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By Nicholas Larsen, International Banker
A payment lands in Singapore at 02:14. A supplier drawdown is due in Mexico before the London team has logged on. A US-dollar receivable arrives late in the European afternoon, just after the investment window has closed. A subsidiary’s account balance slips below its funding threshold while the group treasurer is in a meeting. None of these events is especially dramatic on its own. Together, they reveal a problem now confronting corporate treasury: Liquidity is moving on a timetable that no longer waits for the treasury function to catch up.
Faster payments, instant settlement and 24/7 commerce are impacting the treasurer’s basic mission: to know where cash is, when it becomes visible, how quickly it can be moved and whether the organisation can act before the opportunity—or risk—has passed. This is proving essential in a high-rate, more volatile and more digitised financial environment, in which every delay can prove costly. Idle cash can mean lost yield. Late visibility can slow hedging. And fragmented bank data can lead to avoidable borrowing, trapped liquidity or missed warning signs.
Such potentially glaring inefficiencies justify the development of real-time, always-on treasury. Application programming interfaces (APIs), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual accounts, instant-payment rails, in-house banks, tokenised settlement and automated liquidity tools all form part of the story. But the deeper transformation is in the operating model. Treasury is being pushed to catch up with a world in which cash visibility, liquidity movement, risk monitoring and payment execution have become continuous capabilities rather than periodic ones.
Citi defines this as a shift from “value-dating” to “value-timing”: from managing cash around settlement dates and cut-off times towards managing liquidity according to the precise moment it becomes visible, usable, exposed or investable. The advantage comes from narrowing the gap between a financial event and the corporate response.
The infrastructure behind this shift is expanding quickly. In a report published in June 2025, Citi stated that more than 80 jurisdictions, representing 95 percent of global GDP, offered domestic instant-payment schemes. It reported nearly 266 billion real-time transactions worldwide in 2023, an increase of 42 percent from 2022, and cited a projection of 575 billion transactions by 2028.
Beyond consumer payments, real-time rails are raising expectations across corporate finance. “Digital is not an enhancement to how business operates today—it is how business operates,” said Vanessa Lin, global head of product at Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking. “Realtime experiences, transparency, and always-on access are no longer just differentiators; they are the baseline.”
Still, real-time treasury should be measured by utility, rather than speed for its own sake. “For me, real-time treasury isn’t necessarily about seconds,” Jörg Bermüller, head of cash and risk management at Merck KGaA, said during a Deutsche Bank discussion panel. “It’s about having access to comprehensive, timely information that I can act on. Just having information quickly for the sake of it doesn’t help. We want to use data to trigger a process.”
Facilitating that “access” is proving difficult for firms to implement, however. PwC’s “2025 Global Treasury Survey”, based on insights from 350 treasurers, observed that despite treasury becoming a more strategic, innovative and data-driven partner, many firms remained operationally constrained. Although 94 percent of respondents operated a dedicated treasury-management system, for instance, offline or homegrown systems were still used for long-term cash forecasting, short-term forecasting, treasury reporting, exposure gathering and financial-risk management. PwC also found that 36 percent of respondents still use manual processes for FX exposure management, even though 83 percent cited FX risk as their most critical economic exposure, while 76 percent identified poor data quality as a challenge to cash forecasting.
Goldman Sachs has described the broader challenge as a capability gap, with treasury expected to optimise cash flows, strengthen cyber resilience and support real-time financial decision-making, while many teams still rely on tools and workflows designed for an earlier era. “Legacy in treasury runs deeper than technology,” explained Joe Hopgood, head of digital channels at Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking. “It’s embedded in process, policy, governance, and long-standing ways of working that have hardened over time.”
Although firms have treasury technology, they lack a single, trusted view, with data potentially scattered across enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, treasury-management platforms, bank portals, financial-planning tools, payment providers and spreadsheets. In such environments, cash may be visible in one system, exposed in another and unusable in practice.
Citi calls this problem “information float”: the time between a financial event occurring and the moment treasury can act on it. Reducing that float requires architecture, integrations and workflows built around live data.
