Working capital is the bloodstream of a Growth Corporate. These firms, which generate annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion and are expanding into enterprise-level organizations, drive local, regional and global economies. As a result, the speed at which cash moves through the business often determines whether opportunities are captured or lost. PYMNTS Intelligence has tracked this movement for three years for The Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, measuring how efficiently companies convert working capital into operational advantage and ranking the top and bottom 20% of performers.
The average Growth Corporate loses roughly 4.1% of revenue chasing late payments from business customers, a leak that can run into tens of millions of dollars. Disciplined use of external working capital solutions yields about 4.5% of revenue in savings, such as early payment discounts.
Picture two firms at opposite ends. The laggard neglects tools like card acceptance to cut days sales outstanding (DSO) and skips solutions that let it pay suppliers early, so it absorbs the leak and forgoes the upside. By contrast, the leader does both those things. The gap between them can be the difference between funding the next expansion and scrambling to cover the shortfalls.
The encouraging news is that efficiency is rising. The global Index climbed from 49.1 in 2023 to 54.6 in 2025. The harder truth is that the rewards are narrowly concentrated. Top performers now convert cash almost twice as fast as the bottom tier. These firms also borrow to grow rather than to survive and are wiring their suppliers, payments and, increasingly, AI tools into business operations. This report distills what three years of data reveal about how top Growth Corporates achieve their positions and where patterns differ by region and industry.
How the Index defines the most efficient
PYMNTS Intelligence used regression analysis to identify the behaviors most associated with a reduced cash cycle, then gave every firm a score from 0 to 100. Four drivers carry the most weight:
- Using working capital for strategic reasons
- Stronger cash flow predictability
- Integrating more suppliers into payment systems
- Paying suppliers earlier than the payment is due
Firms in the top 20% are the “top performers” referenced throughout this report. The bottom 20% are the “bottom performers.” The cash conversion cycle, measured in days, serves as the real-world marker of efficiency.
A Working Capital Advantage
Top CFOs free up cash in half the time, and the lead is widening.
The cash conversion cycle measures how quickly a company turns its investments in inventory and other resources into cash from sales. A shorter cycle means capital that would otherwise sit idle in inventory or uncollected receivables is instead available for reinvestment in growth, debt reduction, acquisitions or shareholder returns.
Cash efficiency shows up first in time. In 2025, top performers cleared that cycle in 24.2 days, versus 44.4 days for bottom performers, a gap of roughly 20 days of trapped cash in every cycle. That advantage compounds quarter after quarter, fueling the ability to fund growth from internal cash that weaker firms must borrow to replace.
While the Index gain is broad, it’s also uneven.
Industry lens. The cash-cycle gap between industries dwarfs the gap between regions. Media and technology firms convert cash in 19.7 days and lead the Index alongside agriculture (Index score of 59.3) and retail and marketplaces (Index score of 59.1). Manufacturing sits at the other extreme, with a 70.7-day cash cycle and the lowest Index score (49.7). Healthcare posted the largest three-year jump as the sector professionalized its working capital practices, increasing the Index score from 41.5 to 50.4.
Working Capital as Strategy
The best CFOs borrow to grow. The rest borrow to survive.
The single most revealing question in the study is why a company uses working capital at all. Among top performers, 80% name planned growth as their primary reason for using working capital solutions, and just 3% cite using it for an unplanned emergency. Among bottom performers, the picture inverts almost perfectly. Sixty-seven percent use these solutions for unplanned emergencies, and a scant 2% for planned growth. Efficient finance teams treat working capital as a forward-looking strategic instrument. Struggling teams treat it as a fire extinguisher.
Across the full sample, the balance still tilts toward strategy. Forty-three percent cite using working capital for planned growth and 25% cite using it for emergencies, showing how heavily the bottom tier weighs on the average. The strategic instinct of top performers is also consistent worldwide.
Industry lens. Strategic intent tracks the Index. The industries where working capital solutions are most often deployed for planned growth, such as media and technology, retail and agriculture, are the same industries that top the Index and run the leanest cash cycles. Capital-heavy sectors like manufacturing and healthcare carry more emergency-driven usage, which mirrors their longer cash conversion cycles.
The working capital instrument mix
The split between borrowing to grow and borrowing to survive shows up in the instruments themselves. Heading into the next 12 months, nearly all firms in both tiers (93%) expect to use at least one external financing method. The divide is not about access but about what they reach for.
Top performers favor structured, planned financing facilities. They are more likely than the bottom tier to line up working capital loans (58% versus 54%), finance through corporate cards (29% versus 23%) and lean on non-bank credit facilities (22% versus 19%).
Bottom performers tilt toward reactive, short-term solutions and are more likely to use overdrafts as a financing method (25% versus 22%). Demand concentrates on the planned anchors of the mix, working capital loans and bank lines of credit, but the top tier commits to those options while the bottom tier spreads into the costlier stopgaps. The instrument mix is the borrow-to-grow versus borrow-to-survive divide made concrete. The best CFOs line up deliberate financing ahead of need, while weaker firms patch shortfalls with whatever is closest to hand.
