EuroFinance

Just as businesses are looking at radical change to keep themselves relevant, so too must treasury. Disruption is a given. But how to create a coherent strategy of how to remodel? How to evaluate in advance the myriad risks that new business and treasury models are likely to entail? Winners of this award have innovated to drive treasury efficiency, control risk and create value for the wider business.

Treasury technology is rapidly advancing and proliferating into every aspect and function of treasury, often making recent tech obsolete or less useful. This award recognises a treasury team that has collaborated with a partner in implementing new and innovative technology that has successfully transformed their treasury function.

Treasury has become a driver in joining up disparate systems and making their data available for real-time analysis. This award recognises their role in reducing complexity and increasing visibility and insight, connecting treasury to the business in a way that has not been possible until now.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused a global economic shock, and aside from the human toll has played havoc with treasury forecasts and hedging strategies. This award recognises astute risk management actions by treasury that protected staff and enabled their companies to survive.

Winner: Holcim

Holcim group, the Swiss multinational manufacturer of building materials,set out on a path to shift treasury activities to centres of excellence (COEs).overhauling operating models to better align with the rest of a multinational’s global finance organisation.

This meant handling not only a multitude of technological and banking challenges but also significant operational headwinds as the company moved from a local treasury in each country to a regional treasury reporting to the regional CFO.

Despite the challenges, the treasury team’s efforts reaped benefits as simplification, standardisation, resulted in the reduction of hundreds of manual labour hours, tens of hours in treasury tasks and also cutback in banking fees. As masters in strategic change, the treasury team has achieved important goals in digital transformation, people development and in the aim of being a real business partnering to the business, the business itself is growing due to these efforts.

Runners Up: London Stock Exchange

In January 2021, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) completed the acquisition of Refinitiv, a financial markets data and infrastructure provider. This was the largest acquisition in the history of the company. While acquisitions fuel growth for an organisation, they always come with challenges, and for the treasury team at LSEG it not only meant merging the two treasury organisations but also standardising and integrating their processes, including the implementation of a global treasury management solution.

In November 2021, LSEG started working on the treasury transformation and after a short period of six months, the treasury team was able to automate and standardise a large part of its manual treasury processes and further integrate with Refinitiv’s treasury management solution, helping it gain access to daily cash visibility, something the team did not have with their manual processes and further making it is easier to analyse and eliminate manual reconciliations and enhancing controls.

Winner: Health Care Service Corporation

The scale of HCSC’s US$50.2bn operation is enormous and involves a complex system of multiple independent financial platforms. This led the treasury team to begin an enterprise-wide digital transformation project to improve decision making and re-architect the team’s capacity to be prepared for any future crises or to take advantage of an opportunity with agility and confidence.

The modernised treasury technology stack delivered critical productivity enhancements, such as centrally organised data management and improved treasury decision making functionality that has driven treasury performance, and created significant business value.

Runners Up: CrowdStrike Holdings,Inc.

A global cybersecurity leader that provides cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data, CrowdStrike has seen its revenue increase by two-fold while cash & cash equivalents climbed from just over $250 million in January 2020 just before the pandemic to over $2 billion as of April 2022. Therefore, to support this hyper-growth, the company needed a quick and automated solution that could be rapidly implemented and scale treasury alongside the growing company.

Taking advantage of the rising trend of open banking via APIs and machine learning solutions, the company partnered with a fintech company to gain full visibility into its cash activities within weeks and was able to provide valuable cash insights to support real time data backed decisions.

Winner: Pegasus

The dramatic drop in demand for passenger air transport due to the COVID-19 pandemic upended operations for the airline industry. With aircrafts grounded and oil prices tumbling, treasurers at the Turkey based Pegasus Airlines were tasked to ensure that the company had sufficient liquidity to survive the pandemic.

The treasury team carried a Eurobond issuance, a local currency issuance and also utilised its bank limits to bolster its cash positions. Meanwhile, the team also started to hedge against fuel prices at the beginning of June 2021 which reaped profits as Brent prices rallied, and implemented multiple steps in order to cut its payments and generate cash savings. The treasury team’s efforts helped reduce cash burn across the organisation in order to emerge strongly out of the pandemic.

Runners Up: Save the Children International

Established over a century ago, Save the Children International provides education, health care, economic and emergency relief to children in 118 countries around the world.

Local banking system failures, higher regulatory barriers and economic sanctions in some countries, put tremendous pressure on the treasury team to continue providing funding in the most challenging locations.

The treasury team has been actively mitigating these operational risks by not just keeping the current funding routes and cash distributions system open but also finding alternative payment routes so that funding to frontline colleagues remains unabated in the coming months to support their key mission of supporting children and families.