By Deepesh Patel, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, Joy Macknight, Transaction Banking and Payments Editor
Four decades of treasury logic rebuilt in a new system a new system, a global liquidity structure run by three people, and counterparty limits that move with the market: the treasury winners at the Corporate Excellence Awards.
This year’s Corporate Treasury Awards were dominated by infrastructure: treasury systems, cash structures and risk controls rebuilt across large multinational businesses. Much of that work was carried out alongside ERP migrations, volatile rates and currency movements.
As with every category at the TTP Corporate Excellence Awards, held at The Lansdowne Club in London on Wednesday 7 October, entries were anonymised and judged blind by members of TTP’s Global Advisory Panel against five criteria: innovation, impact, collaboration, sustainability and scalability.
This is the second of four articles on the winners.
Best Treasury Transformation Project
Winner: Essity
Essity won for a multi-year, technology-led transformation of its treasury, nominated by BNP Paribas.
Essity had run a decentralised model across dozens of subsidiaries, with manual data entry, local FX hedging and reconciliation adding cost and risk. Its treasury core dated from 1985 and had to be retired as part of a group-wide S/4HANA migration. The team retained the logic of the old system and rebuilt it as Internal Currency Exposure Management (ICEM), a central engine that nets, clears and hedges internal invoices daily and settles them centrally each month across more than 80 operating companies.
The programme sustains 99 per cent straight-through processing and removes subsidiaries’ internal FX exposure entirely. A market-first SWIFT configuration, developed with BNP Paribas and Tietoevry, lets payroll and commercial payments share bank accounts while meeting each flow’s regulatory requirements. More than 90 per cent of cash now sits in pools.
The judges highlighted the scale of the work carried out by Essity’s in-house team, including the transfer of four decades of treasury logic into the new system without any project slippage.
Essity, winner, Best Treasury Transformation Project.
Runner-up: Novartis
Novartis, also nominated by BNP Paribas, was commended for replacing more than 15 SAP instances and several non-SAP systems with a single S/4HANA treasury core. It rebuilt in-house cash and payment management natively, moved its payment factory and cash pools into a shared service centre, and switched collections to virtual accounts. A single source of truth links S/4HANA with FIS and HighRadius. Delivered in under two years across more than 100 entities, the programme lifted straight-through processing above 95 per cent and improved cash forecast accuracy by 20 to 25 per cent.
Best Cash and Liquidity Management Solution
Winner: Newell Brands
Newell Brands won for turning a fragmented, decentralised cash structure into a single, bank-agnostic liquidity model spanning 230 accounts, 99 legal entities, 21 jurisdictions and 18 currencies.
Newell used in-house banking, automated cash concentration, notional pooling and FX-efficient structures to centralise a largely manual operation covering more than 45 countries.
Regional cash concentration rose above 90 per cent and operating cash requirements fell by roughly 60 per cent. More than 200 intercompany loan relationships were centralised, and banking relationships were cut from 157 to 57. Together, the changes contributed to a reduction in debt of around US$300 million.
The detail that stayed with the judges was scale against headcount: the entire global structure is run by three full-time treasury professionals.
Newell Brands, winner, Best Cash and Liquidity Management Solution.
Runner-up: Henkel
Henkel was commended for an automated cross-border cash pool, built with BNP Paribas, that gave the group access to cash held in Saudi Arabia. Saudi dividend rules had left its Saudi entities holding idle cash while sister companies borrowed externally. After an RFP across eight banks and several years of engagement with the Saudi central bank, Henkel linked Saudi Arabia and the UAE through a Jebel Ali header account. Roughly US$45 million is now usable group liquidity, and it has already supported the region’s first sustainable Saudi riyal deposit, linked to Henkel’s carbon and water targets.
Henkel, runner-up, Best Cash and Liquidity Management Solution.
Best Treasury Transformation Initiative (Financial Risk)
Winner: Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS)
Bristol-Myers Squibb won for work across four areas of treasury: capital structure, risk management, working capital and insurance.
BMS issued €5 billion of euro-denominated debt through a new European financing entity and used it to retire US dollar debt, aligning its debt with its cash flows and helping it beat its US$10 billion deleveraging commitment ahead of schedule. Treasury redesigned its net investment hedging, replacing some forwards and swaps with capped collars; the change produced a roughly US$16 million swing in 2025 and has since been extended into yen and Brazilian real.
A Cash Leadership Office, built with EY-Parthenon, embedded accountability for working capital across Procurement, Inventory and Order-to-Cash and unlocked more than US$600 million. A move to captive-centric structured reinsurance is projected to save around US$30 million to 2030.
The judges highlighted the range of the work, carried out while BMS was also managing significant patent-cliff pressure.
Bristol-Myers Squibb, winner, Best Treasury Transformation Initiative (Financial Risk).
Runner-up: Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC)
Louis Dreyfus Company was commended for changing when it knows what its trade finance costs. Working with Mitigram, which nominated the project, LDC replaced reconciliation across spreadsheets and SharePoint with one digital workflow. LDC and Mitigram built more than 80 payment advice mappings across 23 banks, bringing the different bank formats into the same process. Around 90 per cent of cost reconciliation is now automated, duplicate entry of bank charges has gone, and fee discrepancies are caught while transactions are still live. That gives LDC a consistent basis for discussing fees with its banks.
Best Treasury Technology Solution
Winner: ASML
ASML won for replacing static, ratings-based counterparty limits with a dynamic framework that moves with the market and with its own cash.
The old policy linked limits mainly to short-term credit ratings. Ratings are slow to react, and fixed limits could not keep pace with ASML’s large and volatile cash position, which meant frequent ad hoc requests to raise them. Market stress showed credit default swap spreads deteriorating well before ratings moved.
ASML’s treasury now links each counterparty limit to two daily variables: the counterparty’s end-of-day CDS spread and ASML’s total available cash. CDS data flows automatically into the treasury management system, and a single global dashboard shows limits against actual exposures each morning and is reported to senior management daily.
The judges liked how a compliance exercise became a live decision tool. Treasury now spends its time on investment decisions and risk rather than manual reports and limit requests.
Corporate of the Year in Treasury
Winner: Essity
The judges named Essity Corporate of the Year in Treasury for proving that a four-decade-old treasury engine could be rebuilt without losing a day of live operations.
What made this a corporate-wide achievement was the breadth of what now runs through one system: close to one million intercompany invoices and around €8 billion of local-currency sales a year, settled centrally with no internal FX exposure for subsidiaries. Straight-through processing at 99 per cent across payments, FX, liquidity reporting and accounting saves several hundred working hours a week.
Subsidiaries now experience treasury as a reliable strategic service rather than a back-office cost centre, which is exactly the change this award was designed to recognise.
Essity, Corporate of the Year in Treasury.
The next article covers the Corporate Payments Awards, Individual Recognition and the overall Corporate of the Year.
