Transforming Treasury
How treasury innovation drives better business outcomes
Optimizing working capital has transitioned into an engine for competitive resilience. Reducing cash tied up in inventory, receivables, and payables frees liquidity and strengthens the balance sheet, giving CFOs resources to invest in growth.
Corporate treasury is central to this shift. By managing how money flows across the value chain — from pay-ins to payouts — treasury dictates capital velocity, turning trapped cash into funds that can be redeployed.
Fragmentation, however, remains a barrier. Multiple providers slow cash movement and limit real-time visibility; 48% of CFOs cite transparency and accurate liquidity projection as top challenges.
Adyen and Boston Consulting Group surveyed finance leaders across the US, UK, and EU on the future of corporate finance. The findings suggest that simplifying the technology stack is central to unlocking the treasury's full potential. This report examines how a unified, intelligent approach to treasury can optimize liquidity in real time and move money at the pace customers expect — supporting the CFO’s growth mandate.
In-depth interviews
and
quantitative surveys
+
A wealth of insights from
experts across the ecosystem
Treasurers are moving beyond optimizing liquidity in isolation. They’re optimizing the entire receivable-to-payable flow with customer experience at the center. This shift will shape the next generation of finance.
Ethan Tandowsky
CFO, Adyen
The treasury manager’s core mission remains, but stakes are rising.
The role of a corporate treasurer has become increasingly complex. While the core mission remains unchanged — maintaining cash visibility, accurate forecasting, and liquidity optimization — today’s economic environment and risk landscape add new layers of complexity.
Interest rate cycles and broader market uncertainty have made bridging liquidity gaps with short-term credit significantly more expensive, leaving less room for error in liquidity decisions. At the same time, operational fragmentation, cyber threats and fraud now rank among the top concerns for treasury teams, with nearly half of respondents citing them as a top-three priority. Operational control is particularly critical, encompassing payment approvals, execution and reconciliation across an expanding landscape of fragmented systems. Cyber and fraud risks continue to rise due to the growing sophistication and scale of global attacks.
2025
2018
As we grow, managing currency risk, liquidity, and the movement of future customer funds has become a priority for the entire team.
Director, retail marketplace giant
Managing the full money flow: from pay-ins to payouts. Money must move with the same velocity as the digital interactions it powers.
Traditional lines between treasury and payments activities are blurring. Across industries, the treasury team’s scope is expanding to encompass the full money movement lifecycle — from pay-ins to payouts — operating at the speed of customer and supplier expectations. CFO respondents highlight this shift, identifying the efficiency and speed of payments as the second most relevant challenge in corporate treasury today.
Identified by CFO respondents (%)
One solution combining both pay-ins and payouts is the gold standard. This will allow even more flexibility in streamlining claim payments - speeding up the low-risk cases to optimize customer experience, and introducing friction when there is a risk of fraud
Insurance leader, survey respondent
The digital economy is reshaping how value is created and exchanged. New value chains are emerging, defined by real-time services and instant fulfillment expectations.
Businesses now expect to use funds as soon as a customer has paid, rather than waiting for settlement. In the platform economy, pay-ins and payouts are embedded directly into the user journey. For these business models, payout speed is a critical driver of both customer and worker retention.
EXAMPLE
Fueling food delivery with fast money movement
Faster payouts help food delivery platforms win and retain top drivers and restaurants.
Evolving financial technology creates opportunities. Corporate treasurers can now move money with greater speed and precision.
New technology is both expanding what’s possible and raising expectations. Internal teams, customers, and external partners now expect faster, on-demand money flows rather than scheduled batches. Real-time payouts have become the benchmark for certain user experiences, but they also introduce new complexity: cash moves earlier and less predictably, increasing pressure on working capital.
Innovations that impact the treasury function:
Provider fragmentation leads to a lack of visibility and increases the risk of cash becoming trapped in transit.
These numbers reflect the complexity of money flows, often fragmented across multiple systems and providers. As a result, visibility can be limited or siloed, making accurate forecasting difficult — 1 in 4 enterprises report struggling to optimize liquidity and working capital.
To manage these flows, treasurers frequently rely on manual or bespoke processes, which are resource-intensive and become even more challenging when layered on top of technical debt from acquisitions or incompatible legacy systems.
The average enterprise treasury function manages:
Primary banks
Bank accounts
Pay-in and payout providers
The price of complexity to liquidity in global insurance
A global insurer in 25+ countries struggled with technical debt and regulatory constraints, leaving treasury staff focused on manual tasks rather than strategic analysis.
Outdated technology hinders real-time treasury. Legacy integrations still depend on batch processing and custom host-to-host (H2H) connections.
The technology required for real-time treasury is now mature: APIs are reportedly used for around 50% of bank connections, TMSs aggregate information across providers and accounts, and ERP systems increasingly improve data accessibility.
Yet many corporate treasurers do not see the full benefit of these advancements. Real-time visibility is only as good as the quality, latency, and reliability of the underlying bank integrations. Half of treasurers still rely on H2H connections, and the complexity and risk of migrating core platforms to APIs often delays adoption.
Advanced, agentic technologies can help bridge this gap. By combining real-time integrations with intelligent automation, treasury teams can move beyond legacy constraints, unlocking continuous visibility, faster decision-making, and more strategic use of cash.
Technology, modernization, and integration remain major challenges in treasury and liquidity management. Significant technical debt hampers nimble decision making, real-time visibility, and real-time treasury.
