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Part 3 (Tech and data intelligence): Top areas of focus for corporate treasury in 2025

This is the third of a four-part article series

The third article in this series highlights a critical focus for corporate treasury in 2025: the enduring importance of treasury technology and data-driven intelligence as primary areas of emphasis.

Treasury technology and data-driven intelligence

Recent years have been marked by geopolitical upheavals and global economic uncertainty, prompting corporations to invest in treasury technology advancements and accelerate their automation initiatives, thereby fuelling momentum towards a data-driven treasury.

Although there are encouraging indicators, such as stable global economic growth, geopolitical instability and complexities persist. As 2025 is expected to bring a reconfiguration of global trade dynamics, corporate treasurers are poised to expedite their digital transformation by deploying emerging technologies to bolster cash flow visibility, optimise liquidity management, improve risk management, and strengthen payments security.

Emerging technologies such as application programming interfaces (APIs), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are set to play transformative roles in treasury departments over the next 12 months and beyond.

Strategic Treasurer’s 2024 Treasury Technology Analyst Report reveals that 45% of respondents already leverage APIs in their treasury operations, with an additional 29% planning to adopt them within two years. Notably, the percentage of respondents uninterested in APIs has plummeted from 49% in 2019 to just 10% in 2024.*

According to the Treasury Technology Analyst Report, the growing adoption of APIs in treasury and finance is due to the fact that “APIs have been used to support both ‘open banking’ and ‘open treasury,’ referring to the approaches that seek to allow more streamlined integration with banking systems (open banking) and between internal treasury and other finance systems (open treasury).”

In this regard, APIs have emerged as a pivotal component of treasury management systems connectivity, empowering systems to not only retrieve data from external financial institutions but also enhance integration between internal tools and platforms. As per the analyst report, this development paves the way for vendors to “push the boundaries of functionality and leverage the full ecosystem to greater advantage” in the near future.

Moreover, APIs enable the instantaneous and secure transmission of banking transaction and account data, providing corporate treasurers with comprehensive visibility into their global cash positions. This improved visibility allows for more accurate and efficient cash flow forecasting and management, streamlines real-time payments and reporting processes, and simplifies supply chain finance and working capital management.

Among emerging technologies, AI and ML have consistently taken center stage for the past two years. The analyst report indicates, however, that “AI’s current use in treasury is primarily via platforms such as the TMS.”

The report also sheds light on the future trajectory of AI in treasury, showing a modest rise in adoption among treasury professionals in 2024 (17%) compared to 14% in 2023. This trend is expected to accelerate significantly, with adoption projected to more than double to 39% by 2026 and to grow by an additional 25% over the next five years.

The Treasury Technology Analyst Report identified two major use cases where AI and ML have impacted TMSs: cash forecasting and fraud detection and prevention.

Corporate treasurers, responsible for the ownership and control of cash, spend the most time on cash forecasting. However, this area remains a persistent challenge for treasury teams and often ranks high on the list of tasks they can’t dedicate enough time to. Many treasury practitioners also report significant inaccuracies in their forecasts. To address this issue, some vendors have started incorporating ML into their TMS solutions to bolster forecasting capabilities. Treasury executives are also eager to integrate AI-based forecasting systems this year.

"Assuming adequate historical data is available, ML has proven to be highly effective in providing rapid and increasingly accurate cash flow forecasts. While not yet widely available across all TMS offerings, this will likely become more common. Based on recent survey data, treasury professionals are eager to adopt AI-based forecasting tools," the Strategic Treasurer report noted.

In addition to forecasting, treasury executives are increasingly interested in using AI for fraud detection and prevention, a priority that is expected to grow in 2025 and beyond. The analyst report stated, “AI excels at identifying patterns and, by extension, items that break patterns. Criminal activity and fraudulent payments tend to break the normal patterns of the business in some way: an unusually large transaction initiated outside of normal working hours, a massive number of files being accessed in rapid succession, etc. AI-based anomaly detection built into a TMS can flag and, in some systems, block payments or activity that are suspicious until an analyst reviews them.”

As AI and ML continue to advance fraud detection capabilities, corporate treasury must remain vigilant, especially as bad actors also leverage these technologies to perpetrate payments fraud. This calls for creative thinking about how AI and ML can further support treasury operations while carefully considering potential risks and downsides.

Corporate treasurers are also raising critical questions, such as how AI and ML can reinforce treasury's role as a strategic business partner and how big data can be utilised to generate smarter insights, achieve operational and liquidity effectiveness, optimise investment portfolios, and improve in-house banking and netting practices.

As the pace of digitization accelerates within corporations over the next 12 months, the enormous amounts of data generated in their systems present a significant opportunity for the corporate treasury function, as data has become a crucial business asset for every organization. This trend will provide fresh impetus for the adoption of big data analytics and other emerging technologies for cash forecasting, hedging, credit risk management, cash flow planning, fraud detection and prevention, regulatory compliance, variance analysis, and advanced scenario modelling.

With treasury at a pivotal moment, corporate treasurers are likely to further enhance data intelligence in 2025, enabling them to quickly extract actionable insights that can help mitigate risks and identify business opportunities.

In conclusion, treasurers must remain attuned to the ever-evolving landscape of treasury technology and data-driven intelligence to support business growth and make prudent decisions.

Given the rapid pace of technological change, technology is expected to continue dominating corporate treasurers time and attention in 2025. What’s more, the past year has seen substantial growth in both innovation and investment in treasury technology, and this momentum is likely to persist in 2025.

 

⃰ Disclosure: Strategic Treasurer owns CTMfile.

Read more from this series:

To read the first part of this article series, click here:

To read the second part of this article series, click here:

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