Unlocking the commercial value of payments
Treasury has long been defined by what it controls – risk, liquidity, compliance. But as payments infrastructure modernises and data becomes a strategic asset, can treasury teams generate commercial returns from the very systems they use to move money? The answer, increasingly, is yes – but it requires fundamentally rethinking what payments are for.
For most of corporate history, the payments function has moved money reliably, at low cost, with appropriate controls. Efficiency was the goal; visibility was a bonus. Yet, the convergence of real-time settlement, AI-powered analytics, and open API infrastructure is allowing treasury teams to do something qualitatively new – generate value from payment flows.
This structural shift arrives when CFOs and boards are asking hard questions about commercial performance, not just operational competence. According to research by PWC, 65% of organisations are planning to expand API use in the next few years, while treasury teams at $10+bn revenue organizations are investing in in-house banks (67% adoption), payment factories (60%) and payments on behalf of (POBO) models (50%) to consolidate flows, improve control and reduce costs
What are the big payments developments helping businesses?
- Over the past five years payments infrastructure has undergone quiet but consequential change. Real-time payment networks – Faster Payments in the UK, SEPA Instant across Europe, FedNow in the United States – mean that settlement takes seconds rather than days, and cash positioning is genuinely dynamic. Idle balances shrink. The float that once sat in transit becomes available capital. For a multinational processing thousands of transactions daily, it presents a material working capital improvement.
- ISO 20022 migration deserves equal attention, even if it gets fewer headlines. When every payment carries granular reference data – counterparty identifiers, invoice numbers, purpose codes – reconciliation improves, exception handling reduces, predictability of payment outcome strengthens, and the analytical potential of the payment flow increases substantially.
- Virtual accounts enable multinationals to rationalise sprawling bank account estates without losing the granularity needed for entity-level reporting. What previously required dozens of physical accounts across multiple banking relationships can increasingly be managed through a single master account with virtual sub-structures – reducing fees, aiding reconciliations, simplifying liquidity pooling and improving visibility.
- Tokenisation warrants separate emphasis. By removing dependence on traditional payment rails for certain transaction types, tokenisation enables instant and secure deployment of available funds globally, driving capital efficiency in new ways. Beyond transaction speed, tokenisation is beginning to unlock liquidity in assets that were previously illiquid or intangible – opening genuinely new funding avenues for businesses willing to explore the frontier.
AI and data offer an intelligence dividend
Alongside infrastructure changes have come improvements in understanding payments – and the ability to act on it. AI-powered cashflow forecasting has moved from experimental to operational at a growing number of large corporates. Models trained on historical payment data, seasonal patterns, and external macroeconomic signals are now generating short-term liquidity forecasts with accuracy levels that allow treasury teams to run materially leaner precautionary cash buffers. In an environment where yield on deployed cash matters, reducing idle reserves by even a small percentage represents genuine commercial value.
Intelligent payment routing – selecting the optimal rail, timing, and counterparty for each payment based on cost, speed, and risk – is beginning to deliver measurable savings at scale. As payment options multiply across traditional bank rails, real-time networks, and emerging alternatives, the case for manual routing decisions weakens. Machine learning models that process routing decisions in milliseconds, optimising against a defined cost function, are increasingly the right answer.
Fraud detection has advanced in parallel, as machine learning applied to transaction pattern analysis has significantly improved anomaly detection, particularly for cross-border and high-volume flows where manual review is impractical. The commercial benefit is twofold: direct loss reduction, and the operational efficiency of reducing false positives that create friction without improving security.
The largest opportunity, however, may be spend analytics. Continuous interrogation of payment data – rather than in quarterly snapshots – allows treasury to gain insights that previously required a significant analytical effort to produce: supplier concentration risks, early-pay discount opportunities, working capital inefficiencies embedded in payment terms.
That shift from periodic to continuous is not incremental. It changes what treasury can credibly offer to the business.
Embedded and real-time payments also drive something less quantifiable but commercially significant: customer experience. Businesses that can offer instant settlement, transparent payment tracking, and frictionless refunds create competitive differentiation that can translate into loyalty and retention – outcomes that sit well beyond the traditional treasury mandate but are increasingly within its reach.
Treasury is becoming a connected nerve centre for business
New infrastructure and intelligence only deliver value if payment data flows freely across the organisation. This is the integration imperative, and it is where many treasury transformations stall.
Modern treasury management systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms are increasingly API-enabled, allowing real-time connectivity. Open Banking APIs, in particular, provide direct access to domestic bank accounts with real-time balances, payments, and transaction data, optimising cost and speed.
And the same connected infrastructure is transforming supply chain finance. Dynamic discounting programmes that respond to real-time cash positions – rather than operating on fixed payment schedules – allow treasury to deploy surplus liquidity productively while offering suppliers early payment certainty. This is a genuine win-win, and it is becoming more accessible as connectivity improves.
Cross-border payment corridors, historically the most opaque and expensive dimension of corporate payments, are being disrupted by alternatives that offer better FX economics and full end-to-end payment tracking. For treasury teams managing significant international payment volumes, the cost and visibility improvements available today versus five years ago are substantial.
