From the outside, it looks like control. Dashboards. Reports. Daily check-ins. But talk to anyone in treasury, and the truth comes out fast: it’s not control. It’s the illusion of it.
Behind the numbers is a daily scramble. Outdated data. The tools don’t talk to each other. Manual work dressed up as a process. And the real cash position? Always a little fuzzy, always a little too late.
Treasury teams aren’t confused. They’re constrained. They’re being boxed in by tools and thinking that no longer fit the job. And as long as that illusion holds, every decision made carries more risk than anyone wants to admit.
The experts
Sarah Häger
Sarah Häger is Chief Commercial Officer at Enable Banking and a leading voice in Open Banking. With over 15 years in corporate banking (including six years heading Nordea’s Open Banking Community team), she has deep expertise in financial data infrastructure and API development. At Enable Banking, she helps businesses gain better access to their financial data, a critical factor in improving cash visibility and control. Named one of Sweden’s top 75 future female leaders in 2019, Sarah is passionate about using regulation and technology to drive smarter financial decision-making.
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Jouni Kirjola
Jouni Kirjola is the Head of Solutions and Pre-Sales at Nomentia with over 20 years of experience in corporate cash management and has deep expertise in cash forecasting, payment factories, in-house banking, and process development.
The seven sins of cash positioning
Treasury teams are told to manage risk better, improve forecasting accuracy, and ensure liquidity. But the system is rigged against them.
Take Olivia. She’s the Group Treasurer at a multinational with operations in 22 countries and over 150 bank accounts. On paper, she’s responsible for ensuring liquidity and optimizing working capital. In practice, she spends most of her day fighting systems that weren’t built for the job. She knows where the money should be. But knowing where it actually is? That’s a different story.
Her frustration isn’t unique. It’s structural. And it shows up in seven distinct — and persistent — ways.
1. Cash moves fast. Financial data does not
Payments are instant now. Customers pay in real time. Suppliers expect the same. But the treasurer's view of the company's cash lags by hours, sometimes days. Her reports depend on batch processes, delayed bank feeds, and manual updates. By the time the numbers hit her screen, they're already stale. She's expected to act in real-time with data that simply isn't.
"Many treasurers today are still making decisions based on yesterday’s data in a world that moves in real time. This isn’t a technology gap anymore. It’s an adoption problem." –Sarah Häger, Chief Commercial Officer, Enable Banking
2. Too many banks. Too little integration
Her company has grown fast — through acquisitions, expansions, and regional deals. The result? A sprawl of banking relationships, each with its own portal, file format, and time zone. The treasury team jumps between systems just to check balances. There’s no consolidated view, no standard feed, and no way to get everyone looking at the same version of cash at the same time.
"Every additional bank adds complexity, not just in reconciliation, but in contract management, compliance, access control, and real-time visibility. Without harmonized integration, it’s death by a thousand portals." –Jouni Kirjola, Head of Solutions and Pre-Sales, Nomentia
3. Tools that weren't built for real-time cash visibility
The enterprise software stack was built for finance. Not treasury. ERPs are good at historicals, not live positioning. Olivia’s ERP can close the books, but it can’t tell her if she can move $5M today. APIs could help, but getting them to work across fragmented systems is expensive, time-consuming, and politically difficult. The treasurer’s toolkit is full of software but light on visibility.
"ERPs weren’t built for liquidity decision-making. Treasury needs tools designed for now, not the month-end."— Sarah Häger
4. Manual labor, modern stakes
The mornings start in spreadsheets. Every. Single. Day. The process hasn’t changed in years: log into five bank portals, export yesterday’s balances, copy them into Excel, and manually roll it up into a position report. It's slow, error-abundant, and draining. And yet, this is still the most reliable method the treasury team has. One wrong cell and the whole forecast is off, but she’s still expected to hit accuracy targets.
"When spreadsheets are your source of truth, you're not managing liquidity. You're gambling with it." –Jouni Kirjola
5. There is no single source of truth for cash
Sometimes, Olivia's numbers say one thing, the controller's dashboard another, and the CFO sees something else entirely. Why? Because cash is scattered across entities, systems, and regions. There's no single source of truth, just partial pictures, gut feeling, and, worst of all, old reports. And the treasurer has to live with the consequences.
6. Cross-border cash chaos
The further the money goes, the less visibility she has. Asia-Pacific reports late. Latin America comes with conversion surprises. Europe follows its own rules. Every geography adds complexity. From time zones to regulatory delays to currency risks. The treasurer is supposed to optimize global liquidity. But the system is so fragmented that she can’t even be sure how much is truly available, let alone where and when.
