August 17, 2026
The 2026 treasury management trends are by no means a surprise. As volatility persists, data availability expectations rise, and risks multiply, treasury teams continue to prioritize visibility and resilience — and technology remains a key enabler of both.
Treasury may be heading toward unified data views and automated processes, but it’s not there yet. TD Bank’s October 2025 survey is clear: almost 80% of treasury professionals are still stuck with fragmented systems and manual processes.
So, the transition may be underway, but it’s not a done deal yet.
Here’s how technology and business priorities are shaping it in 2026 and beyond.
Businesses continue to use a mix of payment methods, but real-time payments are steadily gaining ground. In the United States, instant payments were the most frequently used payment method among businesses in 2025, ahead of ACH and wire transfers by over 15 points. In the EU, payment service providers are now mandated to offer instant payments, as per the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR).
As real-time payment adoption accelerates, treasuries have little choice but to adapt to faster payment execution. That means:
Real-time payments hold real promise, but they can quickly turn into a headache if existing ERP/TMS systems and payment hubs aren’t integrated. This is where APIs come in: they link both internal and external systems, enabling them to exchange data promptly and securely.
Open banking regulations are largely to thank for the banking API connectivity possible today. As banks have been mandated to offer APIs to their partners, ERP and TMS systems can now connect directly to banks’ systems and capture real-time cash flow data.
Yet, APIs’ potential doesn’t stop there. Open banking APIs can provide real-time FX rates and market data. They can also be used to initiate actions like direct debits without leaving internal systems. As the BNY and Datos Insights report points out, 90% of cross-border payments are still powered by traditional banking, making those integrations as valuable as ever.
The use of AI in banking and payments operations is booming. The BNY and Datos Insights report found that the adoption rate jumped 16 points year-on-year, reaching 50% in 2025.
While the technology’s potential is immense, adoption remains uneven. For example, only 17% of organizations use the technology to combat payment fraud, as per the 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. What’s more, a mere 3% of treasury organizations were ready to call their AI capabilities mature in a 2025 PwC survey. Most said they were either in the experimental or pilot phase (42%) or early stages of implementation (31%).
What drives corporate treasury to go all in on AI? The promise of automation, operational efficiency, enhanced risk management, competitive differentiation and smarter decision-making — that’s the answer. Here’s how AI is poised to make that promise come true:
That shift toward agentic AI is already underway. Rather than progressing through the traditional cycle of manual processes, basic automation and then analytics, some treasury teams are leaping straight to AI-powered forecasting, anomaly detection and liquidity modeling, particularly where the capabilities are embedded directly into existing TMS and ERP platforms. Real-time fraud monitoring is where the shift matters most: treasury is already the department most likely to catch an attempted fraud, cited by 83% of organizations in the 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, with business email compromise alone striking 74% of organizations in 2025 — a scale that manual, rules-based screening struggles to match. That being said, Teams adopting agentic AI need to pair it with human oversight for exceptions and active model risk management, since a forecasting or reconciliation model trained on stable conditions can misfire the moment those conditions change, whether that’s a rate shock or an ERP migration.
The two treasury management trends we’ve already listed impact not only treasury teams but also cloud treasury management system (TMS) vendors. They’re expanding their capabilities to:
External and internal connectivity have always been core to the value proposition of TMSs. So, it’s no wonder that we’re seeing vendors expand their libraries of out-of-the-box integrations and APIs to unify data, automate processes and power straight-through processing (STP).
Advances in generative AI, in turn, pave the way for reporting automation within TMSs. Thanks to this technology, reports can now be generated instantaneously. What’s more, generative AI can make data more easily accessible through conversational search.
Digital assets are also rising in prominence, and TMS vendors are taking note. According to Ripple's 2026 survey of more than 1,000 global finance leaders, 72% said they must offer a digital asset solution to remain competitive but lack a starting point compatible with existing workflows. That's a striking gap: strong demand but no easy entry point, which is exactly the opening TMS vendors are moving into. For example, Murex integrated Quant’s programmable money infrastructure into its MX.3 platform. That infrastructure powers support for tokenized deposits and digital bonds.
For treasury teams building a digital asset strategy, the emerging trends point to a few practical priorities:
ERP systems hold critical data: payables, receivables, the general ledger. That data is the backbone of financial operations, and the treasury function can’t make do without access to it.
Yet, only 40% of corporate treasury departments use fully integrated ERP/TMS ecosystems. Another 40% use one or several ERP systems with limited integrations, while 20% still rely mostly on spreadsheets and manual processes.
The organizations that do leverage ERP integration, however, stand to reap a lot of benefits. Unhindered data flows between the ERP and TMS:
The result? Everyone across functions relies on a shared, accurate, real-time view of the organization’s financial health. That means faster decisions, cleaner processes — and increased trust in numbers.
Of course, ERP integration isn’t always straightforward. Certain homegrown ERP systems may require middleware or modernization to be integrated with other systems.
In addition to that, truly breaking data silos isn’t a matter of a single integration. It’s a matter of consolidating data from multiple sources in a single place, such as a data lake or warehouse. Organizations also need a data architecture, like a Data Mesh, to manage and use that data.
