Every year, the theme changes to reflect the key trends that have emerged in treasury over 12 months. The winners will be sharing their stories at the 30th anniversary International Treasury Management Virtual Week from Sept 27 – Oct 1.
Winner: Alibaba
Since its IPO, Alibaba has grown from a China-centric ecommerce company to a global MNC. For the treasury team, this has brought considerable challenges – which Alibaba has successfully addressed by undertaking six major initiatives spanning next-generation cash management and post-M&A integration, and by leveraging everything from virtual bank account pooling to blockchain and APIs.
Winner: Pearson
Following Pearson’s previous success in the EuroFinance Treasury Excellence Awards, the company built on its earlier cash management optimisation project with a more comprehensive forecasting solution that incorporates AI-enabled forecasting alongside analyst forecasts, sales forecasts and committed cash flows. Despite the uncertainty brought by the Covid crisis, Pearson used the enhanced process to speed up invoicing, accelerate £60m in cash flow and meet its 2020 targets.
Winner: Shell
One of the world’s largest dividend payers, Shell responded to the risk and inefficiencies of its old manual approach just in time to avoid having to settle a multi-billion dividend during the first Covid-19 lockdown via many thousands of cheques.
Instead, the oil giant built a digital payment infrastructure that enables its registrar to make the direct payments custodian banks sought. This saved millions in bank fees, preserved interest income and eliminated credit risk, while serving shareholders better by introducing election rights to the UK. This innovation lets owners receive their quarterly payouts in euros, sterling or US dollars.
Runner-up: F. Hoffmann-La Roche
Although an API solution might have seemed obvious, Roche found a cheaper, simpler route to the live bank balances it was seeking to complement its earlier in-house bank and virtual account initiatives as it builds a real-time treasury.
This alternative – intra-day statements with the same content and accounting standard as an end-of-day MT 940, unlike an API or interim MT 942 message, and consistent with the future Camt.053 XML format – gives the Swiss pharma giant full visibility over its collections and highlights early payments.
That allows it both to ship earlier to customers and to avoid putting inefficient cash buffers in place in case payments fail to arrive.
Winner: Coca-Cola EuroPacific Partners
Behind the headlines of a drawn-out and bid, the €6bn cross-border acquisition that created Coca-Cola EuroPacific Partners (CCEP) this spring was underpinned by a sophisticated currency and interest rate risk management strategy.
The deal might easily have failed. So to limit potential downside the company put in place a deal-contingent hedging package. This covered both its Australian dollar exposure on the target (Coca-Cola Amatil) and its interest rate exposure on the borrowing to fund the deal if it went through – and was able to accommodate both a credit downgrade and the eventual higher price shareholders demanded.
It’s easy to enter the awards – after all, in showing what you can achieve, you’ve already done the hard part. The simple procedure and guidelines are detailed below.
We are looking for a good narrative which supports your submissions. Although we require some information about your company in our online entry form, what we are ultimately looking for is a compelling story. Ideally, to excite our interest, that story can be given simply in bullet points on a one page uploaded document showing concrete examples of treasury-led/implemented transformation project (s) that show good communication, mobilisation of resources and teamwork through adversity.
The annual EuroFinance Treasury Award for Excellence is presented to the company that best embodies the themes of EuroFinance’s flagship event.
The award is open to any commercial business, public/state-sector entity or not-for-profit organisation, anywhere in the world.
Banks, FIs, software providers and other vendors are not eligible to enter but we welcome submissions on behalf of your corporate clients.
Competition for this award is strong, and so it is unlikely (but not impossible) that treasuries from the smallest businesses will satisfy the criteria.