This article is written by Cobase
The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation is reshaping the financial landscape at record speed. By late 2025, every bank and payment service provider in the eurozone must be able to receive instant payments, and by early 2026, they must be able to send them. On paper, this sounds like progress: faster, cheaper, safer payments for all. In practice, the rapid timeline is creating strain across the industry.
Not every player in the payments ecosystem is ready for this shift. Many banks still operate on legacy infrastructure, not built for real-time, round-the-clock processing. For them, upgrading systems to handle instant payments, fraud checks, and sanctions screening within seconds is a massive task.
Vendors face a similar challenge. Some are rushing to bolt instant-payment functionality onto old platforms, creating patchwork solutions that may not scale or stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Corporates, meanwhile, are caught in the middle. Treasury teams must adapt their workflows, manage liquidity in real time, and—critically—ensure that their master data is accurate.
The risk is clear: if corporates and banks aren’t fully prepared, they may be tempted to look for “opt-outs” or backdoors in the regulation to buy more time. But regulators have made it clear: there is no going back. Instant payments and Verification of Payee (VoP) are here to stay.
The Regulation doesn’t just mandate instant payments—it makes Verification of Payee mandatory. That means before a transfer is processed, the account name must be checked against the IBAN, and mismatches must trigger a warning.
This sounds simple, but the operational impact is huge:
For banks and corporates, this is where the regulation bites hardest. Without strong VoP tools, the risk of fraud, error, or compliance failure grows.
The regulation is coming fast, and not everyone is ready. But the answer isn’t to delay or to water down compliance. The answer is to adopt solutions that make instant payments both safe and sustainable.
For corporates, this isn’t just about checking a regulatory box. It’s about safeguarding payroll, protecting supplier relationships, and keeping treasury operations running smoothly. For banks, it’s about maintaining customer trust in an environment where money moves in seconds.
Cobase’s role is to provide the tools to make this transition possible—helping clients stay compliant, avoid backdoors, and operate securely in the new real-time payments world.
Conclusion
The pressure is real. The Instant Payments Regulation is forcing banks, vendors, and corporates to modernize faster than many expected. But cutting corners isn’t an option. With Verification of Payee built into every step of the payment process—master data, bulk files, single transfers, and address books—Cobase ensures clients stay both compliant and protected.
Instant payments are becoming the standard. The real question is: will your systems, data, and processes be ready? With the right solutions, the answer can be yes—without compromise.
1. What is the Instant Payments Regulation?
The Instant Payments regulation is new EU legislation that makes instant payments mandatory across the euro area. By late 2025, all banks and payment service providers holding euro accounts must be able to send and receive instant transfers 24/7.
2. Why were instant payments not widely available before?
Although SEPA Instant Credit Transfers (SCT Inst) were introduced in 2017, participation was optional. Some banks adopted the scheme quickly, but many did not. As a result, instant payments were common in some countries but almost unavailable in others.
3. How does Verification of Payee (VoP) work?
Verification of Payee checks whether the name of the beneficiary matches the IBAN before a transfer is processed. If there’s a mismatch, the sender is warned. This helps reduce fraud and prevents costly errors before the payment leaves the account.
4. What risks do corporates face with instant payments?
Instant transfers are irreversible. Errors in supplier details, outdated employee data, or fraud attempts can cause money to be lost in seconds. Without accurate master data and fraud-prevention controls, corporates are more exposed to risk than with traditional, slower payments.
5. How should businesses prepare for instant payments?
Corporates need to ensure their payment processes, ERP data, and fraud controls are ready for a real-time environment. This means cleaning up master data, implementing strong verification measures, and adopting technology that supports instant and secure payment flows.
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This article is written by our partner, Atlar
There is a version of treasury that costs money and a version that makes money. Most private equity (PE)-backed companies are running the first version. The gap between the two is measurable in EBITDA, exit multiple, and management hours, and it is closable within the hold period if you approach it correctly.
Treasury in an independent company is a steady-state function. In a PE-backed company, the calculus changes on almost every dimension.
