Bharti Airtel, a leading integrated telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, today announced that it has bagged the prestigious Adam Smith Award 2012 for “Best in Class Benchmarking” in recognition of its excellence in the area of treasury operations. This year the Adam Smith Awards were organized by London-based publication House – Treasury Today in association with Lloyds Bank. The awards’ jury adjudged Bharti Airtel as Highly Commended in this category for the recent success achieved by the company in centralizing its all-India payment operations into a captive shared service – the Airtel Centre of Excellence. This award was received by Mr. Alok Bafna (Head – Finance, Airtel Centre of Excellence Finance) and Mr. Manish Kapoor (Head – Cash & Bank, Airtel Centre of Excellence) in an award ceremony held at London a few days ago.
The solution for Airtel Centre of Excellence was developed by Airtel jointly with IBM, Citibank and HDFC Bank. A web-based system has been implemented for processing a million payment transactions worth about US$ 12 billion annually to all vendors & subscribers across India. The Adam Smith Award to this solution is in recognition of this project’s efficient and error-free delivery of a payment processing model, elimination of physical instruments, on-time vendor payments, continuous auditing, accurate forecasting and headcount efficiency.
According to Treasury Today, the selection criteria for winning entries at Adam Smith Awards is based on tangible results in the form of cost savings and above average ROI driven through exceptional implementation and quantitative improvements in efficiency. In total, 229 nominations from 24 countries were received from companies’ across various indust
