2023 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Risk Management

If the world were static, risk management could be static too—but reality is quite the opposite. Effective risk management in this day and age requires companies to be continuously evolving and improving. Risk teams must always be looking for opportunities to do their jobs better. Our three 2023 Alexander Hamilton Award winners in Risk Management exemplify that mindset.

“Never assume you know everything; always keep your eyes open for opportunities to know more,” advises Chris Scott-Hansen, managing director at Morgan Stanley. “The individuals managing risk at Morgan Stanley are brilliant, in my view, but the world can change in the blink of an eye, and they need to evolve with it.  Access to information, so that they have their arms around the risk, is crucial. And they have to be willing to stretch their arms further to reach around anything that may pop up. The only way we have a collective future is to think and then rethink and then think again.”

Here’s how our winners innovated to build their collective futures:

• Gold Award:  At Microsoft, challenges gaining visibility into transactions deep in the supply chain led to a rethinking of the way the company’s cloud business shares information with suppliers, their suppliers, and so on. A cross-functional project team developed a blockchain-based solution that has created, in the words of senior program manager Mohamad Masri, “an ecosystem of common data.” Companies up and down the supply chain see the same information. “We can see all the cards on the table, and it makes communication and collaboration a lot simpler,” Masri says.
• Silver Award:  The risk management team at Morgan Stanley was also looking for a better way to share information. Risk officers and financial advisers had historically used only historical information to determine future risk, but wanted to improve their risk forecasts. When the company didn’t find an off-the-shelf solution that met its needs, it built out a Portfolio Risk Platform that provides better insights into risk at all levels and has even supported revenue growth at the company.
• Bronze Award:  401(k) service provider Paychex offers most new customers discounts that slowly diminish over time. Its legacy process for managing changes to the discounts was highly manual, so the company developed a tool that automates most of the decision-making around, and implementation of, the discounts. This simplification of these processes dramatically reduced both risk to the organization and staff time required to manage pricing.

All three projects show the benefits of thinking creatively about how technology can improve risk management. “Our senior management team encourages employees to find better ways to do things,” says Doug Baxter, director of financial operations for Paychex. “With this project, we have demonstrated that creating value for the company doesn’t require a significant spend or significant IT resources.”

Congratulations to Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Paychex for their outstanding initiatives! And thank you to the judges of our 2023 awards program: 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; Paul Galloway, senior adviser at Strategic Treasurer; and Marie Hollein, former president and CEO of Financial Executives International.

Finally, thank you very much to TIS and Kyriba for sponsoring the 2023 Alexander Hamilton Awards program.

Treasury & Risk will continue to present 2023 Alexander Hamilton Awards in a series of articles through the remainder of the year. Stay tuned!