In many jurisdictions, ISO 20022 is already the messaging standard for payments, securities, FX operations and trade services:
While the transition has been underway for several years now, treasury teams are only starting to pay attention to what it means for their function. A survey at a 2025 ACT conference showed as much: half of the participants said they were aware of ISO 20022, compared with fewer than a quarter in 2024.
For now, ISO 20022 coexists with legacy standards, but the upcoming years will mark the end of their support. In November 2026, SWIFT will stop accepting unstructured postal addresses. Over the next two years, legacy MT messages will be progressively phased out.
Ignoring this transition can spell trouble for the treasury in the form of:
The advent of ISO 20022 isn’t merely a new legal requirement to comply with, however. It’s also an opportunity for treasury teams to:
Instant payments and faster data flows — and shortening cash conversion cycles as a result — make slow, cyclical risk management archaic. The velocity of modern business requires a new method: one that relies on real-time risk visibility, dynamic controls and instant or near-instant response speed.
Digital tools are the only way to enable this dynamic, real-time risk management. The three key technology trends in treasury management shaping it are:
Multiplying macroeconomic and geopolitical events create a sense of “omnicrisis,” and continued disruption has become business as usual for 72% of treasury professionals. That is shifting priorities to balance-sheet resilience and debt repayment.
With volatility becoming the rule rather than the exception, treasury is becoming a frontline risk defense. After all, a five-percent swing in FX rates can erode millions in operating profit, especially for exporters with tight margins. A jump in interest rates, in turn, can substantially raise financing costs.
In practice, preparing for continuous volatility forces the treasury to shift its priorities to:
It should come as no surprise that trade professionals cite US tariff volatility as the number one regulatory/customs change by its impact. But that doesn’t mean that other changes aren’t impacting trade and treasury alike. Export controls and country-specific sanctions continue to affect treasury planning and cross-border activity.
These are hardly new trends in treasury management: the world already experienced a trade war in 2018-19. That said, treasury teams’ response to geopolitical risk in cross-border operations is evolving.
Advances in predictive analytics, for one, herald the end of quarterly stress tests. What replaces them? Real-time scenario analysis and dynamic scenario modeling. Thanks to these capabilities, a new tariff announcement doesn’t have to cause panic. Teams can easily model its downstream impacts across liquidity, working capital and hedge ratios — all in a matter of hours, not weeks.
Centralized exposure visibility is also rapidly becoming a matter of survival. Of course, it requires breaking data silos and connecting systems — a resource-intensive undertaking for some. But the payoff is well worth it: a unified view of FX, commodity, counterparty and interest rate exposures. This view always displays the most recent data; no quarterly updates required.
Centralized exposure visibility is the foundation for proactive risk management. It enables leaders to see how a regulatory change could reverberate across operations, thus helping them make the right decisions to mitigate its impact.
Payment fraud, ransomware attacks, business email compromise (BEC) scams, data breaches — these are just a few cyber-related threats that treasury teams now have to include in their definition of financial risk. After all, a single attack could lead to substantial financial losses, reputational damage (which may lower revenue) and penalties from regulators.
As treasury systems are growing more connected and automated, they become prime targets for cybercriminals. Luckily, the 2025 PwC survey shows that treasury leaders are well aware of just how crucial preventing them is. Most (81%) have already invested or plan to invest in cybersecurity enhancements.
Yet, treasury teams still have a long way to go. For one, there’s often a disconnect between treasury and IT teams that must be overcome first. Beyond that, treasury teams need to move to a proactive approach to cybersecurity that involves:
Reliance on third-party tools, cloud infrastructure, and technology creates an often-overlooked risk vector: supply chain and third-party compromises. A single outage in an AWS region, for example, can have a ripple effect: in October 2025, it caused failures across multiple systems relying on DynamoDB, from Venmo to Ring doorbells.
More than 70% of organizations experienced at least one third-party cyber incident within 12 months, according to a 2025 report.
Traditional compliance-driven models based on due diligence questionnaires and annual reviews are falling short. What should replace them? Consistent, comparable, decision-ready assurance mechanisms that rely on continuous monitoring and risk assessment. A zero-trust security model should also become a standard requirement for vendors.
Treasury teams have a vital role to play in protecting operational resilience if cyberthreats ever become cyberincidents. It falls on them to ensure businesses can follow through on their financial commitments despite major disruptions (e.g., third-party system outages, cyberattacks). In practice, that means creating a minimum viable finance function that:
In a world of accelerating disruption and increasing volatility, the treasury function must be recognized for what it is: a business-critical function that ensures operational resilience and protects the organization against risk.
However, to fulfill this role, treasury teams need the right digital tools and infrastructure at their disposal. In other words, siloed data, fragmented systems and manual processes have to go.
That’s why these 2026 treasury management trends drive treasury transformation across organizations, jurisdictions and industries. This transformation is a journey toward the future of treasury: instant intelligence, accurate forecasting, proactive risk management, smarter forecasting, broader automation and tighter controls.
