Treasury has always been expected to be precise. What’s changed is the scale of what treasury is asked to be precise about.
Across Europe, treasury and finance teams are managing more bank relationships, entities, currencies, and systems than they did even a few years ago. At the same time, leadership expectations have shifted: treasury is no longer seen only as the function that executes payments and manages cash positions, but increasingly as a partner that helps the business make faster, better decisions - especially under uncertainty.
That tension - higher complexity, higher expectations - is exactly what the Nomentia Treasury Trends Report 2026 set out to capture. Together with Juniper Research, 384 senior finance and treasury decision-makers were surveyed across the Nordics, DACH, Benelux, and the United Kingdom, spanning a broad mix of industries. The survey was conducted online in December 2025 and covered a wide set of topics across treasury operations, modernisation plans, and forward-looking strategies .
What emerged is a clear picture of where European treasury teams are today: not at the start of the journey, nor yet at the “fully connected, fully automated” destination.
Treasury is evolving faster than its operating model
A key theme in the report is the expanding remit of treasury. Beyond traditional cash and risk management, treasury teams are increasingly expected to provide strategic insight to leadership. Yet that requires data and systems that many teams still struggle to consistently assemble.
This matters because “strategic treasury” is not only about expertise. The report highlights how treasurers are perceived as closely tied to treasury maturity and the organisational environment in which they operate, especially the quality, availability, and reliability of data that enables decision support.
In other words, the role is evolving, but the underlying operating model systems, integrations, governance, and workflows often lag behind.
Most teams are in a transitional phase
One of the most practical takeaways from the report is that many treasury teams are operating in a state of limbo.The “average” profile described in the research suggests partial automation across key activities and reliance on multiple systems to run daily operations. Core activities are typically centralised at the group level, with some local execution. But end-to-end automation remains limited, and inconsistent automation across systems makes reconciliation harder than it needs to be.
That helps explain why so many teams experience the same operational friction:
- Cash and liquidity insight depends on stitching together inputs from different systems
- Reporting becomes a process of consolidation rather than interpretation
- Forecasts inherit inconsistency from the underlying data landscape
The bottleneck is rarely “lack of effort”
Across the report, fragmentation shows up as a root cause: fragmented system landscapes, siloed processes, and inconsistent data handling amplify many of the common day-to-day challenges treasury teams face.
This is also where the “mid-market reality” becomes especially visible. The report’s findings underline that typical treasury pain points can become more challenging for mid-market organisations than for large enterprises—not because the problems are different, but because resources to fix them are often more constrained.
The implication is important: modernisation programmes that assume large internal IT teams, long transformation cycles, or heavy change management may be unrealistic for many organisations. The report consistently points toward approaches that reduce integration burden, minimise disruption, and generate value in manageable steps.
Control and governance are part of the operational reality
Modernisation is often discussed through the lens of visibility and automation. The report adds another dimension: governance.
A meaningful portion of treasury teams report that policies and controls are not consistently standardised and enforced, relying instead on manual oversight or informal practices. The report highlights the risk this creates—exposure to compliance breaches, inconsistent decision-making across entities, and the potential for weaknesses to compound over time into failed audits and reduced confidence from leadership.
Just as importantly, the report indicates that proactive monitoring and exception-driven alerting are still not the norm, even when passive controls are in place. This reveals a gap between “having controls” and “operating controls as a scalable daily discipline.”
Regional differences show different starting points
While the overall themes are consistent across Europe, the report also highlights that regional conditions influence how treasury maturity, automation, and strategic perception develop.
In the Nordics, respondents show stronger reliance on manual systems and procedures, with cultural and legacy factors likely shaping adoption paths. The report links this to the ability of treasury to provide timely, accurate insight—and therefore to how strategic the role is perceived.
In Benelux, the report points to familiar barriers (such as integration complexity and cost), but also highlights organisational alignment and leadership sponsorship as a key constraint to progress in many organisations.
In DACH and the UK, the report shows comparatively higher maturity profiles, while still indicating clear room for optimisation—particularly around connectivity, intraday insight, and the foundations required for more advanced capabilities.
Taken together, the regional picture reinforces a central point: “modern treasury” is not a single upgrade. It’s a maturity path shaped by systems, governance, and organisational readiness.
What treasury teams value in modernisation approaches
Finally, the report’s findings point to what teams look for when evaluating how to move forward - especially when modernisation must happen alongside daily operations.
A recurring preference in the research is for solutions that integrate with existing environments, reduce system complexity, and enable incremental progress without requiring wholesale replacement. This is also why modular approaches - faster to integrate and easier to scale - show broad appeal in the report.
For treasury leaders, the practical question is no longer “Should we modernise?” It’s “How do we modernise in a way that actually works inside our reality—our systems, our resources, our daily workload, and our leadership expectations?”
Download the Nomentia Treasury Trends Report 2026
This article is a high-level view of what the research reveals about the operational reality of treasury teams across Europe. The full report covers the detailed findings across priorities, challenges, solution preferences, and regional profiles—based on the survey of 384 finance and treasury decision-makers conducted with Juniper Research.
