Sustainable Investing in Treasury: Between Intention and Execution

This article is a contribution from our content partner, TreasurySpring

AI agents could gradually change how corporate treasurers manage cash, reducing the inertia that keeps large balances in low-yielding bank accounts and putting pressure on banks’ deposit funding.

Torsten Slok, Apollo’s Chief Economist, put out a short note recently asking whether an agentic bank run is coming. He argues that AI assistants could soon start moving household cash automatically into accounts paying over 3%, rather than leaving it in US checking accounts paying 0.1% on average. If enough people did that, banks would lose a lot of the cheap funding they rely on to lend.

Although he’s talking about households, I think something similar could eventually happen in corporate treasury, although it might take longer. The balances are much bigger, most sit well above any deposit insurance limit, and moving them means treasury policies, approvals, and an audit trail. Nobody wants to explain to their board that an agent moved £20m somewhere it shouldn’t have.

When it does happen, though, I think the impact on banks could be much bigger too. I don’t necessarily mean a bank run in the traditional sense. More likely, it means gradually removing some of the inertia that keeps corporate cash sitting in low-yielding bank accounts today.

How big is the gap?

In July, the average rate on UK companies’ interest-bearing instant-access deposits was 1.97%. In the euro area it was 0.60%.

For context, central bank rates today are 3.75% in the UK and 2.50% in the euro area. They aren’t directly comparable with the rates available on corporate deposits, but they give a sense of the gap. A 178 basis point difference on £10m, for example, is equivalent to £178,000 a year.

For banks, this spread matters a lot. US banks’ net interest margin was 3.32% in the second quarter, according to the FDIC. In the UK, the Bank of England says aggregate net interest margins across the major banks increased year-on-year in the first quarter, with UK-focused banks benefiting from higher structural hedge income. Across European banks, net interest margins are around 1.6%. Cheap deposits aren’t the only thing driving those margins, but they’re clearly valuable to banks. 

None of this is because treasurers aren’t paying attention. Nearly half of the organisations in the AFP’s 2026 benchmarking survey have fewer than five people in treasury. Moving cash somewhere new usually means another onboarding and KYC process, plus internal approvals, and there’s nearly always something more pressing that week.

It’s also worth saying that rate isn’t the only reason companies keep money with their relationship banks. Balances often sit alongside an RCF, better FX pricing, or access to capital markets business, and those relationships have real value. My view is that most teams just don’t have the time to work out how much of their balance the relationship genuinely needs, what could sit somewhere else, and what leaving it there is costing them. That’s the kind of analysis an agent could eventually run every day. In combination with access to secured institutional-grade products, treasurers could have an opportunity to generate enhanced risk-adjusted returns on their cash. 

Why it will take time

AI adoption will take time. Andrej Karpathy describes current models as having jagged intelligence, and anyone who uses them regularly will recognise that. They can do something genuinely impressive and then get something simple wrong.

Our own AI in Treasury Report, a survey of 55 treasury professionals, found only about a quarter use AI regularly. Cash flow forecasting is where they most want help, chosen by 73%, yet more than three quarters say accuracy is their biggest concern. Only 4% want AI involved in executing transactions. For now, treasurers want AI that supports decisions rather than one that carries them out, which I think is a reasonable position to hold today.

It is changing quickly though, with many companies looking to address issues with existing AI models. One interesting example is TypeSafe AI, which released Jev in early access this month. It isn’t a chatbot. It’s designed to take in messy information and return structured decisions. TypeSafe says it gives more consistent answers than a large language model and tells you how confident it is in each one.

It’s early, and those claims will need to be proven in practice, but the direction is interesting for treasury. Deciding where surplus cash should sit this week given your policy, existing exposures, and today’s rates is exactly the sort of structured problem that these systems should eventually be able to help with.

The other thing that will set the pace is infrastructure. An agent can only act on cash if the places holding it can be reached programmatically, with the right permissions and controls. Most corporate banking infrastructure wasn’t designed with autonomous agents in mind. My feeling is that platforms built API-first will enable these workflows much sooner, and that’s where treasurers will see the benefit first.

