According to FIS research, liquidity inefficiencies are costing businesses an average of US$2m annually.

“CFF and liquidity management is hugely impactful for the business, both in terms of the positioning and investing of cash, as well as acting as a proxy for how the business is functioning,” said Steve Szafraniec, Senior Manager, Treasury and Working Capital Consulting Group, PwC, during our recent webinar entitled ‘Next-Generation Cloud-Native Technology Moving the Needle for Treasury’, held on 13th May.

Today, treasurers need to look at liquidity further out into the future than ever before, according to Aditi Agarwal, Chief of Staff and Global Treasury Operations Leader, GE Healthcare, so they don’t run short of cash nor lose an opportunity to put excess cash into strategic investments. “We have to think about peak liquidity requirements and whether we have funding mechanisms available when needed. On the other side, we need venues to invest cash efficiently if we have peak liquidity inflows during the year,” she explained.

FX hedging is another priority area for treasurers. “We enter into FX hedging based on underlying data, such as sales in a particular currency. Current market changes could impact sales numbers and income – we don’t want to be hedging more than needed,” Agarwal said. “Importantly, technology is helping us track what is happening in real time and manage day-to-day treasury activities.”

Cloud as key enabler

Leveraging data to drive decisions and respond in almost real time is the new benchmark for treasury, said Thomas Jerolitsch, Vice President, Product Management for the Enterprise Treasury Solutions, FIS. “It may be easy to get an immediate response but there may not be enough data to make it actionable. Treasury needs the appropriate data consolidation, such as a data lake, plus the features and functionality to interpret and drive actionable results,” he explained.

Cloud technology can help facilitate data integration between TMS, enterprise resource planning and bank systems for processing payments as well as other activities, said Nilesh Dusane, Global Head of Institutional Payments, AWS.

However, having all the information in one place, such as a data hub or data lake, is an ideal scenario but not a reality for most companies. “At the same time treasury is bringing together the information, there will be times where data remains in silos. Therefore, your roadmap should be architected to do both: analyse data in a centralised data lake, plus find ways to get signals from disparate data stores,” he advised.

In addition to facilitating seamless integration to support real-time data flows, the cloud’s scalability is a key advantage. “Public cloud provides the capacity to process data as and when needed, creating efficiencies not only from a cost perspective but also from an operational perspective,” said Jerolitsch. “It has features and functions to process data and drive meaningful analysis around CFF and currency management, as well as leverage data in an artificial intelligence (AI) model.”

The time horizon of CFF is important, as is the accuracy, according to Dusane. “Using technologies like generative AI (GenAI), machine learning and cloud, some customers have been able to extend the length of CFF out several months, as opposed to several weeks. For example, they can predict if they will be long dollars or short euros in six or eight months,” he explained.

AI gamechanger

According to Jerolitsch, AI opens up a phenomenal opportunity. “From my perspective, the obvious use cases revolve around leveraging AI and large language models to dramatically accelerate getting information out of the system in an actionable way. Secondly, embedded AI to improve models which have data gaps, for example CFF or FX exposure management,” he said.

Szafraniec highlighted a few mature AI use cases, including CFF which uses data from across the enterprise, such as payables, receivables, cash flow data, etc. “Treasurers are consolidating transactional data on the cloud and using different models to create scenarios and a CFF for what’s likely to occur over the next year,” he said.

“The ChatGPT interface has us all thinking about how we’ll be more conversational with our data in the future and approach data in an open-ended way,” he added. “Tailored experiences based on the company’s data is another area where we see AI play a big role in the future.”

To crowdsource ideas from the treasury team on how to leverage technology for process improvement, GE Healthcare ran a programme in 2024 called ‘Simplification Marathon’ and followed it up with a similar programme in 2025 called ‘Shark Tank’, resulting in 40 ideas. One idea was to use an AI chatbot to search standard operating procedures, which are filed away and a headache to access.

“We wanted to create a mechanism to make answers available at the click of a button,” Agarwal explained. “We are seeing many use cases like these, such as treasury FAQs, where we can use leverage GenAI technology rather than having a person trawl through the documents.”

Both Dusane and Agarwal report an emerging trend in treasury from being reactive to proactive, leveraging AI and GenAI to provide recommendations based on prior data and transaction patterns. “In every scenario, whether liquidity, FX or controls, the models can identify an impending risk and prompt us to manage it proactively,” said Agarwal.

The webinar concluded with top tips for future-proofing treasury: forge strong relationships with the internal IT team, create solid business cases that illustrate shareholder value benefits, break down deliverables into small use cases to realise immediate wins, invest in talent and create a culture of continuous improvement.

Bonus: Download FIS’ white paper, When treasury operations can’t handle emerging risks, to learn how you can fortify your treasury operations against emerging risks.