Intraday Liquidity Becomes Finance’s New Battleground

Watch more: Need to Know: FIS’ Thomas Jerolitsch

For decades, liquidity management was an exercise in protection, not optimization. Most treasurers approached it like insurance: unavoidable, useful in a pinch, yet hardly something to celebrate or obsess over daily.

But all that is changing. Propelled by regulations, markets and technology, intraday liquidity is emerging to take center stage in enterprise finance.

“It’s not just about the operational part … it’s also about the strategic balance sheet management part that organizations are looking at,” Thomas Jerolitsch, VP of product management for enterprise treasury at FIS, told PYMNTS.

Rather than a static measure taken at day’s end or quarter’s close, liquidity is becoming a real-time pulse of institutional resilience. This transformation is not a story of survival but one of reinvention. Intraday liquidity has taken center stage because the pressures, expectations and possibilities around it have shifted.

Europe’s forthcoming Payment Services Directive (PSD3) and Basel’s evolving BCBS 239 standards are just two examples of mandates driving institutions toward real-time reporting and liquidity controls.

“Europe is starting off some regulatory requirements that will require financial organizations to manage real-time payments. … I think that’s a key call out as to why it matters now more than it probably ever did,” Jerolitsch said.

Intraday Liquidity Comes of Age

Yet while the urgency of compliance is unmistakable, most institutions may be only halfway prepared. A large number of financial institutions continue to rely on infrastructure from the 1980s and 1990s, decades before APIs and real-time data became mainstream.

“Organizations [are] scrambling to be ready from a client-facing perspective … and just starting to transition over into getting their back-office structure in order,” Jerolitsch said.

The ongoing reliance on outdated systems isn’t just an obstacle to regulatory compliance; it can become a cost multiplier and a risk incubator.

“Many of those legacy infrastructures just do not have real-time capabilities … and hitting refresh or refreshing something just often enough is not real-time,” Jerolitsch said, underscoring a key misconception in the marketplace: Frequent updates are a stopgap, not a replacement for streaming data.

“The past 10-15 years have been about institutions trying to just get by with legacy infrastructure. … You maybe just about cut a corner here and there … but post-COVID and SVB … this is tipping organizations over, to be perfectly honest,” he added.

The fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s 2023 collapse didn’t just rattle depositors. It also sent a chilling reminder across the financial services industry that decades-old stress testing frameworks may no longer suffice in an era of social media bank runs and hyperconnected markets. With real-time payment systems and faster settlement windows, risk is migrating to the minute level.

The tipping point is real, and it’s financial as much as it is technological. As maintenance costs mount and returns diminish, the calculus for modernization becomes unavoidable.

“Institutions, after a certain point, are being forced to throw even more resources at their liquidity management platforms, and the more resources that are added they get even less of a return,” Jerolitsch said.

A New Era of Liquidity Strategy

So, how are the most forward-thinking institutions responding? By recognizing that intraday liquidity management is more than an operational problem. It’s becoming strategic.

To do this, enterprises are turning to cloud-native platforms, real-time analytics engines, and AI-driven forecasting tools that allow treasury teams to analyze positions more dynamically, simulate future scenarios, and stress-test their balance sheets in near-real time.

FIS has been investing heavily in these capabilities. “Over the past two, three years … we’ve laid the foundations that allow us to address real-time data management, integrate in real time through API connectivity, [and] assist organizations … with strategic balance sheet management,” Jerolitsch said, pointing to the launch of their cloud-native Quantum and Liquidity Hub platforms that together capitalize on existing capabilities such as FIS Balance Sheet Manager.

These tools offer not just real-time views into global cash positions, but also the ability to model liquidity impacts under stress and measure key performance indicators against shifting regulatory and market benchmarks.

“That technology play has paid off for us. … We recognized that there is a liquidity management use case that will just become more relevant,” Jerolitsch said.

“Intraday liquidity visibility gives organizations an opportunity to allocate capital more efficiently, drive better returns, or reduce cost of funding.”

The Tipping Point of the Near Future

Looking ahead, Jerolitsch predicted that the next few years will see a convergence of regulatory deadlines, data standardization, and the enterprise-grade rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies that don’t just report, but advise, predict, and act.

“AI agents can be a great opportunity … to think about data exchange as a process with certain means that should be driving a certain outcome,” he said, hinting at future systems where treasury becomes as autonomous and predictive as a self-optimizing supply chain.

These capabilities could create a shift toward treasury becoming an engine of enterprise-wide decision support.

But one thing is certain: No institution will make this journey alone. Jerolitsch believes that the era of “best of breed” point solutions is giving way to full-stack strategic partnerships designed to solve today’s needs and prepare for the future.

“Understand the technology, understand the business vision … not just from the perspective of today, what do I need right now, but actually how can a partner help me tomorrow, next year, two years’ time?” he explained.

He also cautioned firms to consider the long-term viability of any partner. “Organizational change oftentimes disrupts firms. … Do consider the probability of any disruption happening with your partner in the future to ensure that … you’re really set up well for a long-term partnership.”