Let's get real about treasury

"Treasury will never let go of Excel." Right? 

In this article, Nomentia CEO Alexander von Schirmeister reflects on an encounter with a Treasury Manager that sparked the question: Why do treasury teams hold on to spreadsheets and what does that really tell us about the state of modern finance?

Drawing on fresh data from Nomentia's Treasury Trends Report, he makes the case that the real issue isn't the tools people use, but the fragility hiding behind the ingenuity of the people using them. 

About the author

Alexander von Schirmeister is Nomentia's CEO and leader with over three decades of professional experience across industries and continents, having held large regional CMO and general management/P&L roles. 

Just the other day I sat next to a Treasury Manager, and watched her work wonders on Excel. I don't know about you, but I am always in awe when I see a proper Excel "whizz-kid" at work. My own Excel skills peaked sometime in the late 90s when I was doing simple pivot tables as a consultant, and I am secretly envious of those who honed that skill. There is something almost meditative about watching someone navigate a complex spreadsheet with complete fluency: the keyboard shortcuts, the nested formulas, the instinctive sense of where everything lives. And as I watched, she told me —not for the first time— that treasury will never let go of Excel.

My reaction wasn't dismissal. It was curiosity. Because if that's true, it's worth understanding why.

The easy take is to frame Excel as the problem. The outdated tool holding finance back. But that misses something important. Treasurers aren't clinging to spreadsheets because they resist change — they're clinging to them because they've become extraordinarily good at making them work. I've come across companies running global cash forecasting on a single spreadsheet so complex it took thirty minutes just to open. That's not laziness. That's remarkable and very respectable ingenuity under pressure. It's also, if I'm honest, a little bit impressive. The human capacity to build something functional out of whatever tools are available is one of the things I genuinely admire about finance professionals.

The problem is that ingenuity has a ceiling — and carries a massive risk.

The world isn't getting more stable. Volatility has become a baseline condition, not an exception. Liquidity can tighten faster than models expect. Supply chains fracture. Currency moves surprise. Interest rate environments shift in ways that confound even the most seasoned forecasters. And treasury is where pressure shows up first. Cash and liquidity don't lie. When surprises start appearing in your cash position, they're rarely isolated. They're usually a signal of wider fragility in the organisation. Treasury doesn't just manage risk. It reveals it.

None of this is unprecedented, of course. I work with many experienced leaders who were in the room during the 2008–2009 Great Financial Crisis. They'll tell you that the shapes change —inflation, rate shocks, geopolitical disruption, a pandemic nobody modelled— but the underlying dynamics don't. Uncertainty isn't temporary. It doesn't resolve and go away. It just takes different forms and arrives on a different schedule. The leaders who navigate it well are the ones who stopped waiting for stability and started building for adaptability instead.

What has changed, meaningfully, is the pace at which weaknesses get exposed.

Our recent Treasury Trends Report, conducted with Juniper Research, puts some numbers to this. 56% of treasury teams say they're satisfied with their current level of automation. That sounds reassuring — until you consider the other half. A third of teams lack standardised, consistently enforced controls. 62% of finance leaders cite data silos and fragmented systems as a moderate to severe operational challenge. And 39% are prioritising liquidity and funding resilience as a direct response to economic uncertainty.

Put those numbers together: resilience is a priority, controls are inconsistent, and systems are fragmented. That's not a criticism of the people involved. In most cases they're doing an exceptional job with what they have. It's a description of a structural reality, and realities have consequences whether or not we name them.

I'll return to my favourite quote, because it is so true: the seven most expensive words in business are "we have always done it this way."

The failure mode here is rarely dramatic. It's gradual. A point of efficiency lost here, a workaround normalised there, controls becoming informal over time. The boiling frog problem. Smart, capable people compensating for weak systems with sheer effort and personal expertise — holding it all together through force of will. Until something breaks. Until the person who knew where everything lived leaves. Until a reconciliation that used to take a day starts taking a week. And suddenly there's no room to manoeuvre. They hit the wall, and the wall arrived faster than anyone expected.

Technology alone won't solve this. I've sat through enough pitches to know that another dashboard, another AI-generated insight, another automated alert doesn't replace judgement. And I'd be cautious of anyone who tells you otherwise. Treasury is too important for "move fast and break things." Every payment matters. Every cash position matters. The stakes are genuinely existential. And the organisations that treat treasury as a back-office function rather than a strategic nerve centre tend to find that out the hard way.

But doing nothing is also a decision. It just defers the consequences and usually compounds them.

Getting real about treasury doesn't mean abandoning what works. Excel will be around for a long time. It belongs in the toolkit, and the people who are brilliant at it should be celebrated, not replaced. What it means is being honest about where effort is masking fragility. About where "working well enough today" might not hold under tomorrow's conditions. About whether the system you have is genuinely resilient, or whether it's resilient because one or two exceptional people are quietly holding it together.

Change is always coming. It always has. The organisations that navigate it well aren't the ones who react fastest when the crisis hits. They're the ones who had the conversation earlier, when there was still time to think clearly and act deliberately.

That's the conversation worth having.