Challenges in 2025

The last few years have brought numerous challenges for treasury teams – and 2025 is likely to be no exception. According to Kyriba’s Stark, “The looming challenge remains delivering a confident and reliable cash forecast and liquidity plan for the CFO and leadership to build their capital planning upon.”

He predicts that in the year ahead, treasurers will face a mixture of high-growth markets alongside regions that underperform due to higher inflation and near-recession-like behaviour. “The result is a need for treasury to mobilise cash globally so they have the agility to adapt to various market conditions and liquidity performance scenarios,” he adds.

Sander van Tol, Partner at independent consulting firm Zanders, says that treasurers will be focusing on both internal and external challenges. “The external challenges we expect treasurers to encounter are difficult to predict, and much dependent on the geopolitical events and/or events in financial markets,” he says.

“We have already seen in the past that unexpected external events – whether it is a global pandemic, defaulting financial institutions, or loss of liquidity in financial markets – can suddenly be the trigger for a revised focus and attention of the treasury function.” As such, he argues that it is important for treasuries to be ‘antifragile’ – a term used by essayist and mathematical statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe systems that improve in response to shocks and stressors – and prepared for financial resilience.

Turning to internal challenges, van Tol highlights access to talent and budgetary pressures. “Access to the right talent to drive a technology supported transformation process is very scarce,” he says. “You need to be able to combine expertise in treasury management, a deep understanding of how to deploy new technologies, strong communication skills and an ability to drive change.”

Where budgetary pressures are concerned, he observes that companies are increasingly looking to lower their operational costs while limiting the budget available for new projects. This is making it more difficult for treasurers to get budgets approved, even though many treasury projects offer the opportunity to achieve a solid return on investment. “In order to overcome this budgetary challenge we advise our clients with more detailed quantitative and qualitative business case for new treasury projects,” he adds.

Those who throw caution to the wind and are always taken by surprise; those who prepare to hedge against the risks coming up – and the opportunists who, while being hedged, are able to encash the opportunities through arbitrage and otherwise.

Amit Baraskar, Vice President & Head, Treasury at Thomas Cook (India)

Time for AI-powered digitalisation?

With interest in new technologies such as generative AI continuing to be high, harnessing the opportunities presented by technology is set to be another area of focus for treasurers this year.

Van Tol says he expects that corporates will largely continue to pilot GenAI technology on a smaller scale, “like implementing chatbot functions for internal clients/stakeholders of the treasury function, or data analytics to improve the accuracy of the cash flow forecast or FX exposures.” But alongside these small-scale pilots, he predicts that trailblazers will embark in earnest on an AI-powered treasury digitalisation and rationalisation project.

George Dessing, Executive Vice President, Treasury and Risk at global information, software and services company Wolters Kluwer, sees considerable potential for AI and technology in general within treasury, noting that this is a priority for 2025.

“Given the amount of information we digest on a daily basis just the simple use of summarisation is already a big help,” he explains. “This is one of the areas where the ‘straight-out-of-the-box’ functionalities of GenAI have had an immediate benefit. We use it for everything from producing market sentiment analysis using transcripts from corporate earnings calls and central banking authorities, to recapping meeting transcripts to capture key points and assign actions.” Nevertheless, he points out that it is far easier to use technology like Copilot if all the relevant data is centralised in a single database, with clearly defined ownership and a focus on ‘clean’ data. “We are leveraging an internal Wolters Kluwer product for this, notably CCH Tagetik, which is a single unified system and is the source of our ‘truth’. Having all the historic and forecasted data in one place in a structured and consistent way helps us run analyses using Copilot much more efficiently and produces much better results.”

For Dessing, the most exciting use case for AI in treasury is cash flow forecasting: “We want to apply the power of AI in our cashflow forecasting based on historic data in our systems.” At the same time, his goals for 2025 include upskilling the team to use these technologies more effectively.

“A great and easy way to get started right away is to switch out your traditional search engine with an AI assistant tool,” he says. “This will inherently make you better at prompting and understanding the capabilities (and limitations) of such a tool. As we say often to each other, ‘let’s strive to make it better.’”

Embracing the new reality

So where does all this leave treasurers as 2025 begins? Looking back at the last 12 months, BofA’s Kalay argues that the most important lesson learned is that of ensuring treasury has a seat at the table, alongside other key stakeholders across the organisation.

“Most treasuries are going through technical integration, and as part of this, treasury needs to be talking to technology vendors and making sure that the necessary budgets are allocated,” he observes. “Likewise, if companies are going through implementations related to working capital or supply chain finance, treasury needs to have a seat at the table, together with procurement, tax and legal.”

When it comes to thriving in 2025, Stark says the best advice for any treasurer is to focus on top and bottom line impact. “While efficiency of treasury operations is a great objective for treasury, the business benefits when treasury’s impact can help organisational KPIs,” he observes. “Treasury has immense insight, and collaboration with the business is the recipe for success in 2025.”

Van Tol, meanwhile, offers some advice that he describes as somewhat contradictory. “On the one hand, I would advise treasurers to make a treasury technology-driven roadmap to see how they can best deploy new technology, and what are the prerequisites for doing so,” he says. “On the other hand, my advice is to embrace change and prepare for the unexpected. We already know that if we look back in 12 months’ time, we have to conclude that the year has been different than we had expected. So instead of sticking to your fixed routines and long-term technology plans for too long, it is sometimes better to revisit them and see whether there are opportunities in the new reality.”