On stage at Treasury Today Group’s Finance Leaders Forum in Hong Kong, and in my conversations with treasury leaders around it, one theme kept resurfacing: talent. The challenge being described is threefold and connected – attracting a new generation of digital-native professionals, retaining high-potential talent in an era of unprecedented workforce mobility, and communicating internal value so that treasury is recognised as a strategic nerve centre rather than a back-office utility.

When discussing solutions, leaders almost immediately default to mechanical ones: competitive compensation, professional certifications, technical upskilling and hybrid work arrangements. These all matter. But as someone who advises C-suites on corporate narrative, reputation and executive positioning, I see a different bottleneck.

Treasury’s talent challenge is not only functional. It is also a storytelling problem: how treasury explains itself to the talent it wants, how it listens to the talent it already has, and how it makes its value visible to the C-suite. Put simply, treasury needs to tell its story outward, hear it inward and translate it upward.

People join stories, not job descriptions

People remember what is at stake. Historically, corporate treasury has presented itself to the talent market through process: liquidity management, cash flow forecasting, debt structuring, FX hedging and internal controls. While these functions are critical to balance sheet health, none of them inherently inspires an ambitious 22-year-old choosing between a tech startup, a strategy consultancy or a finance career.

Early-career professionals evaluate potential employers through the lens of purpose, technological sophistication and executive impact. Treasury sits squarely at the intersection of all three, touching macro geopolitics, AI deployment, green financing and real-time capital allocation. But because the industry rarely articulates this, it remains opaque to outsiders.

The fix starts with reframing the narrative around the stakes of the role – treasury is where global interest rate shifts, supply chain friction, and energy transitions collide with the corporate balance sheet. Telling a young candidate, “You are part of the team ensuring this company can pay its people when a currency fluctuates 15% overnight,” creates immediate purpose and gravitas.

Employer branding also needs authentic human voices. At Cognito, we encourage institutions to bring their employer narrative onto the social platforms where Gen Z actually evaluates opportunities. Giving junior analysts the platform to speak publicly – within sensible disclosure guardrails – about the projects they lead turns them into the most convincing advocates an organisation has.

Finally, make the career path visible. ACCA’s Global Talent Trends Survey 2026 found that 62% of all

respondents expect to move roles within the next two years, and more than half (52%) expect their next move to be outside their current organisation. Showing people where treasury leads – whether to CFO, chief risk officer, corporate strategy or enterprise deal-making – makes staying part of the story.

What happens when leadership leaves the room

If the external story gets people through the door, the internal one decides whether they stay. And unlike the recruitment narrative, this story is not written by leadership – it is written by employees’ day-to-day experience. Leaders have to hear it before they can shape it.

In communications, we often say that culture is what people experience when leadership isn’t in the room. In my experience, leaders – myself included – overestimate how well their intended culture is experienced, because employees naturally present an optimised version of reality to their bosses.

The most effective remedy I have seen is deliberately listening beyond your own reporting level. Lightweight, structured channels like skip-level check-ins, onboarding debriefs, and 90-day reviews with new joiners surface what people really think before they absorb organisational silence.

Behaviour under pressure tells the rest of the story. Where do decisions stall? Who feels empowered to speak in cross-departmental meetings? And how does leadership respond the first time a junior team member makes a mistake or flags a counterparty or liquidity risk that turns out to be a false alarm? In a function where an unflagged risk can cost millions, how a leader reacts in that single moment shapes a team’s psychological safety far more than any values statement on a wall.

Translating treasury’s value upward

The third story is the one treasury tells the rest of the business about itself – and it is often the hardest to tell.

Treasury naturally reports in its own vocabulary: basis points, hedge ratios, forecast accuracy, counterparty limits. Boards and CFOs think in margin, resilience and growth. “We hedged 80% of our euro exposure” is a process update; “We protected third-quarter margin from a 6% swing in the euro” is a business outcome. The facts are identical, but the second positions treasury as a strategic partner rather than a back-office utility. And how treasury is perceived internally shapes a great deal – its budget, its influence and ultimately the career story it can tell the talent it hopes to attract.

“Is this approach still serving the outcome, or is it merely serving my comfort?” It is a question I ask of my own work, and one worth asking of treasury’s reporting habits. Reputations are built on what worked yesterday, yet the same monthly pack, the same metrics, and the same playbooks applied to new problems can quietly become a vulnerability in a rapidly changing macro environment.

The signs of inertia are subtle but recognisable: treasury’s updates draw no questions from the C-suite, team members stop pushing back or high-potential talent quietly leaves.

In our experience, change is easier to introduce when the risk of it feels small. Piloting a reframed report with one business unit before overhauling the whole pack is a low-stakes place to start. Feedback from all levels matters too – some of the sharpest insights into operational friction come from the most junior members of the team, who work with legacy tools every day. And normalise external peer support: when leaders treat seeking advice as a strength rather than a weakness, they model the continuous learning that helps teams adapt through market cycles.

The power of reframing the treasury story

Treasury’s future will not be defined solely by yield optimisation or systems integration, but also by human leadership, influence, and narrative. Treasury holds some of the most critical intelligence in any enterprise. The opportunity is to translate that technical depth into business narratives – outward to prospective talent, inward to its own teams, and upward to the C-suite.

Treasury does not lack substance; it lacks translation. The functions that learn to tell their story better will win the next generation of talent, as well as a lasting seat at the strategy table.