2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Treasury Transformation

Whatever a company’s size, and however sophisticated its treasury function, if it looks hard enough, it is sure to find areas of cash management, financial risk mitigation, or other core treasury activities that are ripe for transformation. The winners of this year’s Alexander Hamilton Awards in the category Treasury Transformation demonstrate this fact.

Two of these organizations had no treasury function at all just a few years ago. When Scott Taylor joined Bandwidth as its treasurer in 2019, he was the first dedicated treasury professional the company had ever employed. By contrast, Microsoft has a large, well-established, and perpetually innovative treasury organization, as demonstrated by the company’s many appearances in the Alexander Hamilton Awards winners’ circle through the years.

But despite their differences in size and circumstances, all four of this year’s Treasury Transformation winners recognize the importance of periodically reconsidering and, when necessary, re-engineering critical processes to optimize efficiency and effectiveness. “When you build a process that then grows over time, it’s really valuable to take a step back and re-examine whether you’re doing it in the best possible way,” says Jemima Haines, manager of treasury capital markets for Salesforce.

These winning treasury teams re-examined processes, saw room for improvement, and then undertook truly transformative initiatives:

• Honorable Mention:  Global logistics service provider BDP International automated communications between its banks and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By providing real-time visibility to cash and payments around the world, the system eliminates inefficiencies that were inherent in the company’s legacy manual processes and supports BDP’s continued global growth.
• Bronze Award:  For Salesforce, cash forecasting is business-critical, and it’s a process that treasury has always taken pride in. However, the company’s invoicing forecasts used to be manually generated by a different corporate function. Seeing an opportunity to improve, treasury advocated to take ownership of the invoicing forecasts, subsequently transforming processes and using automation to accelerate the forecasts’ completion.
• Silver Award:  Managing user access to online banking portals was a significant challenge for Microsoft. More than 2,000 users need access to portals of 60 different financial institutions around the world. Local finance teams were formerly responsible for access management. To improve security and consistency, the central treasury group transformed the process, consolidating and standardizing global permissions.
• Gold Award:  At communications technology company Bandwidth, a very small treasury team is responsible for managing liquidity across operations in 60 countries. They worked with their financial institutions and technology providers to streamline processes worldwide. Now transaction and account-balance data flows automatically into a centralized repository of treasury information. Running custom reports is simple, and machine learning capabilities automate trend analysis for rapid and predictive insights.

All four projects came to life when a treasury team leaped at the opportunity to improve their long-term value to the organization. “There are two ways to view a treasury team,” Haines says. “On the one hand, you can just view us as counting the pennies and managing transactions. Obviously, that is important—but there’s also the potential within treasury to be much more strategic. [Our invoicing forecast] project has enabled us to provide more insights and do more analysis. And honestly, that is where we feel we can provide the most value.”

Bandwidth’s Taylor agrees. “One of our company’s seven core principles is to innovate by challenging ‘what is’ with ‘what should be,’” he says. “It takes the ingenuity of treasury professionals to imagine our own worlds and ask ourselves, ‘What does success look like?’ It is exciting and energizing to see the progress we’ve made. I’m just as excited to see what we’ll be able to do in the future.”

Congratulations to Bandwidth, Microsoft, Salesforce, and BDP International on 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 ICD, C2FO, GTreasury, and Kyriba for sponsoring the 2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards program.

Treasury & Risk will continue presenting 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 Treasury Transformation Awards.
• Help us celebrate the winners of the 2021 Working Capital Management: Partner Impact Awards on May 5—register today!
• View the on-demand webcast recognizing our 2021 Technology Excellence Award winners.
• And we will announce the winners of the 2021 awards in Liquidity Management on June 2. Registration for that event will open soon.