2024 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Technology Excellence

In a business’s early days, optimizing treasury capabilities may take a backseat to more pressing organizational needs. Sometimes this means that, down the line, a large and complex company realizes it is operating much less efficiently than it could be. And in many cases, the adoption of the right technologies can bring efficiencies in treasury that were previously lacking.

“Treasury is a lot of fun because you get to tackle problems that are unique and challenging,” says Yogesh Tupe, vice president and treasurer for executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. “But when my team was spending all their time on manually manipulating data in spreadsheets, that was pulling them away from the fun part. We wanted to have a computer do the repetitive tasks.”

Heidrick & Struggles—like our other two 2024 Alexander Hamilton Award winners in the category of Technology Excellence—did just that. All three organizations harnessed technology in innovative ways to dramatically improve the functioning of their treasury group.

• Gold Award:  When Heidrick & Struggles centralized key treasury functions to improve efficiency, cash flow forecasting proved challenging. In response, the firm built a custom module for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system called the Heidrick Cashflow Forecast Module, which pulls together data from accounts payable, accounts receivable, treasury journals, and the corporate general ledger, then analyzes that data with business logic designed to account for seasonality, foreign exchange (FX), bad debt, and other factors. The resulting forecasts are much easier to produce and less challenging to maintain than with the organization’s legacy process. They also significantly reduce the risk of forecasting errors. Meanwhile, Heidrick & Struggles has gained better visibility into data and processes, supporting better decision-making companywide.
• Silver Award:  Based in Ankeny, Iowa, Casey’s General Stores grew to have more than 2,300 bank accounts across 890 different bank branches before building an internal treasury team. The convenience store chain with over $10 billion in annual revenue centralized cash management, deploying smart safe and other technologies to support the transition. With its award-winning project, Casey’s eliminated approximately $3 million in cash shrinkage and enabled staff nationwide to redirect 1.7 million hours per year away from store-level treasury activities and toward more value-added tasks.
• Bronze Award:  Hilton operates 7,300 properties in 123 countries and territories. For two decades, the Hilton treasury team used spreadsheets and emailed documents back and forth to manage the myriad bank accounts required to run this widely dispersed business. When Hilton implemented a bank account management system, the treasury team was able to centralize bank account information for business units around the world, reducing information risk and creating a clear audit trail that reduces organizational risk as well.

Congratulations to all three of these winning organizations! And thank you to the judges of our 2024 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 ION Treasury and TIS for sponsoring the 2024 awards program.

You can learn more about the Technology Excellence award-winning projects by watching the on-demand version of the webcast during which we presented the awards. And you can learn more about our 2024 awards in Liquidity Management here. Treasury & Risk will continue to present the 2024 Alexander Hamilton Awards in a series of articles and webcasts throughout the year.