This Articles is a repost from an Article posted by our Content Partner Nomentia
We recently interviewed treasury expert Patrick Kunz, who’s been working in treasury all his life. As he mentioned himself during the webinar, “Treasury is basically all I know.”
Patrick has worked independently for the past 11 years. He founded his own company, Pecunia Treasury and Finance, and works with various companies, from scale-ups to large enterprises and anything in-between.
Patrick provided interesting insights into what treasurers should prioritize during the first 180 days of a new job because of his longstanding experience and the many temporary assignments he’s had.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the main things we also covered during a recent webinar. These are the main topics that Patrick deems crucial during the first 180 days of starting a new job in Treasury:
Let’s dive deeper into each one of these topics.
How planning and prioritizing are done in your first 180 days is highly dependent on each company. Suppose it’s a longstanding company with hardly any volatility. In that case, your priorities are different compared to an organization without a treasury department, where it has to be built from scratch, for example. Of course, these are both extremes, and many organizations have characteristics somewhere in between.
In an established treasury department, every treasurer has their own style, working methods, and priorities. If you start a new job in such a team, it doesn’t automatically mean you can simply continue what the former treasurer did. It’s most important to recognize where the company’s priorities are. If the company focuses more on forecasting, it will likely receive more attention and become a priority.
Patrick suggests that it’s really up to the treasurer together with the CFO and the company to prioritize where to start. He also stresses that this should preferably be clear before starting a new job and become even more apparent during the first month or two.
Treasury can never work on its own. If you’re a stand-alone treasury, you’re doing something wrong. Treasury is at the company’s heart and should closely collaborate with other stakeholders. On the one hand, it gets cash in from the business and allocates cash out to other businesses. On the other hand, it also ensures that working capital runs smoothly by guaranteeing that there is sufficient risk-free cash available.
Regarding internal stakeholders, Patrick mentioned that a crucial team to work with is procurement because they know how and when you will spend your money. In addition, sales are important because they generate your cash inflows, and any hick-ups in revenue will hurt your cash flows for the coming weeks. You should also always be in close contact with the CFO, who’s probably your boss (or FP&A depending on the organization). With these main internal stakeholders, you need to align at least every week.
Patrick also mentioned that other departments have the tendency to forget to invite treasury to a meeting or start involving them in a project at a later stage, which often brings in last-minute stress and dealing with tight deadlines. So, putting yourself on the map and explaining to stakeholders what treasury is all about is crucial to overcome such challenges.
Another main reason to keep other departments close is that there might be overlapping tasks or systems that other departments also benefit from. Therefore, aligning processes and systems to work most efficiently is critical.
External stakeholders often consist of banks, liquidity providers, and hedging counterparties. But this also depends on the company and how advanced its treasury operations are.
In the end, treasury sits on top of a lot of tasks but also needs to get away from the comfortable treasury chest and be out there as a business advisor. The business, in turn, should know what treasury does, where to find them, and for what purposes.
There are two questions that a treasurer should be able to answer:
The latter is often a lot harder to answer. Interestingly, on the other hand, companies often don’t have any issues knowing how much profit they will make for the year. They know exact P&L figures and current cash at hand yet forecasting remains a challenge.
If you cannot answer both questions perfectly, you should be able to use some tools or techniques to get the response within at least an hour to half a day. In more straightforward treasury organizations, question one can be answered by accessing one, two, or three online banking portals. However, most multinationals have hundreds of banks because no bank can offer bank accounts anywhere in the world.
When treasury is more complex, answering how much cash you have or will have in the future becomes increasingly challenging. With today’s technologies, however, 90 or 95 percent of cash visibility should be available with the push of a button. There are many tools where you can login to view at least end-of-day balances, but you should preferably be able to see intraday balances and real-time balances too.
Moreover, as a treasurer, you should always be forward-looking. There’s always a cash starting position available from which you can calculate how much cash you need next week, for example, and whether the cash position goes up or down. Then you can take it one step further and do the same for a month. By analyzing shifts in cash positions over time, you can also determine whether there’s a financing need.
If you are in need of financing, you may need to talk to your bank. But can they provide financing quick enough? Or do you already have a credit facility that you can use? Depending on the economic circumstances, it can be hard to get a loan if you don’t have a facility, especially when interest rates are higher and there is less cash in the market.
