Technology is fundamentally transforming the treasury function. Automation is freeing treasury teams to focus on value-added activities such as strategic planning, risk management and business advisory services.

Today’s treasury management systems provide real-time visibility into cash positions, liquidity metrics and financial data across global operations, enabling faster and more informed decision-making. Enhanced transparency, combined with automated controls and validation checks, significantly reduces manual errors and improves the accuracy of financial operations — a next-level advantage in today's complex business environment.

AFP Treasury Connect: Navigating Your Technology Journey, exclusively sponsored by Nilus, explored the topic of treasury technology, including AI, from multiple distinct points of view. The following are key takeaways from the five sessions.

Insight #1: When selecting a TMS, first get clear about where you are and where you want to be.

Choosing a treasury management system (TMS) vendor can be daunting. In the first session of the Treasury Connect event, a treasurer and a treasury consultant took attendees through the process, which included five “do’s.”

1. DO perform a thorough gap analysis.

Understanding your current state and where your current operation is primarily focused is a key element of the TMS selection process.

2. DO speak with your peers.

“Talk to your peers because your peers will absolutely tell you what worked and what didn't work,” said Jeff Diorio, Managing Director, PMC Treasury.

Find out what your peers are using and ask about their experience. Did they get what they were hoping for out of their implementation? Did it satisfy everything they were expecting?

3. DO an analysis of what you want your target state to be.

From there, you can determine which systems have the capabilities you need and target vendors that can support a majority of what you want.

“The vendor might say, ‘we are an out of the box SaaS solution,’ but nothing is truly ever out of the box,” said CJ Heald, Treasurer for TIAA. “No matter which TMS you select, your process is either going to conform to what the system is capable of, or you're going to have to work with the vendor to customize the system to fit you.”

4. DO get the voices to the table who can evaluate the system’s capabilities.

Which business partners do you want at the table? Who is going to be a major contributor to the TMS? Who is going to be a major recipient of information from the TMS? Do you have the skill set on your team to manage the TMS? If you don't, how do you get there?

5. DO be very clear about what you’re trying to accomplish.

The requirements you develop at the very beginning are useful throughout the process. They provide you with a way to measure and convey to the vendors what you need the TMS to do. That helps the vendors ask you good questions to help further your thought process. It also helps them give you an accurate quote and ensure you’re contracting for the correct modules or features.

Insight #2: TMS system implementation never ends — you’re always going to optimize it.

The investment in a TMS is significant for a company of any size. In addition to the system itself, there is the time you and your team put into the selection process and implementation. It’s not something you’re going to label obsolete in a year, or even three. Which leaves you with only one option: optimization.

In the second session, “Optimizing Your Treasury Management System (TMS),” Chris van Dijl, CTP, Founder and CEO of Cugavadi, and Manjiv Dodanwela, Treasury Transformation Lead at IHH Healthcare, talked about ways companies seek to optimize their systems, including reporting.

“The reporting part of a treasury system is underestimated,” said van Dijl. “The treasury systems usually say we have 300-plus standard reports you can use. But none of those reports will cater to what you really want.

“They might give you an idea of what it would look like, but you will have to design your own reports. This is especially true if you have a lot of data you want to include in your analysis that's typically sitting in your ERP — not in your treasury system.”

Sharing his team’s optimization journey, Dodanwela explained that IHH sought to optimize the reporting part of its TMS through the following four steps:

• Customize reporting with Excel-like flexibility.
• Plan for additional interfaces/integration to extract data from non-treasury areas.
• Consolidate visibility of real-time cash positions through API connectivity.
• Enhance reporting capabilities and data analytics through BI tools.

During this process, his team realized that they could not eliminate spreadsheets altogether. “We still have them, but to a much lesser degree,” said Dodanwela. “We think it's possible to attain Excel-like flexibility depending on the customer reporting capabilities of the TMS.”

Insight #3: AI has the power to analyze and aggregate data quickly, enabling real-time insights.

During the third session of the Treasury Connect event, Idan Vlodinger, CEO and Co-founder of Statement, summarized the power of AI in treasury with one sentence: “AI’s superpower is taking all of these different threads and workflows and making sense out of them.”

Vlodinger went on to talk about the three layers through which AI is connecting the worlds of cash and accounting in real time, including data connectivity, data enrichment, and application. To start with, AI is able to take all elements of cash operations — ERP, AR and AP tools, banks — and bring all that data together, making it visible through a data connectivity layer.