The Integration Edge
Efficiency is wired in one supplier connection at a time.
Two of the four Index drivers live in the supplier relationship: integrating suppliers into payment systems and paying them earlier than the payment due date. On average, Growth Corporates have connected 45% of their suppliers directly to their order and payment systems, but the rate varies sharply by industry, and the most integrated industries are also the most efficient.
Integration buys stability, and stability buys efficiency. Top performers are more than three times as likely as bottom performers to have kept every supplier through the year, and far less likely to have replaced a large share of them. Bottom performers churn through vendors, with just 8% keeping the same suppliers all year, compared with 25% of the best performers.
Lean, well-managed supply chains move cash faster. Firms working with fewer than 50 active suppliers had a 23-day cash conversion cycle in 2025. For those juggling more than 100 suppliers, that number rises to 49 days. The most efficient teams also extract more from their payment tools.
Top performers are roughly five times as likely as bottom performers to view virtual cards as a financing instrument rather than a simple payables tool (16% vs 3%), turning a payment rail into a source of working capital.
The regional lens. North American firms rely most on card acceptance to reduce DSO. CEMEA firms rely on it the least and instead show some of the leanest cash cycles among their top performers. The lesson is not that one tool wins everywhere, but that efficient firms in every region have a deliberate collections strategy rather than a default one.
From Pilot to Practice
AI has moved from experiment to expectation in the finance suite.
Artificial intelligence has crossed from pilot to practice. Most Growth Corporates report using new forms of AI, either generative or agentic, across core functions of the finance organization. Seven in 10 use AI for working capital efficiency, one of the most common use cases, with 61% using it for high-level business strategies.
The regional ranking upends the usual narrative. For firms using AI specifically for working capital efficiency, such as forecasting, scenario modeling and automating finance tasks, those in Europe (65%) and Latin America (62%) lead. North America (42%) sits last among the five regions. Markets that have historically faced tighter financing conditions appear to be leapfrogging into automation faster.
A note on cause and effect. AI adoption is widespread but still maturing, and it does not yet map neatly onto a shorter cash cycle. Larger and more complex firms, which tend to carry longer cycles, are often the earliest and heaviest AI adopters, so 2025 is best read as the year AI became table stakes rather than the year it delivered measurable cash-cycle gains. The Growth Corporates to watch are those pairing AI with the strategic and supplier disciplines that the Index already rewards.
Working Capital Resilience
Every late payment is growth leaking out the back door.
Resilience is the flip side of efficiency. Late payments from business customers drain 4.1% of revenue on average. Disciplined use of external working capital solutions returns about 4.5% of revenue in benefits. The most efficient firms capture that upside; the least efficient forfeit it and absorb the late payment drag on top.
Access compounds the divide. When asked what would hold back adoption of working capital solutions in the coming year, bottom performers cited structural barriers, from complex applications to strict eligibility rules, far more often than top performers did. These firms face thinner access and more barriers, at exactly the time when they can least afford them.
The bottom-line benefit of getting this right is largest in the markets that also lose the most to late payments. Firms in Latin America and Europe report the highest amount of annual revenue lost to large payments (5.0% and 4.4%). This underscores that the regions with the most friction also offer the most upside to companies that solve it.
Three years of data point to a single throughline. The most efficient CFOs and Treasurers are not winning on access to capital or on any one technology. They win on intent, deploying working capital to grow, building stable and integrated supplier networks, collecting deliberately and layering AI on top of those habits. As macroeconomic volatility persists into 2026, that disciplined, forward-looking posture is what separates the firms compounding their advantage from those still fighting last quarter’s fire.
Methodology
The Growth Corporates Working Capital Index is a PYMNTS Intelligence product, fielded annually. This report draws on three consecutive waves (2023, 2024 and 2025) to establish trends. Each wave is an independent sample, so respondents differ from year to year. The most recent wave surveyed 1,457 CFOs and Treasurers across 23 countries, five global regions (North America, Europe, CEMEA, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific) and 10 industry segments. The survey was fielded by telephone between May and July 2025 as a double-blind study. The 2024 wave surveyed 1,297 CFOs and Treasurers, and the 2023 wave surveyed 873. Read together, the three waves represent 3,627 CFOs and Treasurers, and trend figures in this report reflect all three years rather than any single edition.
The Index uses regression analysis to score each firm from 0 to 100 on its propensity to reduce days payable outstanding, based on strategic working capital use, cash flow predictability, supplier integration and early supplier payment. Firms in the top and bottom 20% are classified as top and bottom performers. Figures in this report are rounded. Industry and regional figures are drawn from the published Index data book and the underlying survey crosstabs.
