Treasury Software Shifts from Tracking Cash to Moving It in Real Time

For years, corporate treasury technology focused on giving CFOs better visibility — clearer views of balances, payment flows, liquidity positions, and forecasts. Banks, treasury management systems, and FinTechs competed to deliver the most comprehensive dashboards.

That era is ending. Enhanced dashboards have become baseline expectations just as artificial intelligence grows capable of interpreting the financial data behind them. The next generation of treasury infrastructure is being built to connect APIs, SWIFT connections, host-to-host links, ERPs, treasury management systems, and increasingly, real-time payment networks.

Layer AI over that connectivity, and software can potentially progress from seeing where money sits to understanding where it needs to go — and helping put it there.

Bank of America expanded its Ask Global Payments Solutions platform with an Intelligence Hub designed to bring together client, account, and relationship data and use AI to surface treasury insights. Initial capabilities include intelligent treasury management reviews, account diagrams showing liquidity structures and fund flows, and relationship intelligence to identify changing client needs.

American Express announced a new corporate card and expense management platform with AI features. Separately, Citi launched a service enabling bank clients to access multiple cross-border instant payment markets through a single account structure.

The bank also reported that corporate RTP transaction volume had climbed 48%, while transactions above $1 million jumped 351%. The bank highlighted liquidity management and intercompany transfers as emerging applications for the network.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to turn treasury software from a system that organizes financial information into one capable of interpreting it. At the same time, instant payment infrastructure is making it possible to move money around the clock.

Treasury teams have historically operated with a gap between recognizing a financial condition and acting on it. The important shift today isn't from manual treasury to AI treasury — it's from observation to execution. Once software can understand that a company has $30 million sitting in one account, a large obligation approaching elsewhere, and receivables expected later in the day, the obvious question becomes: Why stop at generating an alert?

Payment execution alone is increasingly commoditized. The durable value as I see it today is in making the right payment decisions.

That's according to Andrew Ng, Head of Payments and Embedded Finance at Tungsten Automation. Instead of maintaining infrastructure around individual payment rails, Ng argued that companies can increasingly concentrate investment in what he describes as an overarching control plane — shared data, policy and approval controls, AI-driven recommendations, and access to multiple payment rails.

A PYMNTS Intelligence report found that when small and medium-sized businesses were asked about factors influencing their choice of a primary corporate card, 15.7% mentioned better card and spending analytics while 13.8% cited better expense management capabilities.

More than 80% of CFOs at large companies are either already using AI or considering adopting it, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research on how AI is transforming financial decision-making.

What real-time transaction data is doing is enabling us to have a forward-looking assessment. The question used to be what happened. Now the question is, what should we do about it right now?

That's according to Rinku Sharma, Chief Technology Officer at Boost Payment Solutions. Instead of finance teams periodically determining where liquidity needs to move, software could increasingly monitor conditions continuously and recommend — or even under defined circumstances execute — the appropriate response.

Perhaps the biggest change in treasury management is that cash no longer needs to wait for the banking day. Those capabilities move the competition below the dashboard and into the financial plumbing.

The competitive landscape could be more turbulent internationally than domestically for treasury providers. PYMNTS Intelligence research found that while traditional banks remain the dominant provider for international payments, FinTech companies are expanding their role by turning infrastructure that once required dedicated systems into services that can be purchased as needed.