Award categories

Cash champion

Cash is the lifeblood at the heart of treasury – this award is for the superfit treasury that has optimised cash flow to the business, through excellence in cash management and forecasting innovation, by improving accuracy, efficiency and real time visibility, enabling the business to win.

Financing and liquidity

In a challenging rate environment, treasury solutions to generate liquidity have come in to sharp focus; this award recognises the financing finesse and skills of the treasurer in increasing liquidity whilst reducing overall financing costs.

Risk and resilience

Economic upheaval in recent years has seen inflation and prices spike, elevated rates, demand rise and fall, and supply disrupted. In treasury, alarms have sounded as forecasts and hedging strategies have come under urgent review. This award recognises strategic risk management interventions by treasury to manage economic volatility and enable their companies to thrive.

Strategic change

As businesses adapt to economic and technological changes to stay relevant, treasury is fundememental in supporting and enabling that strategic change. The winner of this award is the treasury team that have worked closely with business partners to drive and support change, by adapting treasury models, managing risks, and enabling business to evolve.

Technology transformation

Treasury has become a driver in joining up disparate systems and making data available for real-time analysis. This award recognises treasury’s role in reducing complexity, simplifying systems, and increasing visibility and insight, by efficiently connecting treasury to the business in ways that are both transformative and innovative.

2023 Award winners and highly commended

Specially commended for industry-wide digital transformation

IATA Pay

IATA

 

 

 

IATA Pay, developed by the International Air Transport Association, is a game-changing, global account-to-account payment solution leveraging instant payments and open banking to modernise and optimise payment processes within the airline industry. In response to industry challenges such as high payment acceptance costs (estimated at $20.3 billion annually) and untapped retail potential, IATA Pay offers significant financial and operational benefits. It reduces processing fees by up to 99%, accelerates settlements, virtually eliminates fraud risk, and simplifies airline operations by streamlining settlement, reconciliation, and refund processes. Through its global reach, it also simplifies operations by offering universal reachability through a single provider. 

The solution, currently live in 25 countries and planning further expansion, provides a unique offering in the instant-payment landscape. Furthermore, it allows airlines to maintain full control over the payment data, integration flows, and branding, solidifying its position as a trusted provider and a leader in the airline industry.

Mastering strategic change

Winner: Airtel Africa

Airtel Africa

Airtel Africa, an integrated telecom provider operating in 14 frontier markets, has a two-pronged approach to growing its business: Telecom and Mobile Money. Despite high potential for growth in both areas, Airtel Africa faces challenges including rising global interest rates, macroeconomic volatility, lack of depth in local financial markets, and foreign exchange (FX) convertibility issues, all of which necessitate strategic solutions to continue to support stronger investments in its vision to transform lives through digital and financial inclusion in the continent. 

To overcome these challenges, Airtel Africa’s treasury team acts as a strategic thought leader, implementing key strategies such as targeted financing solutions in the operating entities with local banks and Development Finance Institutions, optimisation of capital structures within the Group, and innovative liquidity management solutions. These solutions aim to provide long-term financing in fixed interest rates and local currency, mitigate FX risk, replace foreign currency debt with local currency debt, and safeguard against trapped cash situations.

Key benefits of these solutions include enabling business investment, facilitating double-digit growth in Revenue and EBITDA, reducing Holdco Debt, and mitigating substantial FX costs. Airtel Africa emphasises the importance of multiple complementary solutions in volatile environments and highlights its wider role in enabling infrastructure development, digital inclusion, and financial inclusion in emerging markets, thus aligning with six of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The strategies employed by Airtel Africa are not only beneficial to the business but also have far-reaching impacts on the communities they serve.

Technology implementation

Winner: Siemens Gamesa

Siemens Gamesa

 

 

 

In the face of a complex system landscape brought about by a simultaneous carve-out and merger, Siemens Gamesa embarked on an ambitious project to construct a new payment. The company faced significant challenges, including the need to unify two disparate systems – a mature, powerful, yet complex Finavigate, and a low-maturity, scattered systems. The goal was to harmonise these systems, automate processes, increase visibility, and ensure compliance and security, all within a tight timeline to avoid breaching the merger contract and incurring penalty fees.

The treasury team at Siemens Gamesa managed to dismantle its fragmented system landscape, establishing an innovative in-house bank that allowed for real-time reporting and automation on an unprecedented scale. The newly implemented system provides 100% cash flow visibility and processes both outflows and inflows automatically using AI algorithms. This new system has significantly reduced complexity across all 235 entities in 85 countries and set a new benchmark for process automation. The project resulted in significant time and cost savings, with the new in-house bank enabling the closure of 800 bank accounts over two years.

Highly commended: SKF Group

SKF

 

 

SKF Group, Swedish bearing and seal manufacturer, implemented a global payments factory, transitioning from a 100% manual payment process to a fully automated, digitised process for purchase to pay. Before implementing a global payment factory, SKF’s local finance teams executed payments manually across its many entities and countries, leading to significant variations and inefficiencies. While some entities could directly send payment files to banks, this was an exception, revealing a lack of standardised and automated payment procedures across the organisation.

While the implementation project was challenging due to the scale of operations, covering 50 countries, 132 legal entities, and 300 users, the project has been successful, with SKF’s today centralised finance operations teams, now operating a no-touch payment flow with straight-through processing. The new process standardisation has improved productivity and integrated the company’s scattered system landscape, resulting in significant cost savings, including a reduction in bank accounts and a sizable FTE reduction. Additionally, the treasury team now operates with enhanced payment compliance, strongly increased security and work efficiency.