A mid-market PE hold typically runs 5–7 years, and every finance infrastructure decision needs to generate returns within that window. The strategies PE firms use to build value also create specific treasury stress points that an independent company rarely encounters.
Buy-and-build
A company executing an active acquisition strategy can absorb dozens of entities in a short period of time. One Atlar customer completed more than 60 acquisitions in under six months. Each acquired entity arrives with its own banking relationships, payment processes, and local finance team. The centralised group finance function is expected to have visibility across all of it, but in practice they often don’t: access to acquired bank accounts is held locally, not handed over immediately, and integrating those accounts into the group’s house bank takes months. Sensitive operational processes, like customer billing, may run through the acquired entity’s existing accounts, creating reluctance to touch anything that risks disrupting revenue.
The result is a group running its capital allocation decisions on incomplete information. Without a consolidated view of cash across all entities, the CFO cannot confidently answer whether the business has the liquidity to fund the next acquisition, service debt, or accelerate a growth initiative from its own balance sheet — or whether it needs to draw on a credit facility to do so. Millions in excess cash sitting across acquired entity accounts that goes undeployed, while the group may simultaneously be paying interest on revolving credit it did not need to draw. A bank-level cash pool does not solve this; it only covers the house bank and primary accounts, not the fragmented estate of acquired entity accounts sitting outside it.
The right response is not to force all accounts into a single bank immediately. It is to connect everything to a single visibility layer first, illuminate the full cash position in real time, and then work through consolidation progressively. Critically, the platform needs to be able to connect new accounts at least as fast as the business acquires them. If it cannot, it becomes a bottleneck on the M&A strategy itself.
International expansion and structural change
As companies enter new markets, banking relationships tend to be established based on what is convenient locally rather than what is scalable for the group. A country manager or local finance lead opens an account with a regional bank that works well for local payroll and supplier payments. The central treasury team is often not involved in that decision, and sometimes cannot be: access to the account may require a locally-issued bank token, or a national identification number held by someone in-country. The central team ends up with accounts on their balance sheet that they cannot see into directly.
The result at group level is the same fragmentation problem as buy-and-build, compounded by the fact that the local teams did not intend to create an opacity problem — they were solving a practical need. Carve-out situations add further pressure: TSA clocks give finance teams 90–180 days to stand up treasury operations that were previously handled by a parent company, by which point the combination of new entities, new geographies, and inherited banking relationships can be significant. The common thread across all of these scenarios is connectivity. Every new entity, geography, or structural change adds accounts that need to be visible to the central team before any active treasury management can happen.
Lean teams and cash efficiency
Operating partners will not approve a treasury headcount build-out. The expectation is that the existing finance team delivers treasury-grade output without a dedicated treasury organisation. That constraint has a direct cash flow dimension that is often underweighted in the business case for treasury infrastructure. A well-run treasury function does not just reduce cost, it actively generates return. Cash that is not pooled and put to work sits idle in operating accounts earning nothing, when it could be deployed into money market funds or short-term fixed deposits. The amount varies by company size and business model, but the return is material: at Mangopay, an Advent International portfolio company, €20M of excess cash was identified and put to work, generating 6.1x ROI on the technology investment from yield alone, flowing directly into free cash flow. It is an investment return the business is either capturing or not, and it compounds across the hold period.
The challenge underneath the others
Treasury is rarely the only finance challenge in a PE-backed company, but it is often the one that sits underneath the others. The cost of poor treasury infrastructure is not just operational friction. When cash reporting is slow, the CFO and operating partner are making capital allocation decisions on incomplete information. When idle cash is not being actively managed, the business is carrying an implicit financing cost on every growth initiative it funds from its own balance sheet. When payment processes are manual and approval chains are informal, the finance team’s time is consumed by execution rather than analysis. The cumulative effect is a business that is not operating at full capacity — one that may have to deprioritise investments, defer initiatives, or delay decisions simply because the financial infrastructure cannot keep pace with the strategic agenda. Treasury is not a back-office function in a PE-backed company. It is load-bearing infrastructure for the value creation plan.
Finance leaders who recognise the gap typically look at three options. Each has a structural problem.
