Treasury tech stack or trap? Why more isn’t always better

At first glance, treasury appears to be in good health. According to Buried Treasury: Uncovering the Secret to Financial Stability, our newest report exploring the state of treasury today and why evolving it can drive better clarity and agility, 85% of financial leaders describe their treasury function as ‘effective’. On the surface, that suggests a function humming along nicely… reliable systems, capable teams, and a reasonable handle on risk. But dig deeper, and you'll find a troubling secret:

Just 33% feel confident in their company's financial agility. 

Is ‘effective’, then,  just code for ‘just functional’?

This gap between perceived and actual effectiveness is becoming a problem, increasingly buried beneath disjointed systems and legacy workflows built for static environments. The irony? Treasury has never had more tools at its disposal.

More tools don’t automatically mean better performance, though. With every new system comes another login and another potential mismatch. Paradoxically, the very tools meant to help often complicate matters, forcing treasury teams back to the outdated processes they were trying to leave behind.

If that sounds familiar, you should stick around. Based on the findings from the Buried Treasury report, we’ll examine how well-intentioned but bloated tech stacks are affecting performance, and what treasury teams can do to simplify, unify, and regain real and effective control.

Bloated tech stacks cause a chain of costly consequences 

You likely use more than four systems to manage cash, FX costs, liquidity, risk, and then some. Our research found that most treasury teams juggle that many platforms, and nearly half still reach for spreadsheets and calculators just to make sense of it all. Not out of choice, but of necessity born of disjointed tools and fragmented data.

It’s a pattern with consequences, and it’s hitting treasury teams in ways they can’t afford to ignore.

Time wasted through complexity

Every new tool adds a login, a data download, or a reconciliation step. At scale, this friction slows weekly and monthly close, delays critical visibility into cash flow, and forces teams into reactive firefighting rather than proactive planning.

Instead of seamless, automated workflows, which a conglomerate of so many tools should be able to deliver, treasury teams are spending an average of 26.4 hours every week on manual tasks. That’s precious time, headspace, and effort lost, hours that could otherwise fuel cash flow forecasting, scenario modelling, or strategic planning.

Good decision-making under threat

When visibility is patchy, decisions are second-guessed and growth suffers. Finance leaders don’t want to wonder whether they’ve seen the full picture; yet without a unified data overview and clean flows, that’s exactly what they’re left doing.

In fact, only 26% of companies report strong multi-entity visibility, and a mere 22% say they’re confident in detecting overspend risk.

In combination, these deficiencies leave nearly half of finance leaders (43%) stating that they lack the information needed for confident treasury decisions—an unsustainable position in volatile markets.

False positives from a crowded stack

It’s easy to assume that more systems equal more control, but what treasury teams often gain in features, they lose in cohesion and valuable insights. The illusion of coverage hides a deeper issue:

When tools don’t integrate well, their output can conflict, overlap, or mislead. Finance leaders are left making decisions based on duplicated data, inconsistent categorisation, or stale reporting.

As complexity grows, trust in the numbers declines. Systems become siloed, and the treasury team turns into a translator, spending time aligning tools that should already speak the same language. At some point, the tools start to obscure more than illuminate.

Four ways to simplify your stack and regain control

The reality is, the more tools a team uses, the harder it becomes to control the flow of information, spot inconsistencies, or respond with speed and accuracy. More dashboards don’t mean more insight. And more features don’t mean better outcomes, especially when they don’t talk to each other.

But wait, don’t roll everything back or start from scratch. Instead, start rethinking what your treasury tech is actually there to do. An integration-first strategy that benefits from specialisms but not overloads is where you can strike gold with your tech stack.

Here are four simple ways to implement it and bring technology back to the status of helper and enabler, not saboteur.

1. Start with the centre, not the surface

Begin by clarifying your core systems—banking, ERP, and TMS. Integration isn’t layering tools on top; it’s ensuring the foundations speak fluently to each other. 

Once the data flows cleanly at the core, insight becomes faster, sharper, and more reliable.

2. Favour modular tools that play nicely

Look for tech that’s designed to integrate, not dominate. Choose tools that serve clear, specialist functions but can plug into your central systems without manual workarounds and added headaches. 

Think of them as orchestral instruments: precise in their role, powerful together.

3. Set a ‘single source of truth’ policy

Enforce data discipline amongst employees. Even the best integration fails if teams feed inconsistent inputs across platforms. 

Align everyone around one data entry point per process. The fewer hands on the inputs, the fewer errors and escalations downstream.

4. Monitor utility, not usage

Adoption stats can flatter to deceive. A tool that’s used often isn’t necessarily useful. 

Focus instead on what’s speeding up month-end, tightening forecasting, or reducing FX risk. Retire or replace anything that fails to deliver clear strategic impact.

Tech that talks is tech that works

When treasury tools multiply without direction or clear scope, clarity and growth become collateral victims. What looks like control from the outside often masks inefficiency, inconsistency, and lag. The solution isn’t to scale back, but to rethink what integration actually means, and to build a stack that supports how treasury teams operate and make decisions.

Buried Treasury: Uncovering the Secret to Financial Stability explores this tension in full, with data, analysis, and direction for finance leaders looking to seriously rethink the treasury function. You can download the full report here.