On the contrary, if you notice that there will be cash surpluses, they are just sitting idle. And when interest rates are high, it means losing money on cash sitting in the account. Beyond doubt, it’s wise to have buffers, but if you have more cash than required as a buffer, you need to start examining other possibilities, such as investing it.
Most companies view the treasury department as a cost center, not a profit center. This means that treasury should minimize costs, not focus on maximizing profits while investing. Most companies that embrace this mindset avoid aggressive investments that are high-risk.
Ultimately, of course, depending on the type of business, Patrick Kunz recommends having at least cash visibility for a few months ahead. Typically, it’s 13 weeks because it involves a quarter-end, which is when you need to report and publish polished figures.
Patrick also mentioned that he’s seen a major shift; ten years ago, it was still pioneering to have cash or treasury management solution in place, whereas nowadays, many tools are available at competitive prices, and they are much easier to implement. So, it’s considered quite ancient when treasury reaches a certain size and still uses spreadsheets or logs into different banking platforms.
Patrick mentioned that he still runs into surprising many companies that work manually in each banking portal but notes that they are primarily non-established companies. Especially companies that have seen a lot of growth over a few years can suddenly have 200 to 500 million balance sheets and struggle with their treasury because they have five banks, are active in different parts of the world, and have exploding Excel sheets.
There was one case in particular that Patrick remembered well where a CFO had a little travel pocket bag with all his bank tokens because he needed to access all banks from anywhere. Without them, the CFO wasn’t able to make any payments. These limitations were then quickly tackled by implementing a payment hub and a TMS.
Cash flow forecasting is a challenge because it always depends on different stakeholders’ input to some extent. The trick is to try and automate as much as possible because there’s already a surprising amount of data available in your ERP system that can be used. For example, if you have payment terms of 30 days, your cash outflows should be fixed accordingly. The first month or so forecast can easily be based on receivables and payables as long as all stakeholders are expected to pay on time.
Taxes and salaries are also predictable. It’s easy to estimate how much salaries cost monthly and whether bonuses or seasonality exist. Some companies also need to pay hefty sums of taxes. Then it’s crucial to communicate with the tax department to see when they pay taxes so there is enough cash available according to such forecasts.
More challenging is creating long-term forecasts. They usually include some healthy guesstimate work. For forecasts of two to six months, it’s good to talk to the FP&A department, and examine the ongoing projects, when billing goes out, or when invoices come in. Then it’s also good practice to talk to local managers, controllers, and finance managers, who must manually fill out their estimates. Tools can still help streamline this process. But since the information comes from people, their input must be accurate. Garbage in means garbage out. If the input isn’t precise, neither will your forecast be. So, it’s always recommended to have a critical eye on the data provided. Ask questions, be in touch with vendors, contact the big cash flow drivers, perhaps ignore smaller entities, and be aware of more significant entity cash flow changes.
Sometimes it’s also challenging to have people report on time before specific deadlines. In such situations, it can be good to include a decision-maker and make cash flow forecasting a company-wide priority (if relevant) so that all stakeholders feel the need to comply.
Regarding hedging approaches, it’s essential to ask the CFO what the risk appetite is related to the different risks, such as FX and interest rates. Some companies don’t hedge a 100%, while others do aim to achieve that. A good example of why you don’t always fully hedge: take a company that operates in 50 different currencies but only has 15 that truly impact the business. They will likely only hedge against risk of 15 currencies rather than all 50.
If you’re starting a new job in treasury, you can easily track how successful the company has been in hedging by checking realized or unrealized FX gains or losses in P&L reports. If there are repeating volatile numbers, it means that the company is not hedging properly. As a result, you probably need to drill down further to find out what the underlying reasons are.
The ultimate goal is to determine the company’s exposure. If the exposure cause is known, you can choose the appropriate instruments to hedge against it. For example, you can use a committed derivative for committed exposure, future expected cash flows, AP & AR, and company loans.
Also, if you plan and know there will be exposure in 3 months, you can use a three-month forward to tackle it. Doing one-month forwards wouldn’t create a perfect hedge in such cases. The key is identifying what to hedge against and selecting the most logical hedging instrument.
On the other hand, there are also more unexpected exposures like future M&A deals, expected profits, and expected balance sheet positions. Hedging against these exposures using derivatives would be uncommon, but you might use FX options or internal ways to offset them instead.
