This article is a contribution from our content partner, Kyriba

There is a quiet revolution happening inside the world’s most forward-looking finance organizations, and most treasury teams are watching it from the hallway. Artificial intelligence is no longer a pilot program, a buzzword in a vendor deck, or a problem for IT to solve. Treasury AI adoption is actively reshaping how cash is managed, how risk is quantified, and how financial leadership earns its seat at the strategic table.

The question is no longer whether AI will transform treasury. It already is. According to Kyriba’s 2026 CFO Survey, approximately 92% of global CFOs are integrating AI into some of their processes and decision-making. The only question is whether yours will be among those driving that transformation, or scrambling to catch up with those who did.

The real risk is inaction

Let’s be honest about what the hesitation often looks like: concern about data security, skepticism about ROI, uncertainty about where to start, and (perhaps most dangerously) the comfort of the familiar. These are understandable instincts. Treasury has always been a function defined by precision and caution. But those same instincts, left unchecked, become an existential liability when the competitive landscape is moving at the speed of AI adoption.

Consider what’s at stake. While your team manually reconciles bank statements and consolidates cash positions across 40 entities, an AI-enabled competitor is receiving real-time global liquidity intelligence before the market opens. While your analysts are building this week’s FX exposure model in Excel, a peer institution’s system has already flagged a correlated risk in a currency pair you haven’t touched yet. The gap isn’t just operational efficiency; it is strategic foresight. And in treasury, the cost of delayed foresight is measured in basis points, counterparty risk, and missed working capital optimization, sometimes in the tens of millions.

Waiting for AI to be “proven” in treasury is like waiting for the internet to be proven in banking. The proof is already in, and the cost is being paid by those still waiting.

What AI actually delivers: cash flow forecasting, FX risk, and beyond

Strip away the hype and the financial case for treasury AI adoption is concrete and compounding. Cash flow forecasting, historically the most labor-intensive and least accurate function in the treasury toolkit, is being transformed by machine learning models that learn from ERP data, payment patterns, and external signals simultaneously. According to Kyriba customer data, organizations deploying AI forecasting are reporting 30-50% improvements in forecast accuracy, translating directly into lower precautionary cash buffers and higher yield on deployed liquidity.

On the risk side, AI is enabling dynamic FX hedging programs that adjust in near-real-time to exposure changes rather than quarterly rebalancing cycles, a structural advantage in volatile macro environments. For organizations with complex intercompany structures, AI-powered netting and pooling optimization is consistently surfacing working capital improvements that manual treasury operations simply cannot detect at the required speed or granularity.

Treasury teams deploying AI automation in cash positioning, payment processing, and reporting are reclaiming 15-25 hours per analyst per week, time that elite treasury organizations are reinvesting into capital structure strategy, M&A support, and board-level financial risk advisory. That is not incremental improvement. That is a fundamental repositioning of what treasury contributes to the enterprise.

Fear is the most expensive line item on your balance sheet

The AI fears circulating in treasury circles deserve acknowledgment, but not accommodation. Concerns about model explainability are legitimate; the answer is to demand transparency from vendors and build internal AI literacy, not to abstain. Concerns about data security are valid; the answer is rigorous governance frameworks, not a blanket moratorium on adoption. Concerns about job displacement deserve a thoughtful response: treasury teams that adopt AI don’t shrink; they evolve. The analysts who once built cash reports become the strategists who interpret AI-generated intelligence for the CFO and the board.

What is worth examining honestly is whether vague discomfort is masquerading as prudent risk management. Every month a treasury organization delays AI adoption is a month of compounding disadvantage: in forecast quality, in working capital efficiency, in FX risk management, and ultimately in the credibility of finance leadership as a strategic partner to the business.

AI for CFOs and treasurers: lead from the front, or explain why you didn’t

CFOs and treasurers are uniquely positioned to lead enterprise AI adoption, not just within finance, but as a model for the broader organization. Treasury sits at the intersection of data, risk, and strategy. The function already commands the systems, the governance instincts, and the cross-functional relationships needed to deploy AI responsibly and at scale. The organizations that seize this moment will not simply become more efficient treasury departments. They will become the intelligence engines of their enterprises, providing the real-time financial visibility and predictive risk insight that transforms how the C-suite makes decisions.

That is a future worth leaning into. The technology is mature enough to deliver. The business case is clear enough to defend. The only variable that remains is leadership conviction.

