Why it's time to take the treasury function seriously

With geopolitical and macroeconomic headwinds swirling, few things are more important for companies than managing their assets and risks effectively.

The trouble is, far too few are doing that, as teams that oversee everything from cash flow and liquidity to investments and funding continue to be held back by dated systems and internal complexity.

According to Pleo’s report, Buried Treasury: Uncovering the Secret to Financial Stability, 85% of business leaders said their treasury function is effective. But that’s only half the story; only a third said they had enough financial agility in their organisations.

Businesses, on average, spend more than a day a week on manual treasury tasks. Many are having to revert back to archaic spreadsheet formats. More than half agreed that time was taking away from mission-critical work.

“The opportunity to automate a lot of the boring stuff is very high,” Naresh Aggarwal, associate director at the Association of Corporate Treasurers tells me.

Around 43% of the leaders in the report said getting all the information they needed was a struggle. That’s not surprising given treasury teams use four different tools on average. Covering multiple entities was also cited as a struggle, increasing the risk of errors like overspending.

Amit Kahana, Pleo’s head of credit, treasury and cash management, said it could be “wishful thinking” to believe such set ups can handle 2025’s continued economic rollercoaster.

Systems are disjointed for a host of reasons, Aggarwal says, including because security protocols differ from bank to bank.

Fortunately, treasurers are starting to hold more sway within their organisations. They are increasingly playing a key role as C-suite advisers, Aggarwal says. Part of the reason we haven't seen a transformation across treasury functions is because their value-add is not fully recognised, he adds, but that is all changing.

“During Covid, treasurers were all up in front of the board going: do we have enough cash? Then it was: what does high inflation, high interest rates mean for our business plan? Now it's an issue around tariffs,” says Aggarwal, who was previously a senior manager at PwC and treasury manager at Fujitsu.

“There is this reactive thing where we need to get the treasurer up in front of us to figure out what's going on…Good treasurers have leveraged this to build stronger relationships with the C-suite and not just be there when some chaos has opened up.”

The key, he says, is for treasurers to be “curious” and turn themselves into “knowledge carriers” for their firms.

“One of the big challenges is how treasurers demonstrate the value they provide not just to the C-suite but to the broader organisation,” Aggarwal says.

This will make sure they are seen as enablers of growth, not blockers. Some are already making that move.

“This is part of a mindset change for treasurers,” Aggarwal says. “We have historically been risk managers. There's a dying breed of treasurers who think their job is to reduce risk by reducing what goes on. In Pleo’s CFO Playbook report, as many as 70% of all organisations said as their business grows and finances become more complicated, the role of treasury becomes increasingly important.

“There are quite a few who talk about their roles as business partners. There's a lot more who go out to the business and ask: where are we expanding? Why aren't we expanding more? Let me do some research, let me see how we can do it differently, do it better.”

Part of the solution to these issues will come with better technology adoption, he adds. 

Advanced data visualisation, for example, has been “transformative” in enabling senior management to get access to high quality information, as have tools that automatically sweep for rogue data and cleanse it.

The majority of finance leaders surveyed for the Buried Treasury report by Pleo - a business spend management firm - said a single overview of all accounts, currencies and wallets is the most important thing for full visibility. 

 Eventually, many more firms will have AI-style tools to boost their treasury function that top management can have access to. Aggarwal imagines a world where instead of an executive coming to their treasury head to ask what a weakening dollar would mean for their revenues, a ChatGPT style tool can model such impacts in a fraction of the time - as long as it’s used carefully.

“You still have this issue if you have bad data coming in… you have to be careful with how you use it.”