A treasury management system (TMS) remains central to this solution, but it creates an always-on function only when connected to the wider corporate and banking ecosystem. ERP data, bank data, payment statuses, receivables, payables, payroll inputs, market data and exposure data all need to move through the system with minimal delay.
APIs become essential at this stage. They allow bank platforms, ERP systems, TMS platforms and payment providers to exchange information continuously rather than through delayed files. They also support real-time balances, payment initiation, payment tracking, validation, reconciliation and FX-rate visibility.
Real-time payments create an expectation that money can move instantly. Treasury still has to ensure the money is in the right account, in the right currency and under the right controls before the payment is made; otherwise, the bottleneck shifts from the payment rail to the funding account. Seeing cash in real-time is useful; moving it in real-time changes the economics.
BioNTech has illustrated the financial value of real-time visibility. After its pandemic-era growth, the German biotech company had to manage large cash balances, FX exposures and investment decisions. At the end of March 2024, BioNTech had €16.9 billion in cash and generated €175 million in interest income in the first quarter. Its head of treasury, Dirk Schreiber, noted that a two-day lag in investments can be costly.
To improve visibility, BioNTech worked with German software corporation SAP, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan to connect via APIs through SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity (MBC). Deutsche Bank began providing real-time account balances and push notifications for credits and debits via APIs. Schreiber explained that this provided BioNTech with “real-time data at every point in time” through its standard treasury application. In a higher-rate environment, delayed visibility can mean delayed investment, unnecessary liquidity buffers or slower FX hedging.
Virtual accounts add another layer. By allowing companies to segregate flows, improve reconciliation and reduce the need for multiple physical bank accounts, they can simplify liquidity structures. “Virtual accounts are not rocket science; they are just smart treasury,” noted Renato Barbone, lead cash management at Bayer, during the Deutsche Bank panel. Bayer has used such accounts as part of an in-house-banking structure to reduce account complexity, improve control and support business requests without proliferating physical accounts.
And while the domestic space is undoubtedly difficult to navigate, it is in the cross-border segment that real-time treasury finds its toughest challenges. For corporate treasurers, this is where payments, liquidity, FX and data converge. A cross-border instant payment is useful only if the company can see it, reconcile it, fund it, manage currency exposures and apply controls around it in real-time.
APIs are needed for payment initiation, live tracking, FX, fraud prevention and integration with TMS and ERP systems, while ISO 20022 provides richer structured data for reconciliation, working-capital forecasting and on-behalf-of payment models. Banks also remain central to that functionality.
A faster treasury function also requires stronger controls. Instant payments reduce the time available to stop errors. Real-time data can create false confidence if the underlying data is poor. AI models can misclassify anomalies. APIs increase the number of connection points. And fraud threats can move as fast as the payment rail. Indeed, a BNY-sponsored Datos Insights survey conducted in the third quarter of 2025 found that 29 percent of responding organisations reported altered payment information during the preceding 12 months, while 24 percent reported immediate-payment fraud. Faster execution therefore increases the importance of verifying beneficiary details, approval authority and unusual transactions before a payment is released.
In terms of implementing real-time functionality, HSBC recommends building a business case that identifies the financial and non-financial costs of batch-based treasury, such as surplus subsidiary cash left uninvested because funding and defunding happen only at end-of-day. The bank also advises treasurers to establish a baseline, form a cross-functional working group and assess which processes are already sufficiently automated to move towards real-time.
A real-time treasury strategy, moreover, should begin with questions such as: Where does delay cost money? Where does manual intervention create risk? Which processes are already automated enough to be accelerated? What data is missing? Which controls need to be strengthened?
Citi’s “Treasury 2030” vision argues that treasury should become a strategic business partner, adding enterprise value through data-driven insights that support decision-making and growth. The next stage, then, is to make liquidity visible, mobile, intelligent and controlled at the speed of the business. In a 24/7 economy, cash cannot be managed as a once-a-day snapshot. It must become a live operating capability.
Go to top
The post Always-On Treasury: How Real-Time Finance Is Rewiring Corporate Liquidity Management appeared first on International Banker.