Spreadsheets and bank portals work until the first acquisition or the first new geography or when you hit 3+ banks being used. Then they fail suddenly, usually at the worst possible moment.
Enterprise treasury management systems built over the past two to three decades were designed for a specific user: a dedicated treasury professional at a large corporate, managing a full treasury function with analysts, IT support, and years of platform experience. These systems reflect that complexity. They handle multi-bank global connectivity, sophisticated hedging programs, and derivative accounting across hundreds of entities. For a Global 500 group treasurer with a team behind them, that depth makes sense.
For a PE-backed mid-market company, it is overkill in the wrong direction. The platforms are built to be operated by specialist teams to warrant investment, and in practice they require long-standing treasury expertise just to navigate day to day. A CFO, controller, or head of finance without a treasury background will struggle to extract basic value from them, let alone configure and run them independently. Most PE-backed companies at the €50M–€500M range do not have that profile in-house, and hiring for it takes time they do not have.
The economics compound the problem. A typical enterprise TMS takes 12–18 months to implement. Payback periods from go-live run two or more years. A company that signs a contract in year one of a 5–7 year hold reaches positive ROI around year four at the earliest. The financial benefit accrues almost entirely to the next owner. No operating partner approves that business case, and no CFO should propose it.
The problem compounds if there is no treasurer in post. The conventional sequence — hire the person, let them select the platform, run the implementation — adds six or more months of recruitment and onboarding before implementation even starts. In a compressed hold, that sequence can consume three to four years of the value creation window before it produces anything.
The rational alternative is to invert the sequence. Deploy treasury technology first, operated by the existing finance team. Unlock cash visibility, payment automation, and yield on idle balances quickly, within the first 60–90 days of the hold. Bring in a treasurer later, as the business scales, to augment a functioning infrastructure rather than build one from scratch. Technology-first treasury is not a compromise. In a PE context, it is the correct order of operations.
The reason technology-first treasury is now viable — and wasn’t five years ago — is a convergence of three shifts.
Connectivity as a managed service
The foundational barrier has always been bank connectivity. Getting a treasury platform to talk to multiple banks across multiple countries required IT resources, middleware vendors, and ongoing maintenance. The model that changes this treats connectivity as a fully managed service: the platform owns the connectivity layer, maintains the bank relationships, and handles protocol management. The customer’s IT team is not in the critical path. When a portco acquires a new entity or opens accounts in a new country, connecting them is a configuration task, not a project. That distinction matters enormously in a buy-and-build strategy where the pace of acquisition cannot wait on implementation timelines.
ERP-native integration
Treasury and ERP operating on the same live data layer, rather than periodic imports and exports, means the finance team stops reconciling backwards and starts managing forwards. Payments initiated in the ERP are visible in the treasury platform before they clear. Expected receipts match against incoming bank transactions automatically. The month-end close shrinks. Cash reporting assembles itself.
Finance AI agents grounded in live data
Most finance teams experimenting with AI today are using disconnected tools: generic AI assistants fed spreadsheet exports, working from data that is always incomplete and always stale. For treasury this is a structural limitation. Cash positions decay in hours. An agent that cannot see all your banks simultaneously, or lacks ERP context to know what payments are due tomorrow, produces answers that are wrong in the ways that matter most.
AI agents operating natively on live banking and ERP data simultaneously are a different category. A concrete example: a Daily Cash Position workflow runs automatically each morning. Before the CFO opens their laptop, it has already pulled balances across every account and entity, flagged unexpected transactions, matched settlements against expected receivables, calculated liquidity headroom by currency against treasury policy minimums, and drafted specific sweep proposals where thresholds have been breached.
The human-in-the-loop is central to the design. Routine tasks run autonomously. High-stakes actions — executing a sweep, releasing a payment batch, approving a transfer above a material threshold — surface to a named approver as a specific recommended action requiring explicit confirmation. The AI prepares the decision. The human executes it. Every action is logged with a full audit trail.
These workflows are configured in plain language by the finance team itself, with no IT involvement and no change orders. A portco that starts with Daily Cash Position can add a covenant headroom monitor or a weekly board cash commentary as the business grows. Each agent operates within explicitly defined, auditable data scopes. That is the answer to the governance question every operating partner and audit committee will raise.
