Stop Managing Cash, Start Creating Value: What CFOs Really Expect From Treasury Today

By François Masquelier, CEO of Simply Treasury, Chairman of ATEL and Chair of EACT. 11 July 2026.

Ask a CFO today what they want from treasury, and you will rarely hear the word “cash” used as a noun. You will hear verbs: anticipate, optimise, protect, create. There are eight concrete areas where a CFO expects the treasury manager to deliver value, none of them reducible to “send me the cash position by 9am.” Reporting cash stopped being the job description and became the minimum entry requirement sometime around the last poly-crisis.

The job description has changed

The pressure is structural, not anecdotal. Recent global treasury surveys converge on an uncomfortable finding: a majority of CFOs now see the treasurer role as a legitimate stepping stone to the CFO chair itself, yet a meaningful minority still believe their own treasurer needs additional leadership development before being ready for that table. That gap is the real story. CFOs have raised the bar faster than most treasury teams have raised their game.

Three forces are driving this. First, the poly-crisis, simultaneous inflation swings, rate reversals, geopolitical shocks and fragile supply chains, has made liquidity a board-level topic rather than a back-office metric. Second, technology has removed the excuse: with API banking, real-time payment rails and AI-assisted forecasting now commercially available, a treasurer who still reconciles positions in a spreadsheet at month-end is choosing to be a scorekeeper. Third, CFOs are themselves under pressure to demonstrate working capital efficiency and capital discipline to their own boards, and they need a treasury function that translates strategy into funding and liquidity plans, not one that merely executes payments.

The infrastructure has caught up with the ambition. The ongoing migration to ISO 20022 messaging, the spread of instant and API-driven payment rails, and the maturing of treasury management systems that plug directly into ERPs mean the plumbing excuse (“our systems don't talk to each other”) is disappearing fast. A treasurer who cannot yet produce a same-day consolidated cash position across entities and currencies is no longer constrained by technology; they are constrained by a project they have not prioritised.

Eight areas where treasury must prove its worth

These regroup into four value clusters that map closely to what I see across European multinationals.

1. Cash visibility and protection. Daily cash positions and 13-week rolling forecasts are table stakes; the real value sits in scenario analysis and early-warning alerts that let the business plan for gaps and surpluses before they happen, and in FX and interest-rate risk management disciplined enough to protect margin without turning hedging into a profit centre in disguise.
2. Banking relationships and solutions. Chronically under-managed. Most groups sit on avoidable NSF fees, overdraft interest, deficient-balance charges and FX spread leakage nobody has audited in years. The fix (cash pooling, sweeping, virtual accounts, host-to-host connectivity) is neither new nor expensive; it simply requires someone to own it end to end.
3. Working capital as a lever. DSO, DPO and inventory days are finance-department numbers until treasury converts them into cash impact and works with sales, credit and procurement to shorten the cycle. This is where AI moves the needle fastest: 2026 benchmarking points to AI-assisted cash forecasting achieving materially better accuracy than spreadsheet models, and AI-assisted bank account reviews identifying six-figure annual fee savings for a typical mid-sized multinational.
4. Customer cash intelligence and financing. Knowing which customers pay late, and why, is a collections lever few treasuries use systematically. Layer on a proper financing and factoring strategy (comparing factoring, reverse factoring, receivables financing and invoice discounting on a genuine cost-benefit basis) and treasury stops asking for liquidity and starts sourcing it.

The eight-point treasury mandate

1. Liquidity intelligence: see cash gaps before they bite.
2. Bank relationship & cost optimisation: audit every fee, every quarter.
3. Banking solutions that add value: pooling, virtual accounts, API banking.
4. Working capital optimisation: turn DSO/DPO into cash, not commentary.
5. FX & interest-rate risk management: protect margin, don't speculate.
6. Customer cash intelligence: know who pays, when, and why.
7. Financing & factoring strategy: source liquidity, don't just request it.
8. Treasury business partner: connect the numbers to the business.

“A great treasury function does not report cash. It anticipates it, prices it, and turns it into a board-level argument.”

François Masquelier, Chair of EACT

Turning metrics into money

None of the above matters if it stays in a dashboard nobody outside the department reads. The eighth and final expectation, treasury as business partner, is the multiplier on the other seven. It means understanding the group's strategy, budget and forecast well enough to translate them into funding and liquidity plans; bringing risks and recommendations to the table unprompted, not in response to a request; and producing reporting that a non-treasury audience (the CFO, the board, the audit committee) can actually use to decide something.

I would add a ninth expectation, implicit but worth stating explicitly for 2026: treasury must now speak the language of the CFO's own KPIs (cash conversion cycle, return on invested capital, cost of capital) rather than the language of positions and confirmations. A treasurer who reports “we are cash positive by €40 million” has told the CFO nothing useful. A treasurer who reports “we have freed €4 million of working capital by cutting DSO four days, and it funds half of next year's capex without new debt” has just made the CFO's argument to the board for them.

Boards do not fund dashboards; they fund arguments backed by numbers. Treasurers who master this translation are the ones who stop being asked to justify their function's cost and start being asked to sit in on capital allocation decisions.

Conclusion: watch the gap, not just the growth

CFOs will not lower the bar. If anything, the eight-point mandate will grow to nine or ten as AI absorbs the mechanical parts of the job (forecasting, reconciliation, fee auditing) and raises the value threshold for what remains distinctly human: judgment, negotiation, and the ability to turn a liquidity position into a strategic argument. The treasurers who audit themselves honestly against these eight points today, and close the gaps deliberately over the next twelve months, are the ones CFOs will trust with bigger mandates tomorrow, including, for a growing number of them, the CFO's own chair. The rest will keep reporting cash, competently, to a board that has stopped listening.

References

1. Salah, M., “What I Expect a Treasury Manager to Deliver,” LinkedIn infographic, 2026.
2. PwC, Global Treasury Survey, 2025.
3. AFP (Association for Financial Professionals), Treasury Technology Survey, 2026.
4. KPMG, Treasury Technology Benchmarking Report, 2026.
5. Deloitte Switzerland, “Emerging Trends in Corporate Treasury Functions,” 2026. Link

AI accuracy and fee-saving figures are directionally consistent across AFP, KPMG and Deloitte 2026 treasury technology research; treat exact percentages as indicative pending each firm's full published methodology.