Imagine a treasury team that had fully embraced AI in cash forecasting, FX risk, liquidity optimization, and reporting. How much more would they know? How much faster would they move? And how much more would the business trust them with? If the honest answer unsettles you even slightly… what, specifically, is holding you back?

Read more from Kyriba

• AI payment fraud and a shifting threat landscape: why CFOs need proactive payment controls
• Innovative approaches to working capital optimization
• From risk to resilience: why bank connectivity is now a CFO mandate
• Why working capital matters more than ever
• A call to action for banks in the AI age
• The Economics of Liquidity: Why CFOs Must Regularly Monitor and Coordinate with Their Treasurer
• Why your risk management system might be sabotaging your business

Join our Treasury Community

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.

This article is a contribution from our content partner, Kyriba

Treasury teams are managing more fraud vectors than at any point in recent memory. The surprising part isn’t the number of threats. It’s that every one of them finds the same way in.

AI-powered fraud is accelerating across payment operations. Geopolitical instability is raising the stakes for financial infrastructure. Kyriba’s 2026 CFO survey reflects both pressures: security and fraud prevention ranks as a top priority, while 81% of CFOs say they are concerned about political instability and conflict. The weaknesses being tested are operational: inconsistent payment controls, siloed data, limited visibility, and too much reliance on manual review were not built for the current environment.

The threat environment has outpaced traditional payment controls

AI-powered fraud and geopolitical cyber risk are not abstract concerns for treasury teams. They are active, accelerating pressures that traditional payment controls were never designed to handle.

Why AI payment fraud is outpacing traditional defenses

CFOs and treasurers know AI payment fraud is real. The harder issue is whether their controls can keep up. AI-powered attack methods are evolving faster than human-based controls can respond. That’s the mismatch. Fraud has scaled up with machine-speed tools. Too many defenses still depend on human review.

AI-powered attacks are dangerous because they combine speed, believability, and scale. Impersonation attempts are more convincing. Timing is better calibrated to exploit gaps in approval workflows. Phishing is harder to catch because the obvious red flags are gone.

The treasury teams most vulnerable to AI fraud are not the ones with the oldest technology. They’re the ones who upgraded five years ago and stopped. Fraud evolves. Static controls don’t.

Geopolitical unrest raises the cyber stakes further

The pressure on payment infrastructure does not come from fraud alone. U.S. banks and financial firms are operating under heightened alert as Iran-related cyber risk has intensified. Recent conflicts, including Russia/Ukraine and Hamas/Israel, have also generated elevated cyber threats directed at financial institutions. Waiting for a confirmed attack at the payment layer before strengthening controls is not a risk management strategy. It is a recovery plan.

While AI fraud and geopolitical cyber risk may look like different problems, they expose identical structural weaknesses. Those weaknesses are operational blind spots that make fraud and systemic disruption harder to catch and harder to contain.

Why reactive controls no longer work

Reactive review was designed for a slower payment environment, where fraud was easier to recognize and finance teams had time to intervene. AI-powered fraud breaks that model. Attacks are timed to exploit approval gaps, vendor impersonation can pass human review, and by the time a callback or email confirmation happens, the window may already be closed.

Callback phishing surged 500% in Q4 2025. The attack works because 48% of organizations still rely on callbacks and email confirmations to validate vendor bank account information. Fraudsters are exploiting the very control designed to stop them. That gap is not a technology limitation. It’s a design choice fraudsters have learned to exploit.

Adding more manual steps to a broken model doesn’t fix it. It just slows down the inevitable failure.

What proactive payment fraud prevention actually looks like

The shift from reactive to proactive is about moving control upstream, into the payment flow itself, so that risk is assessed before authorization rather than investigated after the fact.

In practice, a proactive control framework rests on three capabilities that most treasury teams are still building toward.