Treasury policies are there to love and hate. They can limit how treasury operates and become an obstacle if done wrong. On the other hand, they’re an easy way to show what to do in different situations, for example, financing needs, exposures, and who to contact regarding specific topics. Treasury policies should be written in such a way that they are more of a tool that different stakeholders can easily use.
Your policies should be changed and reviewed at least every year. According to Patrick, if the policy consists of more than twenty pages, you’re doing it wrong, and if it’s shorter than two pages, it’s also wrong. Patrick mentions that you shouldn’t be too detailed in your policies and write them in such a manner that they are easy to understand for non-treasurers—that way, they can easily be distributed to anyone and actually be helpful.
Counterparty risk is always a relevant topic, especially now that some banks are failing again. Treasury needs to see how much cash they have at certain banks and how much risk can be taken, and the exposure per bank should also be defined in the treasury policies. The acceptable amount of acceptable risk differs and comes down to the risk appetite of each company. For example, having a total of 5 billion in cash and only 50 million at a particular bank can feel like low counterparty risk. On the other hand, for another corporate, 50 million at a specific bank can be a substantial amount of money and would be perceived as high risk.
When starting a job, you should determine the risk you’re willing to take with other internal stakeholders. You can, for example, also consider counterparty ratings. Even if there are examples like Lehman brothers collapsing with A ratings and Credit Suisse with a triple B rating, they still provide a better picture of the counterparty’s risk. That said, it’s also vital to be cautious and analyze market dynamics. Small things like rumors in the market can easily affect your risk; if the market decides they don’t trust a bank, it can go down in no time.
Your treasury policies should tackle limits with certain banks and banking groups. It’s wise to minimize counterparty risk to at least three to five core banks to be safe and not overexposed.
Monitoring risk doesn’t need to be done daily but rather monthly or quarterly. Some cash-rich companies can do it every week if they have 12 core banks, for example. In the end, you need to determine the risk appetite, and if you have too much cash at a bank, you should wonder why that’s the case and why you are not investing it instead. You could be investing it in bonds or money market funds that are very low-risk.
Whether you build a more central or regional treasury highly depends on the company, company size, type of company, and type of cash flows. Usually, there’s no 100% central or regional treasury, but something in-between. The good thing about regional treasury is that you’re always in control of your cash in the time zone and specific moment of that region.
With central treasury, the challenge can be that you work in different time zones. When the Asian market is closing, the US market is just waking up. In such cases, you must balance and see that there’s money at HQ and enough from region to region.
A hybrid model can often be the solution where the HQ treasury in Europe receives support from regional treasury centers in Asia, Latin America, and North America. Local presence can be the key to success because of different regional details, products, or other region-specific nuances. For example, it can be especially difficult having treasury operations in countries like China, where there are many regulations. It often requires regional managers with local language skills, knowledge, and connections to the different stakeholders.
Many companies also tackle multiple regions with an ‘around the world’ approach in which Asia sends money to Europe, Europe to the US, and then it’s sent back to Asia again. As a result, the company uses the same money all the time, anytime, in different regions.
There’s no one silver bullet to what you should be doing during your first 180 days in a new treasury job to make a success out of it. It all depends on the context of the company you start working for. Still, this is the advice of an expert that has worked for a significant number of companies, and it can often be applied in various contexts. Feel free to share your thoughts and comments with us as well!
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 [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information.
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.
This article is written by TreasuryCube
In an increasingly complex financial environment, In-House Banks (IHBs) have emerged as a strategic imperative for corporations seeking enhanced cash visibility, optimized liquidity, and streamlined intercompany transactions. Drawing insights from a recent presentation by experts at Citi and seasoned treasurers, let’s explore what makes an IHB not just an option, but a cornerstone of modern treasury management.
An IHB is a centralized internal financial entity that manages cash, investments, foreign exchange exposures, and intercompany lending on behalf of corporate subsidiaries. Acting as a “virtual bank” for the organization, it reduces the volume of external banking transactions and provides critical advantages in cash management, governance, and compliance.
Importantly, an IHB is not a regional treasury center, shared service center, re-invoicing hub, or physical licensed bank. It’s a bespoke solution that integrates deeply with corporate finance operations.
