This article is written by: Tatiana Jekmohan
What looks like an unusually broad remit may sometimes be something else entirely: a signal about high performance, organisational maturity and the way responsibility moves through a business.
A recent conversation left me thinking about a question that is probably much bigger than Treasury.
I was speaking with an experienced Treasury executive — someone clearly passionate about the profession, commercially minded and certainly not inclined to confine Treasury to a narrow traditional remit.
Yet, as our conversation developed, he became increasingly curious about the breadth of my own involvement across the business.
It wasn’t criticism. If anything, that made the question more interesting. Here was someone who understood perfectly well that modern Treasury extends far beyond cash management and banking, and yet even he was asking, in effect: why would a Treasurer be involved in all of that?
I found myself thinking about the question long after the conversation ended because perhaps the answer isn’t really about Treasury. Perhaps it is about what happens when a highly accountable function meets an organisation at a particular stage of maturity — and capability begins to attract responsibility.
Modern Treasury is already a broad discipline. Banking, liquidity, financial risk and payments increasingly sit alongside working capital, technology, automation and strategic business partnering. But in some organisations the boundary can travel considerably further.
Organisation might decide that Credit Control and DSO sit with Treasury. Accounts Payable may sit there too. Improving DSO leads naturally into customer onboarding, credit decisions, contractual terms, invoicing and operational disputes. Payment problems lead backwards into vendor onboarding, accounting and reconciliation. Banking requirements bring corporate documentation and compliance questions. Automation creates dependencies on technology and process design.
Eventually, what looks from the outside like a Treasurer becoming involved in everything may have a more mundane explanation. Follow the cash far enough backwards and you eventually encounter much of the business.
That still did not completely answer the question for me. The more interesting question was how a function acquires responsibilities that nobody necessarily designed it to have.
There is a very human mechanism at work here. A problem falls between functions. Someone helps resolve it. The next time a similar problem occurs, people remember who helped. After enough repetitions, an informal route develops. Nobody has deliberately transferred accountability. Nobody necessarily intends to avoid responsibility. People simply learn where they are most likely to get an answer.
This matters particularly when the receiving team contains people with a strong instinct for ownership. They investigate rather than redirect. If the same problem occurs repeatedly, they look for the cause. If a process is missing, they help create one. If ownership is unclear, they connect the relevant people.
These are precisely the behaviours most organisations try to encourage. But there may be a paradox hidden inside, put a high-performing team into a mature operating model and it can make that model perform exceptionally well. Put the same team into an organisation whose complexity has developed faster than some of its processes, systems or functional boundaries, and the team may start compensating for what the operating model does not yet provide.
That can look remarkably successful…Perhaps too successful.
Treasury provides an interesting example because it frequently sits close to the point where problems become financially visible.
Consider DSO. Making a Treasurer accountable for DSO sounds straightforward until one asks why a particular customer is not paying. The answer may lie in collections, but it may equally lie in customer onboarding, credit assessment, contractual terms, invoice quality or an unresolved operational dispute. The Treasurer who follows the root cause is suddenly deep inside processes that do not traditionally look like Treasury.
Payments create the same effect in reverse. A supplier has not been paid, so it appears to be a payment problem. Yet the cause may sit much earlier in vendor setup, invoice processing, approval, accounting or reconciliation.
Treasury controls the final financial event without necessarily controlling everything required to make that event possible.
Once a team is repeatedly held accountable at that final point, travelling upstream becomes rational. The objective is no longer simply to solve today’s problem. It is to stop tomorrow’s version arriving.
And that is where functional breadth can begin to accumulate.
This part of the question that interest me most.
Imagine a function that is simultaneously improving working-capital processes, challenging customer and vendor journeys, strengthening controls, documenting policies, developing training, rationalising banking and liquidity structures, automating payments and clarifying responsibilities between functions.
Viewed individually, these are operational improvements.
Viewed together, they look remarkably like a transformation programme.
Yet organically emerging transformation is easy to miss because nobody necessarily launches it. There is no programme name. No transformation office. Perhaps no dedicated budget or capacity. Each problem arrives separately and is solved separately. The people transforming tomorrow’s operating model continue running today’s. This creates a potentially important management blind spot. Management sees the successful outcomes. Problems are resolved. Deadlines are met. Processes continue operating.
What is less visible is the human infrastructure underneath those results: manual intervention, investigation, cross-functional coordination, accumulated knowledge and the strategic capacity being consumed by keeping the model working while simultaneously trying to improve it.