1. Pre-payment validation and continuous beneficiary verification. Vendor payment fraud often surfaces after the initial relationship is established: when a bank account is updated between payment cycles, when the first payment goes to a newly registered account for an existing vendor, or when a change is imported from an ERP without independent verification. Validating account ownership once at setup is not enough. Recurring validation against account ownership records and sanctions lists, before every outgoing payment, is what closes the gap. Organizations still relying on callbacks and email confirmations to verify those changes are operating with a control fraud has already learned to defeat.
2. Real-time payment screening and connected visibility. Fragmented systems create blind spots, and blind spots are where fraud hides. Treasury teams need a unified view across banks, ERPs, and payment workflows so that anomaly detection can actually work. An AI model flagging unusual payment behavior cannot do its job if it is only seeing part of the picture. When payment data flows in real time across the full ecosystem, controls can screen for policy exceptions, behavioral anomalies, and high-risk patterns before funds leave the organization.
3. Centralized controls. Human judgment will always have a role in payment operations. Where that judgment is applied, and whether it is supported by good data and clear policy, determines whether controls hold under pressure. The risk is controls that exist in silos: treasury payments running through proper approval workflows in the TMS, supplier payments coming out of the ERP without the same controls applied. Same policy on paper; different enforcement in practice. Controls embedded in workflows and applied consistently across every payment type, regardless of origin, reduce the reliance on any single person making the right call at the right moment. When a payment is flagged, the response should be structured, not improvised.

Three steps CFOs should take to strengthen payment fraud prevention now

The best-positioned organizations will not necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They will be the ones that close the most obvious gaps first.

Start with an honest assessment of where manual validation still lives in your organization. Map every point in your payment process where a human is the primary control. Ask whether that control can operate at the speed and scale the current threat environment requires. The answer in most organizations will reveal more exposure than expected.

Connect payment data across treasury, AP, procurement, and IT. Payment fraud does not respect organizational boundaries, and neither does cyber risk. The fragmentation that makes treasury operations harder to manage also makes them easier to exploit. Shared visibility across payment initiation, approval, and bank connectivity is a fraud prevention requirement, and CFOs are positioned to drive it.

Treat payment resilience as a treasury strategy priority, not a compliance checkbox. Some CFOs still delegate payment fraud entirely to IT or compliance and call it risk management. At the speed the threat environment is moving, that is not delegation. It is abdication. The decisions about where to invest, which controls to prioritize, and how to sequence the work belong at the treasury leadership level.

More pressure, no more excuses

The pressures on treasury payment operations are not going to simplify. AI-powered fraud is accelerating. Geopolitical instability adds risk to the infrastructure payments depend on. And the pace of change in how money moves means the window for catching a fraudulent transaction keeps shrinking.

The organizations that build proactive, connected payment controls now are not just reducing fraud risk. They are building the operational foundation that modern treasury requires regardless of what the threat environment does next. Reactive cleanup is expensive. Proactive control is strategy.

In the months to come, the CFOs who acted now will be managing faster payment operations with measurably lower fraud losses. The ones who waited will be explaining to their boards why a preventable incident cost them a quarter’s worth of margin.

Read more from Kyriba

• Treasury AI adoption: drive the change or chase it
• Innovative approaches to working capital optimization
• From risk to resilience: why bank connectivity is now a CFO mandate
• Why working capital matters more than ever
• A call to action for banks in the AI age
• The Economics of Liquidity: Why CFOs Must Regularly Monitor and Coordinate with Their Treasurer
• Why your risk management system might be sabotaging your business
• Cash Forecasting: Your Blueprint for Liquidity Performance
• How to Tackle Troublesome Tariffs with 5 Savvy Working Capital Solutions
• TreasurySpring Announces Launch of a Public API and Partnership with Kyriba

Join our Treasury Community

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.

This article is a contribution from our content partner, Kyriba

Working capital is the lifeblood of any successful business, but optimizing it in today’s volatile environment requires more than just best practices. It demands innovation, collaboration, and real-time intelligence.

If you caught our first post, you know that amid economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, rising inflation, and shifting consumer demands, working capital has become a lifeline for resilient businesses. We explored why optimizing working capital is crucial in today’s unpredictable landscape and shared foundational strategies for getting started.

In this follow-up, we move from the “why” to the “how,” highlighting innovative approaches and smart moves companies are using right now to optimize working capital, overcome bottlenecks, and drive business growth.

Identifying and eliminating inefficiencies

Before you can fully optimize working capital, you need to uncover hidden bottlenecks that are slowing you down. Supply chain volatility, fluctuating shipping rates, and outdated processes can disrupt cash flow and limit flexibility.

Common bottlenecks include:

• Manual payment processes that create delays and inefficiencies.
• Fragmented invoice systems that lead to late or early payments.
• Limited visibility into real-time cash positions across business entities.

The Solution? High-performing businesses are leveraging automation and real-time tools to minimize these challenges. By automating payment workflows, digitizing invoice approvals, and using cash visibility platforms, these companies are freeing up trapped cash, reducing friction, and streamlining their cash conversion cycles.

