The most effective treasury functions are becoming not those that simply know where the money is at day’s end. They are the ones that can answer a more demanding question at any moment: Can we put this money to work, right now?
Historically, end-of-day reporting served a practical purpose. When banks processed transactions in batches and settlement windows were rigid, a daily snapshot was the best available approximation of reality. Liquidity buffers existed to absorb delays, errors, and unknowns.
But in a real-time environment, end-of-day reporting resembles a lagging indicator. Cash positions can change materially throughout the day as customer payments arrive instantly, supplier payments are settled in real time, or funding is moved across accounts at any hour.
As highlighted by the Tuesday (Dec. 9) partnership between embedded banking provider ClearBank and foreign exchange (FX) and payments solutions company Finseta, designed to leverage ClearBank’s real-time payment infrastructure, the marketplace is moving toward a widening embrace of always-on treasury solutions.
The irony is that treasury teams may have more visibility into cash than ever before, but many are still unable to act on it in real time because systems and processes cannot confirm its availability quickly enough.
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All of this elevates the importance of how treasury connects to its banks.
Read more: AI, Cyber Risk and Payments Monetization Put Treasury at the Center of Finance
End of ‘Good Enough’ Treasury Management
Real-time payment systems, such as RTP® and FedNow® in the U.S., SEPA Instant in Europe, and Faster Payments in the U.K., have been available in some form for years, but recent adoption has been meaningfully different. Instant payment rails are no longer edge cases used only for emergencies or consumer use. They are becoming embedded in B2B workflows: supplier payments, intercompany funding, just-in-time payroll, and even treasury-to-treasury movements within corporate groups.
At the same time, banks have quietly transformed how treasury teams can interact with them. APIs now provide continuous access to balances, intraday transactions, payment statuses, and FX positions. Cloud-based treasury management systems (TMS) can ingest this data in near real time, making the end-of-day file transfer model look obsolete.
In this environment, “good” treasury management is no longer defined by how efficiently a team closes the books each day. It is defined by how quickly and confidently it can deploy cash, rebalance liquidity, and respond to events as they happen.
For many organizations, that shift is uncomfortable. Treasury teams were not built to operate like trading desks. Controls, approvals and risk frameworks were designed around slower cycles.
Many treasury teams discover that the bottleneck is not their TMS, but the way it connects to their banks. Batch files processed a few times a day are ill-suited to a world where liquidity decisions need to be made continuously.
Read more: Making Sense of the Liquidity Hub Treasury Model
Transformation Is Incremental, Not Instant
The good news is that closing the gap between payment speed and treasury decisioning does not usually require a wholesale transformation. Few organizations can justify replacing core systems solely to gain real-time capabilities, and many do not need full intraday optimization across all cash pools.
Instead, leading treasury teams are layering real-time extensions onto existing architectures. This is where banks increasingly play a central role.
Modern banks offer API-based services that sit alongside traditional channels, providing incremental capabilities without forcing clients to abandon established processes. A treasury team might still run its daily cash positioning cycle as before, but supplement it with intraday balance APIs for critical accounts, or real-time payment status updates for high-value transactions.
This hybrid approach allows treasurers to focus real-time decisioning where it matters most — large payments, constrained currencies, volatile periods — while leaving lower-risk flows on existing schedules. It also reduces the organizational shock of moving from a batch-driven world to a fully continuous one.
Read more: Why CFO Now Stands for ‘Chief Forecasting Officer’
This does not mean abandoning structure. Many organizations still anchor decisions around scheduled reviews. What changes is that those reviews are informed by up-to-the-minute data rather than stale snapshots. Exceptions can be flagged as they arise, not discovered hours later.
Progressive treasury teams are engaging banks not just as service providers, but as partners in redesigning cash management. They are asking pointed questions: Which accounts support real-time balance reporting? How quickly are transactions reflected? What controls can be embedded upstream? How does real-time data integrate with existing TMS workflows?
For most organizations, that journey starts with a conversation — with their banks, their TMS providers, and their internal stakeholders. Understanding what is already possible, and where incremental real-time extensions can deliver outsized benefits, is far more effective than embarking on an all-or-nothing transformation.
