Covidien, Dow Corning, and Hilton Worldwide Are 2015 AFP Pinnacle Award Finalists

The Association for Financial Professionals' Annual Competition Recognizes the Leading Treasury and Finance Groups in the Field for Their Innovative Thinking, Collaboration, and Results.

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Association for Financial Professionals

Aug 25, 2015, 12:58 ET

DENVER, Aug. 25, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Covidien, Dow Corning, and Hilton Worldwide are finalists for the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) 2015 Pinnacle Award. Sponsored by Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), the Pinnacle Award, established in 1997, recognizes excellence in treasury and finance.

Finalists were selected based on their innovative solutions that helped their treasury and finance operations run more efficiently and effectively. The AFP Pinnacle grand prize winner will be announced October 18 at the AFP annual conference in Denver.

The 2015 AFP Annual Conference is October 18-21, the largest event for corporate treasury and finance. Register by Friday, September 18, 2015 to save $200 at www.AFPConference.org/Register. For any press related questions please contact Melissa Rawak at [email protected].

Wells Fargo will make a $10,000 donation to a charity of the winner's choice. Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head of Treasury Management at Wells Fargo, and Jim Kaitz, AFP president & CEO, will host the award ceremony.

"AFP is pleased to honor the 2015 Pinnacle Award winners," Kaitz said. "The treasury and finance groups at Covidien, Dow Corning, and Hilton Worldwide truly set the global standard for their peers and their profession."

Conducted amid a corporate merger, Covidien (now part of Medtronic) put together a cross-functional, global team to consolidate foreign exchange exposures, centralize trade management and create an in-house bank to provide intercompany currency hedging services to 30 entities worldwide. The effort saved the company $1 million annually, reduced administrative time and labor, and eased regulatory compliance. The in house bank will remain in place post-merger as a testament to its success

Utilizing Lean Six Sigma techniques, value-stream mapping and a return on human assets focus, Dow Corning overhauled its manual, process-heavy currency trading program, worth roughly $15 billion in notional value and representing 2,000 trades per year. As a result, Dow Corning cut nearly $5 million a year in costs and was able to re-allocate nearly 600 hours of labor to value-added advanced analytics, thought leadership, and strategic business consulting.

In anticipation of its $13 billion debt refinancing and $2.3 billion IPO, the largest ever in the hospitality industry, Hilton Worldwide needed to improve its liquidity forecasting capabilities. It succeeded by transforming a static view of multiple business units and regional forecasts into an agile, simplified liquidity forecast. As a result, Hilton has made significant progress towards achieving investment grade status by using nearly all its free cash flow to repay $1.5 billion in post-IPO debt. As a result, its credit ratings improved and led to an $8.8 billion increase (45 percent) in its market capitalization.

ABOUT AFP®

Headquartered outside Washington, D.C., the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) is the professional society that represents finance executives globally. AFP established and administers the Certified Treasury Professional and Certified Corporate FP&A Professional credentials, which set standards of excellence in finance. The quarterly AFP Corporate Cash Indicators serve as a bellwether of economic growth. The AFP Annual Conference is the largest networking event for corporate finance professionals in the world.

SOURCE Association for Financial Professionals