Adam Smith Awards Asia 2018

Overall Winner – Treasury Today Asia’s Top Treasury Team Dell’s treasury leadership welcomes change and sets clear goals. The team set a hectic pace both on the integration project and when building its ‘2020 future visions’, the latter leveraging financial technology innovations to achieve best in-class global treasury operations and scalability for future growth. The strategic mind-set was such that only focusing on integration would not be good enough. Dell treasury has deployed technology both for execution (TMS, ERP, Trax, ISO XML) and decision-making (using advanced data analytics and a big data pool). The fully digital treasury outlook, as planned in its ‘future of treasury’ notion, enables the evolution of treasury monitoring, control and deployment to next level. While it is important to focus on operation efficiency and effectiveness in the integration, deleveraging is firmly on the agenda. Indeed, debt servicing and repayment was given the highest priority by effective deployment of operating cash across the firm. The three-tier multi currency notional cash pool structure for free and semi-restricted market currencies, and bespoke liquidity extraction solutions in India, China and Brazil, have been instrumental in reducing interest cost for the firm, adding to bottom line in times of need. Dell’s effort to date is even more admirable, given the complexity of the stakeholder network that spreads across the company. Dell treasury was a focal point internally across the business, controllership, finance, compliance, procurement and a number of other functions. Externally, treasury worked with central banks and financial institutions to promulgate their overall business objectives and priorities. Reaping rewards One of the key outcomes of this journey has been the delivery of a consistent and global integrated framework across the organisation. In terms of operational efficiency, consolidation, standardisation and simplification across Dell, including the EMC acquisition, the project has delivered cost and liquidity advantages. But just as importantly, the integration has provided a scalable treasury and banking organisation that is able to support future growth and innovation. The banking infrastructure review, which saw the consolidation of global cash bank relationships and the standardisation of banking fees and interest rates, has resulted in substantial annual cost savings and interest income across the combined company. Furthermore, this banking strategy is scalable to support future organic or M&A growth. Dell has been able to unlock substantial amounts of liquidity through its global liquidity management strategy, enabling it to service its debt and fund future strategic investments. With 60% of operating liquidity now accessible through Dell’s global multi currencies notional pool, 6 | treasurytodayasia Adam Smith Awards Asia © February 2019