UK corporates hold an average £1.12bn in cash for operational and investment purposes, but four in five finance leaders fear they are failing to secure the best available returns. MillTech’s first 2026 UK Cash Management Report found that 82% of respondents believed their companies were missing potential income by failing to optimise excess cash. Some 78% thought better returns were achievable, while 24% of the companies represented held more than £1bn.

Companies already pay close attention. They formally review where excess cash is held or invested an average of 63 times a year, comfortably more than once a week. Changing the available investment routes moves at a different speed: onboarding a new cash management provider or money market fund (MMF) takes an average 3.2 months.

That gap between review and execution runs through the survey. Treasury teams are watching their cash closely, but account opening, fragmented visibility and limited internal capacity can prevent them from acting on what they find.

“While corporates are reviewing their cash positions regularly, execution is still falling short,” said Matt Shapcott, co-head of cash management solutions at MillTech.

Frequent reviews meet slow onboarding

Opening an MMF account was the most common obstacle to improving cash returns, cited by 38% of respondents. A lack of visibility across accounts affected 35%, while 33% pointed to limited time or internal resources.

Compliance and due diligence processes were cited by 46% of respondents once companies began adding a provider, closely followed by legal documentation requirements at 45%.

At the survey averages, the 3.2-month onboarding period is equivalent to roughly 17 formal cash-review cycles. Those reviews may identify a better rate, a more suitable maturity or a need for greater diversification, yet the new destination remains unavailable until the paperwork is complete.

Demand for a broader provider group is unusually clear. Some 98% said onboarding complexity discouraged their company from adding cash management providers. Exactly the same proportion said they would be likely to add further cash investment partners if the process became quicker and simpler.

Each additional relationship widens the choice of rates, maturities and instruments. Yet it can trigger another round of compliance checks, legal review and account-opening work, delaying access while staff complete the process.

Scale makes the problem harder. Before excess cash can be placed, treasury must know where it is, when it will be needed and whether it can be moved. Poor visibility slows that first decision. A restricted provider group then narrows the choices available once the balance has been identified.

“The bigger the treasury operation, the harder it becomes to move quickly across multiple accounts, entities and providers,” Shapcott said.

Uncertainty redirects corporate cash

Geopolitical and market uncertainty is also reshaping allocations. Every respondent said trade tensions, regional instability or wider market uncertainty had prompted the company to move more cash towards Treasury bills and government securities. All also reported allocating more to MMFs, while 98% had moved more cash towards their balance sheets.

Cash nevertheless remained spread across several types of instrument. More than nine in ten respondents reported holdings in MMFs, repos, bonds, Treasury bills or government securities, and bank deposits or uninvested cash. MillTech described allocations across those categories as closely grouped.

Instrument types carry different implications for yield, liquidity, maturity and risk. The appropriate mix depends on when cash will be needed and the controls governing each investment.

Liquidity requirements can change quickly. Supply disruption or a delayed investment may force a company to preserve more cash than forecast. Those balances must generate a return while remaining available when operating assumptions shift.

Neil Gallacher, co-head of cash management solutions at MillTech, said inflation, interest rates and geopolitical disruption had pushed questions about “the returns cash generates and how quickly it can be moved higher up the CFO agenda”.

MMF demand tests account opening

MMFs sit on both sides of the report’s central tension. They are already widely used and expected to attract more corporate cash, yet opening an account for them is the most frequently cited obstacle to improving returns.

Some 93% of respondents expected their organisation’s use of MMFs to increase over the next two years. Almost a third, 31%, anticipated a significant increase.

Following through on those plans may require companies to add funds, platforms or counterparties. If each addition becomes a three-month onboarding exercise, treasury teams could find that their intended investment range expands much more slowly than the cash allocated to it.

Greater use of MMFs may require access to several funds to compare returns, diversify exposure or meet different currency and liquidity needs. The survey’s 98% finding indicates that onboarding is restricting the ability to add those partners.

The result is a practical constraint on competition. A treasury team can review rates frequently, but it can only place cash with providers that have already passed its company’s legal, compliance and operational processes. The theoretical best return in the market may therefore be irrelevant if the fund offering it is not yet available to the company.

Automation leaves gaps in visibility

Nine in ten respondents said their cash and liquidity processes included some automation, and 34% described those processes as fully automated.cVisibility nevertheless remained incomplete. More than a third named visibility across accounts as an obstacle to optimising cash returns. The figures suggest that automating individual tasks does not always connect the accounts, entities and providers needed for a group-wide view.

Future investment is expected to focus on analysis and decision support. AI-driven liquidity optimisation was chosen by 42% as the technology likely to have the greatest effect on cash management during the next five years. Real-time data and analytics followed at 37%, with automation platforms selected by 34%.

AI drew the most support. Useful liquidity recommendations still depend on timely information about balances, forecast cash flows and existing investments. An optimisation tool working with incomplete account data risks producing an answer for only part of the company’s cash.

MillTech’s August survey of North American corporates found a similar operational pattern in FX. That research covered a different treasury activity, so the percentages are not directly comparable. Even so, a lack of real-time data and transparency was the leading FX challenge, cited by 28%, while 26% identified onboarding liquidity providers. In both surveys, finance teams reported difficulty seeing their positions and adding the counterparties needed to act on them.

Better data could shorten the journey from balance discovery to investment decision, but provider approval remains a separate piece of work. Compliance reviews and legal documentation do not disappear when account information becomes easier to collect.

Cash scrutiny is outrunning access

Based on responses from 125 senior finance decision-makers at UK corporates, the report describes treasury functions that are actively reviewing cash, spreading it across several instruments and investing in automation.

Problems appear when a review points towards a new destination. Account opening is already the leading barrier to improving returns, and nearly every respondent said onboarding complexity had deterred the addition of another provider.

Rising MMF use will increase that pressure if the survey’s expectations materialise. Treasury teams may have more cash earmarked for funds without gaining faster access to a wider selection of them. Regular review then risks becoming an exercise in comparing the options already on the shelf.

Time exposes the sharpest contrast. Corporate cash is formally reconsidered more than once a week, while a new route for that money takes over three months to establish. Treasury can therefore revisit the same constrained provider list many times before a new option becomes available.