WASHINGTON,
D.C., August 9, 2011 – Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and
Ontario Power Generation are the three finalists to win the grand prize of the Association
for Financial Professionals’ 2011 Pinnacle Award, which recognizes excellence
in treasury and finance. The AFP Pinnacle Award is sponsored by Wells Fargo
& Company (NYSE:WFC).
The
three finalists were selected because their dynamic solutions made treasury
and finance operations run more efficiently and effectively at their
organization. One of the three finalists will be
named Grand Prize Winner Nov. 6 at the AFP Annual Conference
in Boston.
Wells
Fargo will make a $10,000 donation to the Grand Prize Winner’s charity of its
choice. Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head of Wells Fargo Treasury Management, and Jim Kaitz, AFP President & CEO, will host the
ceremony.
“AFP
is pleased to honor the 2011 Pinnacle Award winners,” said Kaitz. “The
solutions presented by Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Ontario Power Generation are
both visionary and trend-setting and underscore treasury and finance’s ability
to serve the strategic needs of the organization.”
Hewlett-PackardHP’s
corporate treasury and finance team built an interest rate risk management
model to capture various factors that helped model interest rate movements and
their implication to the company’s cash and debt portfolio. As a result, HP
increased net interest income, reduced volatility introduced into the P&L
as a result of the interest rate changes, and improved predictability to help
executive management in planning. The solution also imposes discipline on decisions
about managing interest rate risk.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s
treasury and finance team needed to be able to transfer money between banks
quickly, manage counterparty risk more effectively and achieve greater
efficiency in financial processing. In April 2011 it implemented ISO XML 20022
Version 2 based bank statements delivered over SWIFTNet and now has over 75
percent of the company’s U.S.-based cash visible. Microsoft will enjoy a return
on investment of 44x over a three-year period. And with a single data pipe,
internal IT support costs were greatly reduced.
Ontario Power GenerationOPG
treasury executed ground-breaking financing with unique technical features
resulting in considerable savings. The most critical element was repositioning traditional
construction project financing to longer-term to corporate finance. The project
gained acceptance from lenders and agencies as a hybrid entity, enabling
periodic financing over construction, versus pre‐financing.
This acceptance permitted addressing short‐term
financing requirements during construction through a commercial paper program,
rather than with traditional bank financing, resulting in an approximate
savings of 100 bps. Neither OPG’s lending group nor government agencies had seen
this solution before in project financing.
ABOUT
AFP®
The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), headquartered outside
Washington, D.C., serves a network of more than 16,000, members with news,
economic research and data, treasury certification programs, networking events,
financial analytical tools, training, and public policy representation to
legislators and regulators. AFP is the daily resource for the finance
profession (www.afponline.org).
AFP’s
global reach extends to over 150,000 treasury and financial professionals
worldwide, including AFP of Canada; London-based gtnews, an on-line resource
for the treasury and finance community; and bobsguide, a financial IT solutions
network.