So I don’t expect anything like Silicon Valley Bank, where more than $40bn left in a single day. What seems more likely is a gradual shift. As more of the analysis gets automated, some of the inertia disappears. Banks then come under steady pressure on deposit margins and either pay more for corporate balances or find other ways to hold on to them.

Chasing yield isn’t enough

If you ask an agent to find the highest rate, it will do exactly that, and that’s not a good enough objective for corporate cash.

An unsecured deposit is effectively a loan to the bank. At the end of 2022, around 94% of SVB’s deposits were uninsured. A well-designed agent should be weighing up the same things a good treasurer does. How likely is this counterparty to default? What would we recover if it did? Are we being paid enough for that risk? And does putting more money there leave us too concentrated?

At TreasurySpring, we look at every product on a risk-adjusted basis for this reason, rather than treating the headline yield as the only thing that matters.

This is where I think we are well placed. A single onboarding gives you access to more than 120 counterparties and 1,100+ Fixed-Term Funds (FTFs), so you aren’t limited to the banks you already have accounts with. Many of those FTFs are secured by collateral through repo.

More importantly in the context of agents, that information is increasingly machine-readable. Our MCP server lets AI assistants see available FTFs, current yields and your portfolio, while our API allows other systems to connect directly to the platform. This lets clients either plug that data into their own agent or, over time, use an intelligence layer built natively into the TreasurySpring Portal, with the products, the risk analysis, and their treasury policy all in one place.

For the time being, I’d still want a person signing off on anything material, with the agent doing the analysis and the treasurer making the decision.

But that alone could change quite a lot. If an agent can continuously look at a company’s cash, its treasury policy, its existing bank relationships, counterparty risk, and the alternatives available, it removes a lot of the work that means this analysis doesn’t happen as often as it could today.

I don’t think the corporate version of an agentic bank run will look much like a bank run. It’ll probably be much slower. But if AI gradually makes it easier for treasury teams to work out how much cash genuinely needs to stay with their relationship banks, where the rest could go, and what they’re giving up by leaving it there, the end result could still be significant.

*TreasurySpring’s blogs and commentaries are provided for general information purposes only, and do not constitute legal, investment or other advice.

Also Read

• Understanding risk-adjusted returns: A smarter way to compare investments
• Sustainable Investing in Treasury: Between Intention and Execution
• Building resilience through treasury policies
• Treasurers or Traders?
• Understanding collateral: A guide to secured FTFs
• TreasurySpring Announces Launch of a Public API and Partnership with Kyriba

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This article is a contribution from our content partner, PrimeTrade

I never would have thought, at the start of my emerging career as a trade banker, supply chain financier and potential “Master of the Universe” (per Tom Wolfe), that debit notes would be interesting, and that thirty years later I might be writing a blog about them.

But here we are!

It is quite a long post, but this is a topic that merits a detailed treatment, even if the subject matter is rather dry and somewhat technical.

Myths and realities

This post sets out five myths about invoices and debit notes.

These myths can lead to various confusions, complications and inefficiencies when it comes to supply chain finance.

The post aims to set out clearly how things normally work in the real world of general ledgers and corporate ERPs. It also digs into the implications for SCF and for the design of platforms that help suppliers to access supply chain finance.

There are generally three strategies used to deal with debit notes in supply chain finance – and these are covered in the final section.

With the right design and approach, debit note recovery can be automated and fully-optimised – no more spreadsheets, no more manual tracking, and no need to get suppliers to deduct debit notes from future invoices.

What is a debit note?

A debit note acts as the evidence in the buyer’s books for a reduction in its expenses.

So it is issued by the buyer’s accounts payable team to a supplier when the buyer seeks to pay less than it has been invoiced.

For supplier financing transactions (including SCF), a debit note can be an unwelcome event. If an invoice has been financed and even purchased by a financier, the financier typically relies on the invoice being paid in full.

Myth #1: invoices can be “approved” or not approved

What if I told you that “invoices always get approved”?

A valid invoice is one that is properly addressed, is from a recognised counterparty (ie: a supplier), has the right taxes on it shown in the right way, and which adds up correctly.

