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.