Attracting the best treasury talent is a perennial concern for corporate treasurers, but attaining the right skills mix in a small – and perhaps shrinking – team is an art, which many are finding more challenging day by day.

The rising challenge must also be seen in the context of stagnating wages. According to The Treasury Recruitment Company’s 2025 Treasury Salary Trends Survey, overall compensation has struggled to keep pace with global inflation rates despite consistent salary increases year on year. In the UK, for example, inflation outpaced treasury salary growth between 2003 and 2023.

Yet the range of skills needed to be an effective treasury team seems to be ever-expanding, with leadership roles requiring much more than just financial acumen. For example, the report proposes a focus on developing communication and emotional intelligence skills in light of greater collaboration across multiple departments, executives and board members, and external parties such as banks and investment managers.

“In addition to finance expertise, treasurers need soft skills such as collaboration and communication, as well as knowing how to influence,” agreed Jennifer Wan, Head of Specialised Product Sales for Global Payment Solutions, Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Bank of America. “The breadth of their stakeholders has become even bigger as the value of treasury is further unlocked. Today, treasury is all about business partnering, as CEOs and CFOs ask treasurers to help identify business trends and share strategic growth ideas.”

While treasury has traditionally described itself as a function that gets the money in the right currency in the right place at the right time, now it’s also about surfacing insights and improving the bottom line. “Treasurers can advise the business on how to get customers to pay quicker, which can result in shipping goods faster, improving customer satisfaction and selling more,” she added.

As Wan indicated, treasury has grown in strategic importance in recent years and now has “a seat at the table and a louder voice”. It’s front and centre in large projects such as ERP and TMS upgrades, as well as part of M&A discussions.

“To help facilitate this, it’s helpful if treasurers can convey their point in many different languages, from business to tech speak. They need to be able to read the room, connect the dots, extract the CFO’s vision and execute on it, adding value as a business partner,” she said.

At a recent Future Treasury and Finance Leaders Forum event in London, participants debated whether recruiting junior talent with technology skills is becoming more important than just treasury skills. At the very least, having a ‘translator’ who can act as a conduit between business and tech speak is valuable in the absence of dedicated IT resources.

Whether treasurers view tech expertise as a higher priority “depends on the role, the makeup of the team, and forecasting the human capital needs of the business going forward”, according to Mike Richards, founder and CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company.

Interestingly, both Wan and Richards reported specific examples of treasurers upskilling by taking Python coding classes, for example.

Wan suggests that upskilling the whole team should be part of a treasurer’s people strategy. “Hiring someone with technology skills doesn’t necessarily solve the problem long term – it should also be about upskilling the existing team to have a suitable level of technical knowledge,” she said.

In the next three to five years, Richards believes there will be less operational roles at the treasury analyst level, as there will be less operations per se. “Technology will do more of the heavy lifting,” he said. “As a result, the role of junior and mid-level treasurers will increase in terms of complexity, which will make the world more interesting for them. Previously, they had to scrape data from multiple countries but today it’s coming into a central resource. Now it’s about how they interpret the data and translate it into practical insights – this will elevate the roles [to become more strategic for the business].”