A payment lands in Singapore at 02:14. A supplier drawdown is due in Mexico before the London team has logged on. A US-dollar receivable arrives late in the European afternoon, just after the investment window has closed. A subsidiary’s account balance slips below its funding threshold while the group treasurer is in a meeting. None of these events is especially dramatic on its own. Together, they reveal a problem now confronting corporate treasury: Liquidity is moving on a timetable that no longer waits for the treasury function to catch up.
Faster payments, instant settlement and 24/7 commerce are impacting the treasurer’s basic mission: to know where cash is, when it becomes visible, how quickly it can be moved and whether the organisation can act before the opportunity—or risk—has passed. This is proving essential in a high-rate, more volatile and more digitised financial environment, in which every delay can prove costly. Idle cash can mean lost yield. Late visibility can slow hedging. And fragmented bank data can lead to avoidable borrowing, trapped liquidity or missed warning signs.
Such potentially glaring inefficiencies justify the development of real-time, always-on treasury. Application programming interfaces (APIs), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual accounts, instant-payment rails, in-house banks, tokenised settlement and automated liquidity tools all form part of the story. But the deeper transformation is in the operating model. Treasury is being pushed to catch up with a world in which cash visibility, liquidity movement, risk monitoring and payment execution have become continuous capabilities rather than periodic ones.
Citi defines this as a shift from “value-dating” to “value-timing”: from managing cash around settlement dates and cut-off times towards managing liquidity according to the precise moment it becomes visible, usable, exposed or investable. The advantage comes from narrowing the gap between a financial event and the corporate response.
The infrastructure behind this shift is expanding quickly. In a report published in June 2025, Citi stated that more than 80 jurisdictions, representing 95 percent of global GDP, offered domestic instant-payment schemes. It reported nearly 266 billion real-time transactions worldwide in 2023, an increase of 42 percent from 2022, and cited a projection of 575 billion transactions by 2028.
Beyond consumer payments, real-time rails are raising expectations across corporate finance. “Digital is not an enhancement to how business operates today—it is how business operates,” said Vanessa Lin, global head of product at Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking. “Realtime experiences, transparency, and always-on access are no longer just differentiators; they are the baseline.”
Still, real-time treasury should be measured by utility, rather than speed for its own sake.
Still, real-time treasury should be measured by utility, rather than speed for its own sake. “For me, real-time treasury isn’t necessarily about seconds,” Jörg Bermüller, head of cash and risk management at Merck KGaA, said during a Deutsche Bank discussion panel. “It’s about having access to comprehensive, timely information that I can act on. Just having information quickly for the sake of it doesn’t help. We want to use data to trigger a process.”
Facilitating that “access” is proving difficult for firms to implement, however. PwC’s “2025 Global Treasury Survey”, based on insights from 350 treasurers, observed that despite treasury becoming a more strategic, innovative and data-driven partner, many firms remained operationally constrained. Although 94 percent of respondents operated a dedicated treasury-management system, for instance, offline or homegrown systems were still used for long-term cash forecasting, short-term forecasting, treasury reporting, exposure gathering and financial-risk management. PwC also found that 36 percent of respondents still use manual processes for FX exposure management, even though 83 percent cited FX risk as their most critical economic exposure, while 76 percent identified poor data quality as a challenge to cash forecasting.
Goldman Sachs has described the broader challenge as a capability gap, with treasury expected to optimise cash flows, strengthen cyber resilience and support real-time financial decision-making, while many teams still rely on tools and workflows designed for an earlier era. “Legacy in treasury runs deeper than technology,” explained Joe Hopgood, head of digital channels at Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking. “It’s embedded in process, policy, governance, and long-standing ways of working that have hardened over time.”
Although firms have treasury technology, they lack a single, trusted view, with data potentially scattered across enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, treasury-management platforms, bank portals, financial-planning tools, payment providers and spreadsheets. In such environments, cash may be visible in one system, exposed in another and unusable in practice.
Citi calls this problem “information float”: the time between a financial event occurring and the moment treasury can act on it. Reducing that float requires architecture, integrations and workflows built around live data.
A treasury management system (TMS) remains central to this solution, but it creates an always-on function only when connected to the wider corporate and banking ecosystem.