The process may be working.
Or the people may be making the process work.
There is an important difference.
I would be cautious about turning one set of observations into a universal theory.
This may be particular to certain organisations. It may be more common at particular stages of growth. Finance Directors may recognise it more readily than Treasurers. Leaders in HR, Legal, IT, Procurement or Operations may have seen exactly the same phenomenon around their own teams.
Perhaps the underlying variable is organisational maturity.
Companies do not develop evenly. Commercial complexity can grow faster than systems, policies, governance and specialist capabilities. For a period, somebody has to bridge those gaps.
Perhaps another variable is simply human behaviour. Ambiguity tends to travel towards people willing to resolve it.
And perhaps the most interesting cases occur when the two coincide: an organisation passing through a period of transformation and a team unusually capable of absorbing the ambiguity created by that transition.
Neither is inherently problematic.
The risk arises if temporary compensation quietly becomes permanent dependency.
The original question—why would a Treasurer become involved in so many areas?—turned out to be much more useful than I initially realised.
I would now answer it with another question.
When we encounter an unusually broad, highly effective function, do we know how it became broad?
Was the scope deliberately designed? Did authority, technology, capacity and resources expand with it?
Or did responsibilities accumulate one successfully resolved problem at a time?
That distinction matters well beyond Treasury.
High-performing people are an extraordinary organisational asset. But exceptional individual capability and organisational capability are not the same thing.
Perhaps one of the responsibilities of leadership is therefore to notice when good people are no longer simply performing within the operating model, but quietly compensating for the parts of it that still need to mature—and to turn what those people have learned into processes, systems and capabilities that no longer depend on them.
Because the ultimate measure of a high-performing team should not be how much organisational complexity it can permanently absorb. It should be how much stronger the organisation becomes because that team was there.
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 partner, Embat
Accounting with the best financial team is a critical factor of success for any business, so nothing is more important for the CFO than surrounding themselves with the right people, this is what will allow you to enhance your role and focus on value generation from a much more strategic than operational perspective.
Traditionally, the financial domain was characterised by the mastery and application of a series of technical knowledge, which when well used not only allows one to ‘explain the past’, but also to generate reliable information for business decision making thus minimising the risk of errors.
It is the advance of technology itself, which has allowed them to redefine their role, following the same line of evolution as that of the CFO themselves, that is, towards a vision much more focused on the company’s business and strategy and not merely focused on explaining what has happened and on regulatory compliance.
This reconversion of the area requires the need for professional profiles that not only have a solid “technical” knowledge, but also have the necessary skills to take advantage of the benefits offered by the new technologies available.
It is above all a change in the culture of the area that must accompany and support the evolution of the business itself, adopting new ways of working, based on collaboration, experimentation and continuous learning, while at the same time requiring a rethinking of the operating model, including the automation of tasks and the redefinition of internal processes.
Combining analytical rigor with business intuition, technical precision with the flexibility to adapt to changes in the environment, is essential when it comes to building a financial team, where technical expertise becomes a necessary (and mandatory), but not sufficient, skill.
It is therefore necessary for financial professionals to have a broader understanding of the business they manage, in order to be able to adapt as quickly as possible to changes, which are becoming faster and faster.
The evolution of the CFO in today’s business strategy
Discover the evolution of the CFO and their relevance in today’s business landscape.
Being able to translate and being able to communicate complex information in such a way that it can be used for decision making by the rest of the organisation, which generally speaks a different ‘language’ and does not usually have the same technical knowledge, requires the development and good application of what are defined as ‘soft skills’.
Empathy, proactive attitude, autonomy, thinking critically about how things are done, adapting to new scenarios, interacting with interdepartmental teams, are critical and essential skills that any finance team must have in order to turn data into analysis, business opportunities into results and strategy into profitability for the company.
This is where the CFO takes on a central role, in the sense of being able to integrate the different skills of the financial team, identifying both their strengths and weaknesses, thus ensuring that all members of the team work towards the same common goal.
Therefore, it becomes relevant to promote diversity within the financial team not only in terms of the incorporation of people with different professional experiences, but also with other ways of thinking and approach, in order to encourage the generation of innovative ideas that can become creative solutions to the problems that arise.
A diverse finance team can also be better prepared to meet the challenges of a globalized marketplace. Companies operating in multiple countries need teams that understand the particularities of each region, both from a technical and cultural perspective.