CFO respondent
Optimizing liquidity is a critical challenge cited by over 25% of respondents.
To achieve a complete, consolidated view of cash flow, treasurers must fully integrate their systems. With comprehensive data and control, they can pool cash efficiently and maximize returns. Forecasting is often tailored using seasonality, historical data, and other relevant business factors.
Without accurate forecasts, treasurers must maintain operational cash buffers to cover unexpected variability. Improving visibility into inflows and outflows presents a major opportunity to free trapped liquidity and enhance yield.
Manual tasks distract CFOs and treasurers from creating additional value.
Fragmentation and complexity place a significant drain on human capital across finance. Treasury teams spend 10% of their time visualizing accounts, 13% managing bank relationships, and more than 20% on handling pay-ins and payouts.
Even foundational tasks — such as cash forecasting and evaluating working capital in real time — consume a substantial amount of effort. These tasks, despite significant scope for automation, often require manual checks and approvals, especially when processes need to be modified.
CFOs face similar pressures: 23% of their time goes to managing pay-ins and payouts, 10% is spent managing partners and bank relationships, and 17% is devoted to liquidity management.
These demands limit both treasurers and CFOs from focusing on high-value activities such as risk management, capital allocation, and strategic planning.
How much time treasury teams spend on key treasury activities:
How much time CFOs spend on key treasury activities:
Treasurers need to know where funds sit and how they move.
Today, CFOs and treasurers often have an incomplete picture: visibility is limited by fragmented coverage and static, point-in-time reporting.
To gain a clear view, treasury teams need to track cash flows across the business in real time. This allows them to pinpoint bottlenecks, identify where cash is delayed, and spot where it can be redeployed.
A dynamic, end-to-end view of money movement enables more informed decision-making and helps drive stronger financial performance.
Treasurers seek to optimize technology to gain more control.
Different settlement times, payment channels, and payment requirements can quickly lead to unoptimized cash flows or trapped working capital.
Today, treasurers can now untangle this by bringing inflows and outflows together on one platform, creating end-to-end visibility and greater control over how money moves in and out of the business.
With control over payment flows, treasurers lay the groundwork for more advanced, automated capabilities — from smart settlement and batching to predictive liquidity and real-time yield management.
Smart settlement and batching
Instead of running settlement batches at fixed intervals, AI can determine optimal real time batching by balancing variables that influence cost and speed.
This reduces the inefficiency of processing half-empty batches and ensures priority payments always arrive according to expectations.
Predictive liquidity and funding
Reactive safety buffers can be replaced with predictive forecasting. This solves the cash drag problem by reducing the need for large idle cash buffers. It also reduces overdraft fees, emergency funding panics, and can optimize when to draw on credit lines.
AI models can predict cash requirements across daily and weekly horizons by analyzing historical patterns. These smart models automatically manage funding and can autonomously top up accounts immediately.
Real-time yield management
Cash positions can be monitored in real-time. Excess funds are automatically swept into high-yield instruments like money market funds or overnight deposits to maximize float.
Instead of earning 0% in an operating account, idle cash automatically generates passive revenue. A business with significant average balances can drive meaningful yield improvement and have excess liquidity contribute to the bottom line directly.
Treasurers can leverage real-time visibility and control to improve financial performance and more significantly impact broader business goals.
Once treasurers have improved visibility and control over money movement, they can not only optimize working capital but also respond to the demands of the business in areas traditionally out of scope for treasury teams. For example, partnering with business functions to accelerate the speed, visibility and flexibility of payments to improve customer or partner experiences.
Examples of the direct impact of real-time treasury across industries:
Technology alone isn’t enough. Next-gen treasury needs the right skill sets.
With the shift in technology capabilities now available to enterprises, treasury teams need to think about the corresponding shift in skillsets they need within their function. Notably there is an increasing need for technology talent, capable in API integrations, process automation, AI applications, to help deliver the finance stack treasurers are now seeking to build.
Treasurers need to implement solutions tailored to their industry and business model. Every enterprise has unique requirements — from payment methods and payout functionality to regional coverage and transaction speed. Some processes benefit from real-time money movement, while others gain value from strategically delaying outflows. Adapting technology and workflows to these needs also allows treasurers to support key partners, for example with flexible payment terms for critical suppliers.
Mindset shift: from reactive treasury processes to driving business outcomes.
Treasury teams are expanding their focus from optimizing working capital to directly supporting overarching business goals.
By gaining greater cash visibility, unifying payment flows and enabling real time automation, next-gen treasury can help drive exceptional customer experiences whilst also improving financial outcomes.
This evolution demonstrates that the finance function can drive growth and value through a unified, intelligent approach to money movement. This shift will define the next generation of finance.
Managing a complex landscape of financial partners too often leads to trapped cash, siloed visibility, delayed reporting, and greater operational costs and risk management.
Treasury teams are proactively thinking of which partners to work with and more importantly how to use each partner's capabilities to solve for their specific needs.
Traditional banks benefit from trusted, longstanding client relationships and a broad range of services, with trust in banks up 6 percentage points since 2018.
Yet treasurers expect to significantly reduce their reliance on traditional banking services, increasingly turning to purpose-built solutions. Today, banks reportedly support around 40% of treasury activities — a share treasurers expect to shrink by 16 percentage points in the future.
Share of respondents' current vs. expected future usage of providers for money management services
current