Then AI takes the data, categorizes it, normalizes it and standardizes it, thereby making sense of the data — this is the data enrichment layer. Finally, there is the application layer, which is how we interact with the software, how we get what we need from it and how we give it our inputs, whether from a human in the loop or an output from the device itself.

Talking about how this applies in real-world terms, Alan Drew, Group Treasury Director, Associated British Foods, highlighted AI’s ability to aggregate and analyze data quickly, generating real-time insights that help treasury professionals manage cash flow and financial risks.

He also highlighted AI’s ability to improve cash forecasting by consolidating and analyzing data from different business segments. By identifying patterns and learning from historical trends, AI enables accurate, real-time cash visibility across jurisdictions.

Additionally, he highlighted AI’s ability to help manage large datasets, which has freed the treasury team from manual processes, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.

“We're absolutely determined to extract more value from our activities rather than shrink resource,” said Drew. “We know that we can generate better returns on capital by using AI. It isn't about taking resources out; it's actually just leveraging the human resources we have.”

Insight #4: AI offers treasury professionals the opportunity to focus on strategic tasks.

“A lot of the benefits of AI is that it can replace the manual work that a lot of employees do,” said Ashwin Ramji, Global Assistant Treasurer, World Vision International, beginning the fourth session of the Treasury Connect event. “We may think of that as scary — robots are coming to take our jobs. But, at least in my group, I see people looking for opportunities to grow in the profession and understand it more.

“And if they're spending all their time simply crunching data, filling in spreadsheets, spending all day preparing a report, how are they developing? How are they getting greater insight into the role, and how are they potentially preparing themselves to take their boss's job when their boss takes their boss's job and so on?”

Following on this statement, Bob Stark, Global Head of Enablement for Kyriba, listed four things that AI offers treasury professionals:

1. Greater automation
2. Greater access to data
3. Quicker decision-making
4. Insightful decision-making

In the evolution of treasury as a strategic partner, automation is critical. “It frees up the time that you need to start being able to embark on transformational projects, whether they're just projects or they're greater insights within your current role,” said Stark. “Freeing us up from what can be very time-consuming tasks can absolutely be a pathway to get to that more strategic contribution.”

“The challenge for the treasurer is to find the right balance for each organization so they can focus their human resources on building and developing relationships, identifying new opportunities for growth or leveraging existing resources to extract greater value from existing ventures,” said Ramji. All this while “maintaining the appropriate level of control over AI and also freeing it up to handle much of the heavy lifting and support functions for your organization.”

Insight #5: AI has the ability to transform cash management from an estimate-driven process into a data-powered strategic advantage.

In the final session of the event, Rotem Landa, CFO of Optibus, shared how artificial intelligence has transformed the company’s financial management processes — particularly collections and cash flow forecasting. With the implementation of AI, their AR reconciliation process was automated.

“We are a VC-backed company where cash is king,” said Landa. “It’s super important to our investors, to our management. One of the first questions I've been asked is what our cash position is going to be by the end of the year. I always needed to guesstimate. With the AI tool, I am much more confident in the cash balance and where it will be in three months, six months and nine months.”

Matt Harlan, Chief Treasury Officer for Nilus, added, “Ultimately, the value of a company is its discounted cash flows, so it's important that we have a grasp and a view at a granular level to understand the shifts and the movements in cash as it's transitioning with the business.”

As an SMB-focused company operating globally, Optibus has the challenge of managing collections across multiple currencies and varying payment patterns throughout different periods of the quarter. Even their algorithm engineers considered accurate collection forecasting a “mission” that would take a lot of time and effort to develop.

“And now, with AI, it's much easier to forecast collections based on tons of data sets that the organization has,” said Landa. “Our collection visibility is improved, which is super important for making the right decisions.”

The implementation of AI has shifted the company's collections management from a reactive to a proactive stance. “This is a pivotal issue for a lot of companies where they are really good at maybe completing their sales motion and getting the invoices out, but struggle to then complete and receive the cash as well as reconciling it to the GL, which tends to be an afterthought,” said Harlan.

With AI automation, Optibus has gained better control over AR aging and DSO, ensuring that collections are doing what they want it to do. “You're driving customer behavior as opposed to it driving you,” said Harlan.

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