Leveraging data analytics for timely insights

In an era of rapid change, intuition is not enough, but neither are manual systems or siloed processes that often lead to disconnected, delayed decision-making. Many organizations still operate with limited visibility into their supply chains, leaving them vulnerable to costly disruptions and concentration risk.

A recent CFO Brew article on supply chain visibility highlights just how little awareness some companies have of their third-tier and indirect suppliers, and how this lack of insight can expose them to risks that may not surface until months after an event. Without robust, real-time data, businesses are forced to make “feel-good decisions” that simply don’t work in today’s fast moving, interconnected world.

Leading organizations are moving beyond intuition and manual processes by turning to advanced data analytics and technologies that provide deep, actionable visibility across their supply chains. By harnessing big data and predictive analytics, companies can:

• Forecast cash positions with greater accuracy
• Identify patterns in supplier and customer behavior
• Pinpoint opportunities to renegotiate terms or optimize payment schedules

But visibility alone isn’t enough. The real differentiator for leading organizations is the ability to rapidly and decisively move from insight to action. Forward-thinking finance teams aren’t just identifying cash positions or spotting inefficiencies; they’re empowered to act on those insights in real time. That means having the tools to seamlessly leverage idle cash through payables strategies, accelerate receivables when needed, or dynamically adjust working capital allocations as market conditions shift.

Platforms that combine full cash visibility with integrated action, such as enabling payables financing, receivables financing, and dynamic discounting unlock a new level of working capital agility.This holistic approach ensures that finance leaders aren’t just observers of data, but active participants in shaping outcomes. It’s this marriage of intelligence and execution that’s setting new benchmarks for resilience and growth in today’s market.

Collaboration across teams boosts efficiency

Optimizing working capital is no longer just a treasury responsibility. The most successful companies treat it as a cross-functional challenge, requiring close collaboration between treasury, supply chain, and procurement teams. For example, when tariffs and trade policies shift, procurement must work hand-in-hand with treasury to anticipate the impact on payables and inventory levels.

Here’s how collaboration can make a difference:

1. Aligning procurement and payment terms to support supplier health while optimizing DPO (Days Payable Outstanding).
2. Synchronizing inventory management with cash flow forecasting to avoid overstocking and underutilization of funds.
3. Joint scenario planning to prepare for supply chain shocks and market volatility.

This integrated approach ensures that every dollar invested in inventory, payables, or receivables is working as hard as possible for the business.

Rethinking innovation in working capital strategies

True innovation in working capital optimization isn’t just about adopting the latest tools—it’s about fundamentally reimagining how people, processes, and platforms connect to unlock value. Today’s most successful organizations no longer treat treasury, procurement, and supply chain as separate, siloed functions. Instead, they are building integrated ecosystems where data flows freely, decisions are collaborative, and action can happen in real time.

From my experience, organizations leading the way are:

• Replacing manual workflows with intelligent automation to accelerate the cash conversion cycle
• Using real-time data to drive smarter, faster decisions about where, when, and how to move cash
• Creating shared KPIs between finance and operational teams, ensuring working capital decisions support broader business goals
• Adopting agile technology platforms that adapt to market shifts and scale with growth

The real breakthrough comes when companies move beyond visibility alone and empower teams to act on insights, turning working capital from a static metric into a dynamic lever for resilience and growth. Innovative CFOs and treasurers are partnering with platforms that offer unified visibility across cash, payments, and working capital, creating real-time command centers for liquidity performance.

In summary, working capital optimization is about more than incremental improvements. It means rethinking how teams connect, how data is harnessed, and how technology is deployed to enable rapid, confident decision-making. By identifying bottlenecks, fostering collaboration, and embracing real-time analytics, organizations can unlock new cash flow and build lasting resilience.

Read more from Kyriba

• AI payment fraud and a shifting threat landscape: why CFOs need proactive payment controls
• From risk to resilience: why bank connectivity is now a CFO mandate
• Why working capital matters more than ever
• A call to action for banks in the AI age
• The Economics of Liquidity: Why CFOs Must Regularly Monitor and Coordinate with Their Treasurer
• Why your risk management system might be sabotaging your business
• Cash Forecasting: Your Blueprint for Liquidity Performance
• How to Tackle Troublesome Tariffs with 5 Savvy Working Capital Solutions
• TreasurySpring Announces Launch of a Public API and Partnership with Kyriba
• Navigating the ISO 20022 Migration
• Optimize Your Cash Forecasting with AI

Join our Treasury Community

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.