An IHB addresses several core challenges that treasurers face:
Real-world IHB implementations, like those led by Brook Ballard at Oceaneering, showcase the tangible benefits:
Intercompany netting further reduces payment transactions, bank fees, and FX costs by consolidating cross-border intercompany settlements.
While beneficial for many, IHBs are particularly advantageous for:
At TreasuryCube, we recognize that the modern treasury is not just about managing cash, it’s about unlocking strategic value. An effective IHB is a critical tool to help achieve that vision, especially when supported by integrated technology, skilled people, and proactive governance.
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 written by our partner, FIS
The reality of payment fraud has shifted from a question of whether an attack will occur to a growing likelihood of when and how it will occur.
For finance and treasury leaders, the strategies that provided a sense of security a few years ago may be insufficient against a new breed of sophisticated and relentless criminals. A 2024 survey from the Association for Financial Professionals underscored this reality, revealing that a staggering 79% of organizations were victims of payment fraud attacks or attempts.
This is not a distant risk: It’s an active, daily threat that demands a fundamental change in an institution’s defensive posture. The traditional, reactive approach – detecting and responding to fraud after it occurs – is, in many cases, no longer a viable strategy. The time has come to build a proactive defense.
Today’s fraudsters are often not lone actors but organized, well-funded operations that use advanced technology and psychological tactics. They study organizational structures, identify process gaps and exploit the path of least resistance.
Business email compromise remains a dominant method, where criminals impersonate executives or vendors with alarming authenticity to redirect funds. We’re also seeing the rise of AI-powered deep fakes, where a trusted voice on a conference call can be convincingly spoofed to authorize a fraudulent transfer.
These criminals understand that the entire payment lifecycle, from the initial onboarding of a vendor to the final reconciliation, presents a landscape of opportunity. They target the seams in your processes, exploiting the very human desire for efficiency and speed. This “disharmony,” a term coined by a FIS® and Oxford Economics study, captures the friction between the drive for growth and the drag of persistent security threats.
According to the study, 75% of C-suite executives identify fraud as a critical challenge.
How can organizations overcome the evolving threat of fraud? The answer lies in shifting from a fragmented, manual and reactive stance to an integrated, automated and proactive one.
A truly effective defense begins by fortifying the most common entry points. The vendor master file, for instance, is the heart of the payables process and a prime target. A single fraudulent change to a supplier’s bank details can lead to catastrophic losses before anyone realizes an error has occurred.
Overcoming this type of threat typically requires more than just diligence: It often demands a standardized, technology-enforced process. It includes implementing out-of-band verification, such as a phone call to a preverified contact, for any change to payment instructions. It means moving beyond trust and implementing strict, automated validation protocols.
As transaction volumes grow, manual reviews can become an impossible bottleneck, creating the very noise that criminals use to hide their illicit activities. This is where modern solutions like AI-assisted anomaly detection become increasingly indispensable.
Unlike static, rule-based systems that can only catch what they are programmed to look for, AI and machine learning establish a baseline of “normal” payment behavior for each vendor and transaction type. These systems operate in real time, analyzing payments for subtle deviations in amount, frequency or timing that would be difficult for the human eye to detect. When an anomaly is detected, the payment is automatically flagged for investigation before it leaves the organization. This preemptive capability is a game changer.
Organizations can achieve a greater level of control by consolidating their payment flows through a centralized payment hub. Instead of managing disparate security protocols across multiple ERPs and bank portals, a payment hub provides a more unified point of visibility and control.
A payment hub enables the consistent application of security policies, approval workflows and fraud detection analytics across the entire enterprise. It standardizes an institution’s defense, creating a fortress rather than a series of disconnected fences. A payment hub integrated with a third-party account validation service provides another critical layer, confirming that a beneficiary’s name matches their account information before a payment is ever initiated.
Reduce fraud risk and strengthen controls with FIS Payment Hub – Enterprise Edition
The path forward for finance and treasury leaders requires a strategic pivot. It means recognizing that fraud prevention is not merely a compliance checkbox but a strategic enabler of business resilience and growth.
Building a proactive defense involves a holistic approach that integrates advanced technology, standardized processes and a culture of vigilant verification. By embracing AI-driven monitoring, centralizing payment operations and empowering employees with specialized training, you can transform your security posture from reactive to preemptive.
This shift does not just mitigate risk: It builds the confidence and operational integrity necessary to thrive in a complex financial world.
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.
