The 2025 global macroeconomic outlook indicates a high degree of uncertainty amid the potential for dynamic interest rates and ongoing geopolitical risks. In addition, finance professionals will want to be more proactive in an effort to enhance financial resilience in a dynamic market. Data will be a lynchpin to this goal, especially as industry initiatives like ISO help to make data more accessible within and outside their organization.
Our annual Forecasting Payments report helps break down how treasurers can respond to these considerations. Below are what’s on treasurers minds in the coming year.
In today’s turbulent economic environment, treasurers face a myriad of challenges, from volatile interest rates to supply chain disruptions and fluctuating foreign exchange rates. To navigate these complexities, treasurers must adopt a proactive approach to working capital management, ensuring liquidity needs are met and financial resilience is fortified.
Step 1: Build real-time cash flow analytics
Treasurers can better anticipate future cash needs—and stress test for potential challenges—if they can more easily monitor cash positions, inflows and outflows in real time (discussed in more detail within Trend 4). They can increase the visibility and transparency of cash flow reports with the integration of ERP and bank account transaction data, as well as by consolidating all this data into a shared dashboard.
Step 2: Improve operations
Treasurers should identify liquidity and account solutions to close gaps that impede their ability to instantly move money anytime and anywhere. They might also adopt global liquidity account structures or enable automatic sweeps to support just-in-time funding. To support these global solutions, they’ll want to redefine their organizational structure to include centralized structures such as regional treasury centers or in-house banks.
Step 3: Optimize cash conversion cycle
Finance professionals have direct strategic opportunities to optimize their payables and receivables to impact their cash conversion cycle. On the payables side, they can analyze payment terms, types and behaviors, as well as work with procurement to standardize vendor terms and payment preferences. On the receivables side, they can adjust customer terms and enhance credit and collection policies that may increase the speed at which they can receive cash and put it to use.
Fraud remains a mounting challenge. Take Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, which costs the average victim $137,000 and grows in losses by 16% annually. Finance professionals can take measures to prevent these incidents across their providers, processes and employees.
Step 1: Prioritize third-party provider safeguards
Organizations should think about third-party providers that interact with their systems, as their vulnerabilities run the risk of becoming yours. It’s critical to perform due diligence and enact policies, such as comprehensive verification processes, that include formal callbacks. It may also be wise to introduce liability clauses in agreements, especially when it impacts payment details that require additional validation.
Step 2: Safeguard disbursement processes
Consider process opportunities to safeguard money that an organization sends, such as minimizing physical payments like checks. It’s also important to implement steps to identify suspicious transactions as quickly as possible to increase the likelihood of reversing them. For instance, your organization should move toward daily reconciliation as well as develop a plan to flag transactions in automated processes that require additional attention. Consider partnering with external support teams to identify additional measures.
Step 3: Enhance employee education
Organizations should go beyond generic phishing tests, and employees should understand how to guard against the ever-evolving fraud landscape. They should feel empowered to challenge executive management requests that are out of process to mitigate social engineering attacks, and businesses should provide continuous fraud education to finance teams. This group should understand paths or methods that attackers use to gain unauthorized access to a system, as well as participate in simulations such as regular tabletop and red team exercises.
Treasurers must get data right if they want to take treasury to the next level and access of all the benefits it can offer. For this to occur, treasurers must make a multi-step plan to drive their own data strategy.
Step 1: Collaborate on data
Treasurers should first collaborate with chief technologists and chief information officers to align on firm-wide data tools and security management. Within this working group’s context, treasurers can establish data governance upfront to ensure their approach aligns with firm-wide frameworks for data management and security. It also helps them to build and refine a data strategy that’s mindful of the available tools and technological frameworks within an organization.
Step 2: Integrate data
Next comes the task of building a strong data foundation, which requires the consolidation of all relevant data from banks, fintechs and other third-party providers into a single view. This task is much easier said than done, as each platform can vary in its accessibility as well as what information is provided and how data is structured. This is where strong relationships with CIOs and CTOs can pay dividends, as these executives and their teams can help work through roadblocks by taking advantage of integration solutions like APIs to determine what data is feasible to acquire.
Step 3: Analyze data
Given integration complexities, treasurers should begin analyzing data—even if isn’t perfect. They should work with internal and external partners to access new tools that can make this data accessible to them, and explore ways that this information can inform business decisions in the interim while they build out their broader solution. Throughout the analysis, they should flag opportunities to enrich the quality and value of the data for improved observations and build it into their strategy.
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