Treasury Workstation wins Alexander Hamilton award
November 1, 2009 •
UC’s Treasury Workstation, an automated, web-based cash management system, has been awarded a bronze Alexander Hamilton Award by national publication, Treasury & Risk magazine, for excellence in finance and treasury management.
UCOP’s Banking Services Group developed the intellectual property for the system, which allows all UC locations to share a single, unified system for tracking UC’s cash holdings, making electronic payments and transferring funds. The treasury workstation also generates automatic accounting entries and an archival record of each transaction.
“The award is a recognition of the expertise and knowledge that our people brought to market,” said Dan Sampson, Assistant Vice President of Controls and Accountability. “We are really proud of it. This puts us in the ranks of other Alexander Hamilton finalists such as Fortune 500 companies like General Electric, Google and Microsoft.”
Treasury & Risk, the premiere trade magazine for treasury and finance, named the treasury workstation the bronze Solution of the Year at its Oct. 29 awards ceremony in New York City.
The award went to Treasury Sciences, a private company that developed the treasury workstation with intellectual property from UC’s banking services group. The company has agreed to pay UC royalty on the sales of the software. The company is in contractual discussions with two other clients, and has several other sales in the pipeline, Sampson said.
It’s unknown how much revenue UC might receive from the software. The royalty payments, more than an anticipated revenue source, are tangible recognition of the value that UCOP’s banking services group brought to the treasury workstation.
The system moves between $300 million and $800 million a day, Sampson said. Before its deployment last year, UC’s cash management was tracked using Excel spreadsheets and bank supplied communications software. It was a highly tedious and fragmented system that was prone to error.
Controls are much tighter now, and everything is uniform and centralized.
“We built a payment engine into our system that we own and control. Campuses, Foundations and medical centers now can generate and control their own wire transmissions, which really improves accountability and control.” Sampson said.