On the other hand, it is necessary to promote a culture of open and ‘bidirectional’ communication between the CFO and the members of their team, where the contributions of each one of them are valued, something that is relevant to strengthen the group and thus tend to achieve the proposed objectives.
Trust is another essential requirement for building a cohesive team, especially when confidential and strategic information must often be managed, which is why it is essential to guarantee its integrity. Likewise, it must be bidirectional, thus generating a climate of security that reinforces open communication, as well as the responsible assumption of risks and the ability to learn not only from the successes achieved, but also from the failures.
Thus, forming a financial team is a process that requires a certain “science” in the selection of the best talents with the necessary technical knowledge for the development of their functions, as well as the purest “art”, since it must be complemented with the ability to adapt, innovate and collaborate closely with other areas of the company.
In this way, a balanced integration between art and science is what really determines the difference between a financial team that is oriented to the administration of resources, and another that is dedicated to the generation of value through continuous improvement.
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 Nadia Callaghan
Treasury has quietly become one of the most powerful levers for improving financial performance. In many organisations, it is still treated as a protective cost-centre function, focused on liquidity, compliance and risk management. Yet the businesses that outperform today are those that recognise treasury as a value creator. From my experience, optimising finance returns is not only about taking more risk; it is also about tightening the fundamentals that determine how efficiently money moves through the organisation.
The first and most immediate source of value comes from strengthening collections. Cashflow improves dramatically when organisations collect what they are owed, when they are owed, without leakage or delay. Accounts receivable often suffers from fragmented ownership, inconsistent follow‑up and manual allocation processes that slow everything down. Commission collections can be even more complex, especially in industries where revenue is shared across multiple parties. When treasury leads a disciplined approach to collections, supported by real‑time ageing visibility, automated reminders and clear accountability, liquidity improves almost instantly. Faster allocation of incoming cash reduces unapplied balances, improves forecasting accuracy and frees capital that would otherwise sit idle.
Cost discipline is the second major lever. Operating expenses are rarely fixed; they simply feel that way because they are not reviewed often enough. Treasury can materially improve returns by treating bank fees and partner contracts as commercial agreements rather than administrative necessities. Regular fee reviews reveal charges for services no longer used, pricing tiers based on outdated volumes and FX or payment fees that are significantly above market rates. Debt‑side partner contracts often contain renewal clauses, utilisation fees or covenant‑related costs that can be renegotiated when treasury brings data to the conversation. Organisations that review these agreements quarterly typically achieve meaningful cost reductions without changing their operating model.
Once collections tighten and costs come under control, surplus liquidity becomes visible. Idle cash is one of the most common drags on returns, and yet it is also one of the easiest to fix. Treasury can deploy surplus funds into safe, yield‑generating instruments such as money market funds, notice accounts, term deposits or custody accounts for short‑term securities. These options provide daily liquidity, low risk and significantly better returns than traditional operating accounts. Even modest yields create meaningful profit when applied to large balances that previously sat dormant.
Centralising liquidity amplifies these gains. Cash pooling allows organisations to treat group‑wide cash as a single strategic asset rather than a collection of isolated balances. Physical pooling sweeps cash into a master account, reducing external borrowing and enabling centralised investment strategies. Notional pooling aggregates balances virtually, optimising interest without the complexity of intercompany loans. Both approaches reduce reliance on external debt, lower interest expense and increase the organisation’s ability to generate returns from its own liquidity.
The final lever is automation, which is often underestimated in its impact. Manual treasury processes consume time, introduce errors and prevent teams from focusing on value‑creating activities. Automating bank reconciliations, AR allocation, commission matching, payment runs, forecasting and intercompany settlements reduces operating costs and strengthens control. Automation also improves data quality, which in turn improves decision‑making. Treasury teams that operate with clean, real‑time data can model scenarios more accurately, anticipate liquidity needs earlier and respond to market conditions faster.
Optimising returns is not a single initiative; it is a discipline. When treasury strengthens collections, reviews expenses with commercial rigour, deploys surplus cash intelligently, centralises liquidity and automates manual processes, it becomes a profit engine rather than a cost centre. The organisation benefits from improved cashflow, reduced leakage, lower operating costs and higher returns on liquidity. Treasury’s role shifts from safeguarding the business to powering it, creating a financial foundation that supports growth, resilience and strategic ambition.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