A treasury management system (TMS) remains central to this solution, but it creates an always-on function only when connected to the wider corporate and banking ecosystem. ERP data, bank data, payment statuses, receivables, payables, payroll inputs, market data and exposure data all need to move through the system with minimal delay.
APIs become essential at this stage. They allow bank platforms, ERP systems, TMS platforms and payment providers to exchange information continuously rather than through delayed files. They also support real-time balances, payment initiation, payment tracking, validation, reconciliation and FX-rate visibility.
Real-time payments create an expectation that money can move instantly. Treasury still has to ensure the money is in the right account, in the right currency and under the right controls before the payment is made; otherwise, the bottleneck shifts from the payment rail to the funding account. Seeing cash in real-time is useful; moving it in real-time changes the economics.
BioNTech has illustrated the financial value of real-time visibility. After its pandemic-era growth, the German biotech company had to manage large cash balances, FX exposures and investment decisions. At the end of March 2024, BioNTech had €16.9 billion in cash and generated €175 million in interest income in the first quarter. Its head of treasury, Dirk Schreiber, noted that a two-day lag in investments can be costly.
To improve visibility, BioNTech worked with German software corporation SAP, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan to connect via APIs through SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity (MBC). Deutsche Bank began providing real-time account balances and push notifications for credits and debits via APIs. Schreiber explained that this provided BioNTech with “real-time data at every point in time” through its standard treasury application. In a higher-rate environment, delayed visibility can mean delayed investment, unnecessary liquidity buffers or slower FX hedging.
Virtual accounts add another layer. By allowing companies to segregate flows, improve reconciliation and reduce the need for multiple physical bank accounts, they can simplify liquidity structures. “Virtual accounts are not rocket science; they are just smart treasury,” noted Renato Barbone, lead cash management at Bayer, during the Deutsche Bank panel. Bayer has used such accounts as part of an in-house-banking structure to reduce account complexity, improve control and support business requests without proliferating physical accounts.
And while the domestic space is undoubtedly difficult to navigate, it is in the cross-border segment that real-time treasury finds its toughest challenges. For corporate treasurers, this is where payments, liquidity, FX and data converge. A cross-border instant payment is useful only if the company can see it, reconcile it, fund it, manage currency exposures and apply controls around it in real-time.
APIs are needed for payment initiation, live tracking, FX, fraud prevention and integration with TMS and ERP systems, while ISO 20022 provides richer structured data for reconciliation, working-capital forecasting and on-behalf-of payment models. Banks also remain central to that functionality.
A faster treasury function also requires stronger controls. Instant payments reduce the time available to stop errors. Real-time data can create false confidence if the underlying data is poor. AI models can misclassify anomalies. APIs increase the number of connection points. And fraud threats can move as fast as the payment rail. Indeed, a BNY-sponsored Datos Insights survey conducted in the third quarter of 2025 found that 29 percent of responding organisations reported altered payment information during the preceding 12 months, while 24 percent reported immediate-payment fraud. Faster execution therefore increases the importance of verifying beneficiary details, approval authority and unusual transactions before a payment is released.
In terms of implementing real-time functionality, HSBC recommends building a business case that identifies the financial and non-financial costs of batch-based treasury, such as surplus subsidiary cash left uninvested because funding and defunding happen only at end-of-day. The bank also advises treasurers to establish a baseline, form a cross-functional working group and assess which processes are already sufficiently automated to move towards real-time.
A real-time treasury strategy, moreover, should begin with questions such as: Where does delay cost money? Where does manual intervention create risk? Which processes are already automated enough to be accelerated? What data is missing? Which controls need to be strengthened?
Citi’s “Treasury 2030” vision argues that treasury should become a strategic business partner, adding enterprise value through data-driven insights that support decision-making and growth. The next stage, then, is to make liquidity visible, mobile, intelligent and controlled at the speed of the business. In a 24/7 economy, cash cannot be managed as a once-a-day snapshot. It must become a live operating capability.
Go to top
The post Always-On Treasury: How Real-Time Finance Is Rewiring Corporate Liquidity Management appeared first on International Banker.
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