7. Lack of automation and API adoption
APIs are everywhere — except where she needs them. The banks talk a good game about real-time APIs. Providers like Enable Banking, for example, make those APIs accessible across Europe, even for companies with complex infrastructure. But Olivia’s internal setup is weighed down by competing priorities, siloed teams, and long IT queues. The potential is there, but turning it into a working reality still feels like pushing water uphill.
"APIs shouldn’t be thought of as a tech upgrade. They’re an operating model shift. Real-time data flow is the foundation for modern treasury."— Jouni Kirjola
Judgment day: Decision without vision
Olivia knows the risks aren’t just operational. They’re existential.
Because when cash visibility is broken, decision-making happens in the dark, and that darkness is expensive.
It starts subtly. A missed payment window. A short-term borrowing decision that turns out to be unnecessary. A forecast that swings too wide, too late. Leadership doesn’t panic. Instead, they tighten controls. More reviews. More reporting. More pressure. But not more clarity.
- Then come the bigger hits.
- Liquidity gaps appear without warning.
- Working capital gets locked in the wrong places.
- Cash is hoarded “just in case,” while expensive credit lines are tapped unnecessarily.
- FX exposure isn’t hedged in time.
- Investments get delayed because no one can say with confidence what’s truly available.
Strategic agility dies slowly, one misinformed decision at a time. And when things go wrong, the treasury gets the heat.
Olivia’s team didn’t cause the data delays. They didn’t design the systems. But they own the numbers, so they own the fallout. Leadership demands answers, not context. Treasury is expected to do more with less: explain inaccuracies they didn’t create and forecast liquidity they can’t fully see.
They get blamed but not backed. Held accountable but not empowered.
And what could have been a strategic function (one that helps steer the business, shape capital strategy, and unlock growth) is reduced to a reactive unit. Always reporting. Never driving.
The real enemy
It’s easy to blame the tools. The outdated ERPs. The fragmented bank feeds. The copy-paste rituals that eat up the morning.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: those tools could have been replaced.
The APIs exist. Automation is real. Solutions are available. Providers like Enable Banking already deliver pan-European bank connectivity through regulated APIs. The problem isn’t absence. It’s avoidance.
So why haven’t these obvious fixes been made?
Why is it still acceptable for treasury teams to operate without real-time visibility?
Why is the expectation for strategic thinking so high, while the support for it is so low?
The answer isn’t technical. It’s cultural.
Organizations are still structured around legacy thinking:
- Treasury as a cost center, not a strategic driver.
- Risk aversion disguised as prudence.
- IT bottlenecks and cross-functional turf wars.
- Decision-makers who don’t fully grasp what’s at stake until it’s too late.
The inertia is systemic. But it's also internal. Treasury professionals often know what needs to change. They’ve proposed integrations. They’ve flagged the risks. They’ve asked for better tools.
Often, they’re not lacking clarity. They’re lacking permission.
Permission to modernize. Permission to challenge “how it’s always been done.” Permission to treat cash visibility not as a nice-to-have but as a baseline requirement for business survival.
Until that permission is granted (or fought for) Olivia will keep logging into ten portals every morning, assembling a cash picture that's already outdated, and preparing to defend numbers she didn't break in meetings she can't miss, with answers she can't trust.
The real enemy isn’t the data. It’s the mindset that says, “Good enough is good enough.”
“Change doesn’t fail because the tech isn’t ready. It fails because the culture isn’t. Treasury needs the mandate, not just the tools."— Sarah Häger
Clarity is the only way forward (and you already know that)
Let’s be honest: none of this is news to you. You’ve seen the gaps. You’ve felt the drag of outdated systems and out-of-touch expectations. You’ve sat in meetings where decisions were made on incomplete data, and you’ve carried the fallout quietly. Because that’s the job.
But through it all, you’ve known the answer. Real-time visibility. Integrated systems. Automation that doesn’t just move faster, but makes sense.
You don’t need another article telling you what best practice looks like. You’ve been advocating for it. What you need is validation. And permission to keep pushing.
Because the modern treasurer isn’t someone who just balances liquidity. They shape strategy. They empower the business with reliable data. They collaborate across functions, across geographies, and across systems. They're not reactive. They're anticipatory. They don't just manage risk. They help the company move with confidence.
So, the question isn’t whether you understand what’s needed. It's whether the organization is finally ready to listen. Because clarity isn't a luxury, it's the only way forward.
And you've known that all along.