Valid invoices always get approved and there is a good reason.

This is a fundamental part of the way financial controls work. A valid invoice has been received representing a claim for payment from a supplier and it will be posted in full to the general ledger.

If this didn’t happen, we would get in a mess very quickly. Accounts payable teams cannot use their discretion and post valid invoices to the general ledger with whatever numbers on them they decide might be right.

Audits would be failed and financial controls would have broken down.

If the invoice from the supplier is for an amount that is too high (for whatever reason), a debit note is raised by the buyer so the supplier gets less money. The question is “what’s the debit note?” not how much of the invoice should be approved.

Some accounts payable teams will, alternatively, ask the supplier to raise a credit note and the invoice remains pending and not posted until the credit note is received. Here, for ease of explanation, we assume the debit note route is the one that the accounts payable team uses.

Myth #2: Payables are the same as invoices

In the ordinary course of business, accounts payable teams in corporate clients approve payments and not invoices.

A few key points:

1. Valid invoices are posted to a supplier account in the general ledger at the full amount demanded by the supplier (see above). If debit notes are raised, they are also posted.
2. The amount due to the supplier is the balance on the supplier account in the general ledger – equal to invoices posted less debit notes posted.
3. When it comes to paying a supplier, it is the outstanding and due balance on the supplier account that is settled. The due balance is calculated by taking all the items posted to the supplier account that are due on or before the current date, summing them up and subtracting payments already made.
4. The result is a payable amount – a figure that will be settled to the supplier, usually via a payment run. That figure may be made up of many individual transactions (invoices, debit notes and credit notes). The key approval step is at the time of the payment run.

This makes supply chain finance and supplier financing tricky – since bankers and lawyers like to think in terms of transactions rather than balances.

Bankers purchase invoices not balances.

Debit notes do not conveniently fit into this model.

Whilst the corporate client may be settling a balance that is due to a supplier (invoices less debit notes),

bankers want the invoices that they have purchased to be paid in full to them.

This is also one of the two main reasons why many corporate clients operate an all-or-nothing model with suppliers when it comes to supplier financing.

• Reason 1: if all the supplier invoices are financed by the same bank, there’s no need to try and unpick a balance that has been settled and split it into individual invoices.
• Reason 2: nothing to do with debit notes, so just mentioned here for completeness: most general ledgers cannot handle more than one account payee record per currency – so this one record gets changed from the supplier banking details to the financier banking details and then all the money due to the supplier simply goes to the financier. Again, this avoids the need to try and split the payment into the individual invoices involved.

These two reasons mean SCF programs can lose a lot of agility. There’s no easy way to move suppliers between financiers, and no easy way to have dynamic management of funding, switching suppliers between financiers whenever needed (even daily) to optimise the use of limits and mix in own treasury funds as a funding source.

Myth #3: debit notes are somehow “outside” SCF

I made a statement earlier about “valid invoices always being approved”.

The key question for the accounts payable team when they are deciding what the supplier might be owed is not how much of the invoice to approve.

The key question is: how big should the debit note be?

Yes, that’s right. The full amount of a valid invoice is always posted to the ledger but if there is a reason to pay less than the full amount, then a debit note needs to be raised.

The questions being answered by the accounts payable team reviewing purchase orders, delivery paperwork and the invoice (ie: the 3-way match) are (a) whether a debit note should be raised and (b) how much it should be for?

For example, the invoice face value is 100, but there is a shortage on the delivery of value 5. So that means the invoice of 100 is posted to the ledger, and a debit note of 5 is created and posted – and 95 is the balance on the supplier account, which is what will be settled in due course.

As stated above, the general ledger is an account-based (ie: balance-based) system.

The supplier account is credited with the full amount of the invoices and debited with debit notes to reach the correct amount that should be paid to the supplier when a payment run is operated.

So what is the bank buying when it provides supplier financing?

• The amount due under the invoice (without set off, counterclaim etc), or
• the amount payable in respect of the invoice at the time of purchase, which could include amounts that are already planned to be netted from the invoice payment.

Is it an “approved payable” (an invoice that is net of specified debit notes) or is it an “approved invoice” (due at face value without deduction)?

