2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Technology Excellence

Many corporate initiatives claim to be focused on people, processes, and technology—but few truly achieve innovation in all three areas. This year’s Alexander Hamilton Award–winning projects in the category Technology Excellence defy that trend.

All three projects made great strides in the realm of technology, obviously, but their innovative thinking did not end there. “We talk a great deal about people, process, and technology, because there’s a widespread interconnectivity between them in our organization,” says David Deranek, director of enterprise treasury operations for Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). “Having the right people, with the right skill sets, in the right places is essential to building a more proactive treasury. When you have that, you can architect a modern treasury that really enables skilled teams to do what is asked of them.”

Here’s how the victors distinguished themselves from this year’s stiff competition:

• Bronze Award:  When CUNA Mutual launched a new line of business, integrating customers’ low-value monthly premium payments into the company’s standard process didn’t make sense from a technology perspective. Instead, the treasury team developed application programming interface (API) connectivity between customer-facing web forms and the company’s treasury management system.
• Silver Award:  Microsoft’s treasury team was receiving 1,600-plus bank statements each day from more than 80 financial institutions around the world. They had automated receipt of the statements, but monitoring the status of those statements and getting the data into the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was too time-consuming. Treasury worked with Microsoft engineering to automate these processes.
• Gold Award:  Health insurer HCSC saw an opportunity to pull together information from many different data sources to support working capital decisions companywide. In addition to consolidating data in a centralized “treasury enterprise reporting” data warehouse, the project introduced sophisticated reporting and analysis capabilities, which improved treasury decision-making, supported dramatic process improvements, and made the entire business more nimble.

In all three projects, the treasury team embraced creative thinking, worked with other groups throughout the company, and delivered great results for the overall organization.

“I’m not part of the treasury department,” says Chris Sonnenburg, senior technology lead with CUNA Mutual, “but I can see that CUNA Mutual has a huge competitive advantage because our treasury department is interested in consuming new ideas, making them actionable, and then delivering great results like this. The effect on the company of having an innovative treasury department may not be measurable, but it is certainly impactful.”

Congratulations to HCSC, Microsoft, and CUNA Mutual for their outstanding initiatives! And thank you to the judges of the competition: Jean-Francois Heitz, former deputy CFO and treasurer of Microsoft; Erik Smolders, former treasurer of Ingram Micro and a vice president in Deloitte’s Global Treasury Advisory Services practice; Craig Jeffery, managing partner of Strategic Treasurer; and Marie Hollein, former president and CEO of Financial Executives International.

Finally, thank you very much to Kyriba, ICD, C2FO, and GTreasury for sponsoring the 2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards program.

Treasury & Risk will present our 2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards in a series of articles and webcasts throughout the year.

• You can learn more about these outstanding projects by viewing the on-demand webcast on this year’s Technology Excellence Awards.
• You can learn about the winners of our 2021 Treasury Transformation Awards through this on-demand webcast.
• Help us celebrate the winners of the 2021 Working Capital Management: Partner Impact Awards on May 5—register today!
• And we will recognize winners of the 2021 awards in Liquidity Management on June 2. Registration for that event will open soon.