Digital Transformation

Winner: Unilever

Unilever

 

 

 

 

Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, demonstrated remarkable foresight by improving its cash forecasting capabilities in preparation for the rising interest rate environment. Despite its global presence, Unilever standardised key processes throughout the organisation, improving the accuracy and timeliness of data used for forecasting future cash positions.

Due to Unilever’s scale and growth, cash flow forecasting was highly challenging. Some countries produced detailed forecasts with labour-intensive manual inputs, while others produced none. The treasury team aimed to centralise forecasting by leveraging its universal data lake, integrating additional data sources from its Treasury Management System (TMS) and banking platforms, and automating forecasting processes.

This new system greatly improved Unilever’s cash flow forecasting. The treasury team could extend its forecasting horizon from a few weeks to three months, with improved accuracy from 50% to 80% in most categories. Consequently, the treasury team could make more informed decisions on investments and liquidity management, expecting to benefit by €1.5 million a year when fully implemented across all geographies. It also reduced manual forecasting tasks, improving the efficiency of the global treasury team. Unilever’s experience teaches that technological solutions can dramatically improve cash flow visibility and responsiveness to changes in the business environment. 

Risk management and resilience

Winner: Bristol Myers Squibb

Bristol Myers Squibb

 

 

 

2022 was marked by a volatile macro-economic environment due to rising interest rates, inflation and geopolitical instability. The New Jersey-based drugmaker, Bristol Myers Squibb’s (BMS) Treasury team turned challenges into opportunities and successfully generated profits and positive cash flows. In addition, a significant challenge also came from its acquisition of Celgene Corporation in 2019, which led to the complex integration of two Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and doubled the number of legal entities, significantly increasing risks, particularly the balance sheet and cash flow foreign exchange (FX) risk.

Faced with these complexities and increased financial risk from currency volatility and rising cost of debt, BMS made various strategic moves that included a $6B debt restructuring, acceleration of the 2023 cash flow hedging program, implementation of a cross-currency swap strategy for six currencies and automation of processes.

The $6B debt restructuring strategically reduced pressure on the company’s liquidity position and freed- up cash flow to allow for additional investments in business development transactions, existing pipeline, and new product launches during the loss of exclusivity (LOE) period of BMS’s key brands while also generating interest savings. The acceleration of the 2023 cash flow hedging program mitigated currency risks and P&L volatility and the implementation of a cross-currency swap strategy for six currencies further reduced interest expenses for 2022 and 2023. The treasury team also implemented an FX third-party tool which facilitated the aggregation of FX exposure data from two ERP systems and hundreds of legal entities. It led to seamless handling of transactions, from identifying exposures to executing and recording trades.

This success was driven by the BMS Treasury team’s bold and timely decision-making, commitment to automation and robust leadership support. BMS’s innovative financial strategies would help position the company to invest in new product launches, clinical trials and acquisitions and licensing deals, bolstering their mission to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.

Highly commended: Primetals Technologies

Primetals Technologies

 

 

The engineering and plant construction behemoth, Primetals Technologies successfully implemented its in-house bank strategy, offering various benefits including bank independence, interest optimization, intercompany clearing, and centralised foreign exchange (FX) trading. Initially, the treasury team faced significant challenges, including starting from scratch with a single employee, no structure, guidelines, or systems in place, and a tight deadline.

In response, they chose to implement a centralised treasury management system (TMS). This system facilitated group-wide cash management, reduced bank account volume and payment formats, and improved intercompany financing and FX trading. As a result, the treasury team gained complete visibility over its cash, intercompany concentration, and FX activity, enhancing its agility and liquidity planning.

The TMS also allowed the company to close over 100 bank accounts, limiting its core banks to just three, and establish a payment factory setup that resulted in seven-figure interest gains. Looking forward, the treasury team plans to leverage AI for fraud prevention, aiming to cover over 200,000 payments annually. This implementation demonstrates the treasury team’s ability to leverage technology for improved liquidity planning, thus enhancing its capacity to respond to global economic challenges.

About the awards

How to enter

It’s easy to enter the awards – after all, in showing what you can achieve, you’ve already done the hard part. Please submit your entry via the form below. You can also download a copy of the form here and email to [email protected] with any supporting documents.

We are looking for a good narrative that 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 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.

CTA Submit your entry

Submissions will close on May 3rd 2024. 

Criteria and eligibility

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.

Guidelines and tips

  • Please use the online entry form to submit your award application. To ensure consistency and fairness in judging, this form is mandatory for all participants.
  • Please provide a clear explanation as to why you should win the EuroFinance Treasury Award for Excellence.
  • You may submit supporting material but this must be in English. (Testimonials from your chief executive, investors, bankers, or internal customers/stakeholders may be helpful but are not necessary).
  • Any commercially sensitive information in the entry should be marked as such and will not be publicised by the judging panel. Please note, however, that you must provide an adequate amount of disclosure to justify the award.
  • Winners will be expected to make a treasury executive available for interview, for an article to be published on the EuroFinance website, and should notify their communications teams of this.

Winners' entitlement

  • Invitation to the annual flagship EuroFinance International Treasury Management conference in Copenhagen, October 2nd-4th where you will be presented with your award and trophy
  • An interview with the EuroFinance editorial team to be published on the EuroFinance newsroom
  • Award logo as “Winner of the EuroFinance Treasury Award for Excellence 2024” for your website, social media and other materials
  • Banks and vendors whose clients win an award may license the Award logo from EuroFinance

Judging process

  • The judging panel will comprise members of the EuroFinance editorial, research and programming teams, chaired by the Senior Editor and a team of treasury experts.
  • The judging panel may conduct its own additional research or put questions to the entrants in order to clarify your submissions
  • Entrants will be notified whether they have won or been shortlisted as soon after the closing date as a thorough judging process allows
  • Anyone considering entering these awards who has any questions about the rules or procedures may email [email protected]