This is a key documentary point and one which might not always be clear in the paperwork used to support supply chain finance. On the one hand, the bank wants to buy invoices free and clear of any debit notes. On the other hand, the corporate client may well want the ability to net pre-existing debit notes (at the time of financing) against those invoices.

Is the IPU for the same amount as the invoice? What exactly is the claim that the bank is buying and relying on here – the invoice or the payable amount (at IPU creation-time) in relation to each invoice? If the supplier financing is documented on the basis that the bank is buying the IPU (and not the invoice) – query the accounting treatment and whether the arrangement might then become financial indebtedness in the books of the corporate obligor?

Myth #4: debit notes specifically relate to invoices

Debit notes “sort of” relate to invoices – but this is an artificial construct and not one that is required in the ordinary course of business.

Companies typically want to collect claims (debit notes) against suppliers immediately. Why wait?

Invoices are posted with a due date (in the future) that reflects when the amount claimed by the supplier should be paid.

Debit notes are often posted with an immedate due date.

That means debit notes are usually collected by set off against the next amount due to be paid to the supplier – ie: as soon as possible. There’s no waiting.

That would be the case even if the debit note might relate to a delivery where the invoice(s) for that delivery are not due to be paid for many days.

And debit notes may also arise that are wholly unconnected with individual deliveries – for example, where there are volume rebates or programme-wide discounts to be recovered.

As mentioned above, settlements clear the due portion of the balance outstanding on the supplier account.

The settlement is calculated by adding up all the transactions that are due and ignoring future-dated transactions. The debit note is always due immediately and is included as soon as possible in any payment that is made to the supplier. The invoice may be due in the future and has to wait.

The idea that this specific debit note goes with that specific invoice is typically a myth when it comes to the practical reality of payables and settlements.

Myth #5: we can ignore debit notes in SCF

Most platforms ignore debit notes. These are “someone else’s problem”.

That’s why many accounts payable teams don’t like supply chain finance and specifically prefer to limit the size and scope of programs to a handful of large suppliers.

And many SCF platforms ignore debit notes completely.

Corporate clients are expected to provide them with a nice and tidy file of “approved payables” which are guaranteed to be paid in full no matter what else may be going on.

This makes life easy for the platform and easy for the bankers and lawyers involved.

But this also makes life complicated for the corporate accounts payable team.

If clean “approved invoice” or “approved payable” files are to be provided to the SCF platform, this typically means that:

• debit notes cannot be posted to the general ledger in the usual way
• debit notes have to be tracked “off-system” with recovery of the debit notes handled away from the settlements and payments process.

This can mean that many clients end up failing to collect all the debit notes that they might claim, or end up having to track debit notes manually in excel and away from the general ledger. This all leads to extra work for everyone, compromising financial controls and adding costs and complexity.

Debit notes and SCF – are there solutions?

Yes – it requires a modern approach to the way that the supply chain finance platform is developed and operates.

There are three approaches:

1. Manual: Corporate accounts payable teams handle the debit notes away from the SCF program with manual tracking and recovery. SCF program is then simple as it is fed with an “approved invoice” file and all invoices are simply settled at their face value. Debit notes are tracked in a spreadsheet and suppliers are required by procurement teams to deduct them manually from future invoices.
2. Delay debit notes: The corporate accounts payable team runs two processes:
   • Debit notes are allocated to invoices before they are included in the file transmitted into the SCF platform; early payments to suppliers are then net of debit notes that were outstanding at that specific moment; and then
   • Those invoices that are in the SCF program are then ring-fenced from the further application of debit notes against them by the accounts payable team – so the SCF financier is not exposed to any netting and will be paid in full. This requires some careful management of posting processes and dates applied to debit notes in the ERP to ensure debit notes are not deducted from financed invoices. One way to do this is to post debit notes with future due dates to defer processing and delay their recovery, leading to earlier due invoices that are financed always being paid in full; this is a cost to the business though.

Also Read

• Supply chain finance best practice
• Upgrading Supply Finance: Case Study
• What is Supply Chain Finance?