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This article is written by Nadia Callaghan
A Treasury Management System implementation is one of the most meaningful changes a treasury function can undertake. It affects how liquidity is monitored, how data is captured, how controls operate, and how decisions are made. While technology is central, the real determinant of success is how well the treasury team is prepared. A TMS will not automatically fix process gaps or unclear responsibilities; it will simply make them more visible. Preparing the team properly ensures the system supports a stronger, more efficient operating model from day one.
The first step is helping the team adopt a practical, forward‑looking mindset. Treasury professionals are used to running daily operations, often with manual workarounds and legacy processes. A TMS implementation requires them to step back and think about how processes should work in a modern environment. This shift is not about being visionary; it is about being intentional. The team needs to understand that automation, embedded controls, and structured workflows will replace many of the tasks they currently perform manually. When people understand why the change is happening and how it will improve their work, they engage more constructively throughout the project.
With the mindset in place, the team should document its current processes clearly and honestly. This is not an exercise in identifying faults but in understanding the baseline. Treasury needs to know how daily cash positioning is performed, how forecasting inputs are collected, how reconciliations are handled, and where exceptions typically arise. This mapping helps identify what the TMS must address and what internal improvements should be made before configuration begins. A system can only perform well if the underlying processes and data are stable.
Once the current state is understood, the team can define the future‑state operating model. This is where preparation becomes practical. Treasury should outline how liquidity will be managed, how forecasting will flow through the organisation, how approvals will work, and how exceptions will be handled. The future state should reflect best practice and be achievable within the team’s capacity. It is important to avoid simply replicating existing processes in a new system. A TMS implementation is an opportunity to streamline workflows, strengthen controls, and reduce manual effort. A clear operating model provides direction for configuration and helps avoid unnecessary rework later.
Clear roles and responsibilities are essential. A TMS implementation exposes ambiguity quickly, especially when decisions need to be made at pace. Treasury should define who owns daily cash positioning, who validates bank data, who manages exceptions, who maintains master data, and who approves liquidity movements. This clarity helps the project run smoothly and prepares the team for how their roles will evolve after go‑live.
Training is another practical component of preparation. Treasury teams benefit from early exposure to the system, even at a conceptual level. Understanding how modules work, how workflows are structured, and how data flows through the TMS helps team members participate more effectively in design workshops. Early training reduces uncertainty and builds confidence, which is particularly important for team members who may be apprehensive about new technology.
Data preparation is often underestimated but is critical to a successful implementation. Treasury should ensure bank account information, entity structures, counterparty lists, forecasting categories, and approval hierarchies are accurate and up to date. Clean data reduces defects, accelerates configuration, and ensures the system reflects the organisation’s true liquidity position.
Throughout the project, communication keeps the team aligned and reduces stress. Regular updates on timelines, decisions, risks, and upcoming changes help people feel informed and involved. When the team understands what is happening and why, they are more resilient during busy phases of the implementation.
Finally, preparing for the first ninety days after go‑live ensures a smoother transition. Treasury should expect higher exception volumes, user questions, and minor process adjustments. A structured hypercare plan, combined with ongoing training, helps the team settle into the new system and begin realising its benefits quickly.
Preparing the treasury team is not a preliminary step; it is the foundation of the entire TMS implementation. When the team is ready, the system enhances visibility, strengthens controls, reduces manual work, and supports better decision‑making. A well‑prepared team turns a complex project into a practical, manageable, and ultimately successful transformation.
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click the button below.
By Alexander von Schirmeister,
CEO at Nomentia
A bank portal still works. The ERP still produces data. A spreadsheet still calculates a forecast. A payment approval workflow still moves from one person to the next. Reports still reach the CFO, even if they arrive later than expected. From the outside, treasury appears to function. Inside the process, finance teams know exactly how much effort is required to keep that appearance of control intact.
