By Deepesh Patel, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, Joy Macknight, Transaction Banking and Payments Editor
The Editor’s Choice awards are the only awards chosen by TTP’s editorial team. This year they go to a bank, a technology provider, two individuals and two industry associations whose work we have seen first-hand through our reporting.
On the night, Treasury Editor Eleanor Hill sent a video message, Geoffrey Wynne and Rebecca Harding of our Editorial Board set out why TTP exists to give the corporate treasurer a voice and how TTP holds itself to account, and Professor Sarah Green explained how the Global Advisory Panel judged 188 submissions blind.
The Editor’s Choice awards sit outside that process. They were not judged by the panel or the steering committee; they were chosen by our editorial team to recognise contributions we have seen first-hand in our reporting this year. This final article in the series explains why each recipient was chosen.
Banking: Lloyds
The editorial team chose Lloyds for turning digital trade from a series of pilots into everyday business for its corporate clients.
Lloyds sits behind three of this year’s corporate recognitions. With Global Tea and Commodities, it helped move documentary collections for Kenyan tea exports onto Enigio’s trace:original platform, cutting transactions that took up to a week to around 24 hours. With European Metal Recycling, MSC and WaveBL, it took documentary collections with buyers in India fully digital using electronic bills of lading. With ADM Agriculture, it built a supply chain finance programme for UK growers.
TTP has followed the same story in its own reporting. In June 2026 Lloyds issued its first digital letter of credit between the UK and France, confirmed by Societe Generale, and Surath Sengupta, Head of Transaction Banking, told us digital trade volumes had grown more than fourfold year on year. Jon Boran, Head of Future Products, co-authored the BAFT, ICC and TTP guide to documentary collections published in May 2026, explaining a much-misunderstood instrument to exporters, importers and bankers alike.
James Lowrey, Head of Trade and Working Capital Product at Lloyds, collected the award.
Lloyds, Editor’s Choice Award: Banking.
Technology: Surecomp
The editorial team chose Surecomp for helping banks in markets that are often left until last to digitise trade finance, without first having to fund a large technology programme.
Surecomp’s Trade Finance-as-a-Service model, built on its RIVO platform, gives banks straight-through processing, compliance modules, API connectivity and workflows that adapt to local rules. TTP reported in 2025 on Rand Merchant Bank’s move onto the service in South Africa, alongside existing users Absa and Investec, as part of an effort to close Africa’s trade finance gap. In September 2026 I&M Bank chose Surecomp to build a regional digital trade finance platform, starting in Kenya and extending to Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Bank One in Mauritius.
The same technology reaches corporates directly: Körber Technologies went live on RIVO this year to automate its trade finance. That reach, from African banks to European corporates, is why the editorial team saw Surecomp as a technology provider making a real difference to how trade is financed.
The award is presented to Abby Bickford, Global Marketing Director at Surecomp,
Surecomp, Editor’s Choice Award: Technology.
Outstanding Contributor to the Treasury Community: Meticulous Dube
The editorial team chose Meticulous Dube for a treasury career built in some of the hardest conditions any treasurer can face, and for her generosity in sharing what she has learned.
Meticulous spent around 12 years at Delta Beverages, Zimbabwe’s largest beer and beverages maker, rising from treasury accounting to run liquidity, hedging and money market placements through high inflation and tight liquidity. As Group Treasurer at Surface Wilmar, Southern Africa’s largest cooking oil manufacturer, she led a debt restructuring that brought funding costs down from 48 per cent to 15 per cent, built a multi-bank strategy and oversaw an SAP S/4HANA treasury implementation. Since July 2024 she has worked as Regional Treasury Manager for TotalEnergies’ Renewables Distributed Generation business in the Middle East and North Africa.
Beyond her own roles, she is active in the Association of Corporate Treasurers’ Treasury Network Middle East and is committed to mentoring and to “elevating the profile of treasury as a forward-looking, strategic function”. Her advice to those starting out is typically direct: “Don’t rush to appear impressive too soon, but instead focus on being useful and learning deeply.”
Outstanding Contributor to the Payments Community: Dr Ruth Wandhöfer
The editorial team chose Dr Ruth Wandhöfer for more than two decades of making payments regulation and infrastructure clearer, more open and more accountable.
Ruth spent more than ten years in senior leadership at Citi, where she chaired working groups at the European Payments Council and the European Banking Federation. She sat on the UK Payment Strategy Forum and the Bank of England‘s RTGS Renewal Stakeholder Advisory Group, and in December 2020 became Chair of the Payment Systems Regulator Panel, which gives the UK’s payments regulator an independent view from across the industry.
She has also shared what she knows. Her three books, EU Payments Integration (2010), Transaction Banking and the Impact of Regulatory Change (2014) and Redecentralisation: Building the Digital Financial Ecosystem (2023), have become reference points for practitioners. She holds a PhD from Bayes Business School, where she is a Visiting Professor, and has served on the boards of the London Stock Exchange Group, Permanent TSB and Digital Identity Net. As a partner at Gauss Ventures, she backs the start-ups building what comes next.
Dr Ruth Wandhöfer, Editor’s Choice Award: Outstanding Contributor to the Payments Community.
Outstanding Contributor to the Trade Community: ITFA and IACPM
The Editor’s Choice award for Outstanding Contributor to the Trade Community goes to ITFA and the IACPM for their work on capital relief for trade credit insurance at US financial institutions. Earlier in the evening, pianist Nicholas McCarthy spoke about challenging the status quo and the ability of large institutions to bring about change. Som-lok Leung, Executive Director of the IACPM, and Scott Pales of ITFA collected the award, on behalf of Jennifer Bearden and Scott Ettien.
Under current US rules, insurers are not treated as eligible guarantors, which leaves US institutions at a disadvantage to European peers when offering receivables finance. ITFA and the IACPM presented a white paper to the OCC, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, projecting that the change could unlock around US$250 billion of working capital support for US corporates and SMEs. It has already delivered one concrete win: a cut in the policy waiting period from more than 210 days to 90.
ITFA and IACPM, Editor’s Choice Award: Outstanding Contributor to the Trade Community.
Thank you
The Corporate Excellence Awards were created to put the corporate voice at the centre, with the judging kept independent of commercial interests.
Our thanks go to the members of our Editorial Board and Global Advisory Panel who judged this summer; to our multilateral, institutional and association partners; to Nicholas McCarthy; and to The Lansdowne Club. We are also grateful to the partners who supported the evening: Lloyds, TD Securities, Deutsche Bank and cflox, Citi, Surecomp and MCB.
Congratulations to all the winners and runners-up, and thank you to everyone who submitted an entry to the inaugural TTP Corporate Excellence Awards.
The winners and runners-up of the inaugural TTP Corporate Excellence Awards.
