2024 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Working Capital & Payments

As the payment landscape becomes increasingly complex, some companies are prioritizing improvements to their accounts payable (A/P) processes. For our 2024 Gold Alexander Hamilton Award winner in the category Working Capital & Payments, those improvements meant bringing the efficiency of payment processes into alignment with the company’s overall ethos.

• Gold Award: Despite the fact that Hitachi, Ltd. is one of the world’s largest conglomerates, all its business units outside of Japan used to manage their own payments. Global A/P processes cost more than they needed to, and central treasury had limited visibility into impending cash flows in most of the world. An organization known for optimizing efficiency, Hitachi treasury knew this situation needed to be rectified. The company leveraged technology to roll out a new in-house bank and payment-on-behalf-of (POBO) structure that enable a global shared service center to manage all outgoing payments. This improved corporate treasury’s control over payments and their insights into changing cash balances, supporting better business decision-making and substantially improving efficiency companywide.

Kayoko Mikami, treasury project manager for Hitachi, explains that this initiative represents the value a treasury team can add when it thinks outside the box. “We are the treasury group, and we emphasize ongoing learning,” she says. “We keep updating ourselves so that we can optimally support the global company. Payments are very important, of course, but they are just the method to close business. Through this project, we have let Hitachi business groups know they can rely on us and utilize us.”

Congratulations to the Hitachi treasury group on this highly successful project! 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.