Modern treasury cannot rely on disconnected systems because the questions it needs to answer are no longer isolated. Cash visibility depends on bank data, account structures, ERP information, payments in progress, forecast inputs, intercompany flows, financing activities, and exposures. Liquidity planning depends on operational data from the business, but also on treasury assumptions, market conditions, working capital movements, and funding plans. Risk management depends on reliable exposure data, but also on trade execution, hedge documentation, limits, reporting, and accounting. If each part of this picture sits in a different place, the treasury team becomes the integration layer.
That integration work rarely surfaces. It lives in copy-and-paste routines, manual file checks, email reminders, reconciliation notes, spreadsheet tabs, and individual memory. It is also where most treasury management challenges quietly begin.
Disconnected systems create time loss because data has to be gathered before it can be analysed. They create duplicated work because teams maintain local trackers even when central tools exist. They weaken cash visibility because the latest view may depend on which bank file has arrived or which entity has responded. They weaken controls because exceptions are harder to identify when workflows are not connected.
The CFO does not usually see the process friction. The CFO sees the answer. If the answer is late, inconsistent, or hard to explain, confidence falls. Senior leadership needs reliable responses to simple but high-stakes questions: How much liquidity is available? Which cash flows are expected? Where is working capital tied up? Are internal payments efficient? Which exposures are material? Are guarantees, hedges, and commitments under control? These questions cannot be answered well when the data behind them has to be rebuilt every time.
The 2026 Nomentia Treasury and Cash Management report highlights that many treasury teams are in a transitional phase. They have moved beyond purely manual treasury, but still rely on multiple systems and partial automation. The pattern is familiar: the organisation has invested in technology, yet treasury still spends too much time reconciling information and validating reports. The issue is not that systems are missing. The issue is that they are not connected enough to support the pace of decision-making.
Disconnected systems are especially risky in three areas.
The first is visibility. If cash positions, transactions, forecasts, and payment statuses are not consolidated, treasury may see parts of the picture but miss the direction of movement. A balance report can show where cash is today, but it does not explain whether the position is temporary, restricted, exposed, or needed elsewhere in the group. Visibility without context can create false comfort.
The second is control. Treasury policies often look clear on paper, but control depends on how processes actually run. Who can approve a payment? Which entities have followed the forecast process? Which exposures have been validated? Which guarantee is close to expiry? Which hedge relationship needs attention? When workflows are disconnected, control becomes dependent on manual follow-up. That may work when volumes are low, but it becomes unreliable as banks, entities, instruments, and reporting expectations increase.
The third is decision speed. In volatile markets, delayed answers are not neutral. A late forecast can affect funding decisions. A delayed exposure view can affect hedge timing. A slow payment status check can affect supplier confidence. A late view of guarantees or credit line usage can affect working capital decisions. Treasury does not need real-time data for every decision, but it does need enough connected information to avoid making decisions with yesterday’s understanding.
A modern treasury management system should not be judged only by feature breadth. The more important question is how well it reduces the gaps between systems, data, workflow, and reporting. A strong setup connects bank information, ERP data, payment processes, cash forecasting, risk workflows, analytics, and audit trails into a reliable operating model. That does not mean every company needs every module at once. It means the architecture should support growth without forcing the team to rebuild its processes every time complexity increases.
Most people researching a TMS today will start with a web search or ask Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT. The answer they get back is usually a feature list. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. A good treasury management system helps finance teams centralise cash, payments, forecasting, risk, controls, and reporting so they can make better liquidity and financial risk decisions with trusted data. Features are how it gets there. That’s the distinction worth keeping in mind when evaluating whether your current setup is still fit for purpose.
The path away from disconnected systems does not always require a large replacement project. In many organisations, the better approach is to identify the most painful manual bridges first. Where does treasury re-enter data? Where does the team wait for local input? Where do reports need manual explanation? Where are approvals outside the system? Where is the same number calculated in different ways? These questions show where fragmentation is creating the most business risk.
Connected systems create reliable answers. They reduce the manual work behind cash visibility, improve the quality of cash flow forecasting, and support stronger controls and compliance. They help the CFO understand not only what the numbers are, but what they mean for liquidity, risk, and action. Disconnected systems may still function. But they make treasury work harder than it should, and confident decisions harder than they need to be.
Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click the button below.
