The report, based on research compiled from nearly 300 CFOs and corporate treasurers across North America and Europe, shows that complexity and fragmentation have become a burden on corporate finance, turning the treasury function from a strategic asset into a bottleneck of system inefficiency and operational inertia.

The report’s core finding is clear: the growing number of banking and payment relationships an enterprise is forced to manage is directly hindering cash visibility, creating unnecessary burden on financial teams and ultimately muting returns on working capital. However, respondents also highlight the substantial opportunity for finance leaders to unlock significant operational and monetary value by consolidating their money management.

The cost of fragmentation

The report highlights the systemic complexity facing treasury departments today:

• Fragmentation from too many partners: The average enterprise business juggles five to six bank relationships and manages over 40 separate bank accounts. This is compounded by an ecosystem of, on average, 12 different payment providers (six for pay-ins and six for payouts).

• The price of complexity: Fragmentation traps liquidity, increasing working capital requirements and limiting returns on positive balances or the float. This reduces financial flexibility and slows innovation — often with downstream impact on customer experience.

• The issue is acute at enterprise level: one in four businesses struggle to optimize liquidity and working capital, while 48% of CFOs cite data-driven liquidity visibility and forecasting as their top challenge. Consolidating bank integrations can reduce treasury fees, free up capital and resources, and enable more effective monetization over time.

• Uncertainty and risk: Operational control, spanning payment approvals, transactional execution, and reconciliation across multiple systems, is ranked as the most critical risk for treasurers. In business models with short operational cycles, the mismatch between the timing of pay-in and payout is a critical factor that elevates risk and hinders the capacity for generating returns on working capital. This risk is significant among CFOs, as 18% consider the speed of in-/outgoing payments as the biggest challenge they face today.

• Operational burden: Complexity forces treasury teams to spend significant time on low-value, manual tasks. According to the report, teams spend 10% of their time visualizing accounts, 13% managing bank relationships, and more than 20% on handling pay-ins and pay-outs. Consolidation of money management systems could help to reduce time spent on these tasks dramatically.

“Treasurers are moving beyond optimizing liquidity in isolation. They’re optimizing the entire receivable-to-payable flow with customer experience at the center. This shift will shape the next generation of finance,” said Ethan Tandowsky, CFO, Adyen.

The opportunity of unification

As enterprises scale, so do the complexities of their fragmented flow of funds. The report notes a structural shift away from fragmentation toward unification, where the flow of funds becomes a strategic advantage and growth engine rather than a constraint.

The future is integrated: While respondents recognize the need for several providers to fulfill all their needs, 74% of survey respondents claim they would like to leverage more integrated money management solutions covering the entire cash lifecycle.

Consolidation is key: Among those seeking an integrated solution, 88% are likely to consolidate these services to fewer providers than they currently use.

“Corporate Treasury is at an inflection point. Trusted providers, modern technology, adequate payment rails, and finance function’s appetite to unify and improve are all there. It’s time for CFOs to demand more from their treasury function and from the partners who power it,” said Stanislas Nowicki, Managing Director and Partner, Boston Consulting Group.