Headquartered in Chicago, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) is the country's largest customer-owned health insurer, with nearly 16 million members in health plans across Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

A decade ago, the company undertook a transformational project designed to centralize treasury activities, improve the treasury team's effectiveness, and reduce their manual workload. "A lot of accounting and finance groups were performing tasks that should have been within treasury, so everything was very decentralized," says Julie Qualiato, senior director of enterprise treasury operations. "The company's approach to cash management entailed being very conservative and overfunding accounts."

HCSC deployed a new treasury workstation and integrated it with the company's forecasting solution, accounting software, platform for initiating wire and ACH transactions, and investment systems. This first phase of technology transformation resulted in much more effective cash management. "We soon were able to make more aggressive decisions, and we reduced idle Tier 1 cash by 90 percent," says David Deranek, director of enterprise treasury operations.