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By Alex Cannon

Across 111 European public tenders for treasury systems, training is named in 47% of notices. The highest-ranked treasury capability is FX and hedging, at 13%.

uropean public bodies have to write down what they want from a treasury system, in public, before anyone can bid.

It all gets published on TED, the European Union’s procurement journal.

I looked at 111 notices, published between May 2018 and October 2026.

Training appears in 47% of them.

After that, the highest-ranked treasury capability is FX and hedging, at 13%.

Why I am raising this

A product that a qualified professional cannot operate without a course has been designed badly.

This market has stopped treating that as a defect and started pricing it in instead.

Some training is unavoidable. A treasury system touches bank mandates, approval limits and payment files and no amount of good design removes the need to show a new user how a particular organization has set those up.

A degree in the domain, 40 hours of instruction and a consultant on call is not that. That is a product nobody can learn by using it.

The newer products in this category are not like this. You open one, click around for an afternoon and it explains itself.

So why are buyers still signing for dinosaur software and then signing again for somebody to explain it?

Why a buyer budgets for training at all

Nobody buying a treasury system is new to treasury.

The people who will use it know what a forward contract is, what a cash position is, which balances get swept at the end of the day.

The training in these notices is not teaching them their job. It is teaching them the product.

What they are paying to be taught is where things are, what the screens are called, which order the steps go in and what the system wants before it will let you do the obvious thing.

The European Central Bank bought its treasury management system in 2018 for €16,534,744. Since then it has signed two consultancy frameworks for that same system: €7m in 2020 and €11.7m in 2025.

That is €18.7m to be helped with a system it paid €16.5m for. The advice has outgrown the software, at an institution staffed with some of the most qualified treasury professionals in Europe.

A degree in the domain, a budget to learn the software and consultants on retainer for the parts that stay unclear.

Does nobody else find this strange?

Where training ranks

Why it comes out as “training”

Nobody writes “this software is confusing” into a procurement document.

You can write 40 hours of training into a contract. You can name a number of sessions, a count of on-site days, a trainer’s qualifications. All of it is enforceable, it survives legal review and a bidder can put a price on it.

You cannot write “make it obvious” into a contract.

So the learning curve gets stated in the only currency procurement accepts, which is people and days. Training tops this list not because treasury teams want courses, but because it is the one line where a buyer can put a number on the distance between signing and competence.

What a buyer can take from it

Score time-to-competence. Half your peers write training into their requirements.

If “how long until my team runs this without you” is not a line on your scoring sheet, you are scoring a different purchase than the one you are making.

The demo is run by the person who wrote the training. Ask what the fifth week looks like for somebody who wasn’t in the room.

And read a few notices yourself.

Public bodies publish requirement sets at a level of detail corporate buyers keep private, written by people who had to think a whole project through before they were allowed to publish anything.

If you are a young vendor, most of these are not for you

Public tenders look like an open door. They mostly are not.

A public buyer has to justify the decision in writing, to people who were not in the room.

That incentive produces the oldest reflex in enterprise software: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

The notice encodes it, through reference requirements, revenue and insurance thresholds, years of comparable deployments and a scoring sheet that rewards the familiar answer.

Nearly half of the treasury software awards that reported a bid count drew a single bid, which is the sound of a decision made before publication.

Unless you hold something specific, an existing relationship with the buyer, a local presence the notice requires, a capability in the specification few others can meet, bidding is an expensive way to lose.

What is useful in these documents is not the opportunity. It is the requirement set, telling you what the incumbents are being paid to compensate for.

What clarity is worth

None of this is the consultants’ fault. If a system takes a month to explain, somebody is going to get paid to explain it.

That is real work and there is real demand for it.

What I keep coming back to is how calmly it gets signed off. Nobody at the ECB had to argue that the treasury system was hard to use. The money went through as consultancy, twice, five years apart and the word “confusing” never had to appear in a document.

So if you are building in this category, that is the number to look at.

You do not have to beat them on functionality. You have to be the system a treasurer can open on Monday and use by Wednesday with nobody sitting next to them.

Also Read

• I read 50 Treasury job ads to see what tech skills are actually expected

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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.