Treasury’s role in multinational corporations has expanded materially as geopolitical volatility, shifting supply chains, funding uncertainty and technology disruption reshape how businesses manage liquidity, payments and risk, according to Matthew Davies, head of Global Payments Solutions (GPS) for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and co-head of global corporate sales for GPS, and Peter Zotos, global head of client advisory and bid management at Bank of America. The shift reflects the practical pressures clients are confronting in real time. Tariffs, inflation, geopolitical disruptions and supply chain uncertainty now move more quickly from macroeconomic concern to operational consequence. A treasury function once focused primarily on liquidity management, payments execution and short-term forecasting is increasingly being asked to anticipate disruption, frame strategic options and support broader business decisions. Davies described treasury’s evolution in operational terms. If trade corridors are disrupted, customer delivery models change or geopolitical events affect business continuity, in each of these situations, treasury is often among the first functions required to respond. “If there’s a change, it impacts your own clients and the way you deliver your services,” he said. Treasury may need to accelerate collections, adjust payment timing or rethink liquidity deployment depending on how the disruption unfolds. Zotos described the same shift from the perspective of finance leadership. Historically, treasury was often expected to provide answers to defined questions: current positions, funding implications or short-term projections. That expectation has changed. “A chief financial officer is no longer simply looking for an answer,” Davies said. “They want to understand the available options, the trade-offs and the recommended course of action.” Treasury’s responsibilities have widened without reducing its traditional obligations. Treasury now sits closer to enterprise decision-making The broadening of treasury’s role reflects both external volatility and internal business pressures. Davies pointed out mergers and acquisitions, new competitive threats and changing customer expectations as forces that can create operational consequences just as quickly as geopolitical shocks. That has drawn treasury into conversations that previously sat further from its traditional mandate. Decisions around the location of shared service centres or global capability hubs, for example, increasingly intersect with treasury considerations. Businesses reassessing supply chains or entering new markets may need different banking infrastructure, new local operating capabilities or revised liquidity structures. Zotos argued that treasury teams are now expected to think much further ahead across a broader set of issues, including market developments, supply chain changes, technology dependencies and cyber risks. But the execution burden has not diminished. Treasury remains accountable for liquidity discipline, payment controls, funding management and operational continuity. Davies acknowledged that treasury teams are rarely given unlimited resources to absorb this expansion in scope. The expectation is to evolve while maintaining the same operational rigour. That helps explain why treasury transformation discussions increasingly focus on efficiency, automation and infrastructure rather than headcount expansion. Real-time treasury remains more selective than universal One of the recurring themes in client discussions is the concept of real-time treasury. Davies said that many treasury teams approach the subject with the assumption that the existence of real-time payments, application programming interface (API) connectivity and increasingly standardised data naturally points towards “always-on” treasury operations. The practical reality is more complicated. “There’s a belief, sometimes mistaken, that because real-time payments and APIs exist, treasury can simply become real time,” he said. A more realistic starting point is visibility. Davies pointed to multi-bank information reporting as a practical example of where treasury functions can already make progress. By consolidating liquidity data across multiple banking relationships, treasury teams can obtain faster and more coherent visibility across currencies, entities and markets. That materially improves decision-making. Execution raises different questions. “Not every payment needs to be real time,” Davies said. Zotos was even more direct. Most treasurers, he said, are enthusiastic about receiving funds in real time, but far less enthusiastic about making payments that way. The distinction reflects how treasury functions operate. Batch processing still provides important control mechanisms around approvals, validation and intervention if something goes wrong. In a real-time environment, recovery becomes materially harder once a payment has left the system. For the vast majority of treasury payments, the requirement is simple, for funds to arrive on time. There are exceptions though. Davies pointed to ride-hailing platforms, where instant payouts may be commercially important in attracting and retaining drivers. In such cases, real-time payments support the business model directly. But he was clear that this is fundamentally different from routine treasury operations. “That’s not a standard treasury process. That’s a business model.” Even where clients want greater optionality in payment execution, banks increasingly absorb the routing complexity. Zotos said clients can provide a payment file with the required timing, while the bank determines the most appropriate route to achieve settlement, rather than letting treasury teams determine the routing themselves. Even when the direction of travel points towards more continuous treasury environments, enterprise infrastructure remains a limiting factor. Zotos noted that enterprise platforms would themselves need to become genuinely 24/7 before treasury could realistically follow at scale. Davies added that even finance leaders seeking immediate point-in-time visibility often remain constrained by the architecture of existing enterprise resource planning platforms. AI adoption keeps returning to fundamentals Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a central feature of treasury conversations, but both executives approached the subject pragmatically. Davies said that many clients begin with urgency, driven partly by concern that peers may be moving faster in adopting AI capabilities but the conversation usually returns to fundamentals. “What are the underlying processes? Does the data have integrity? Can you trust the source?” he said. The immediate issue is not whether AI is strategically important, but whether treasury’s existing operating environment is capable of supporting it. If workflows remain fragmented, data structures inconsistent, or manual interventions excessive, adding AI creates complexity rather than solving problems. “If your processes are broken, you may simply make a bad situation worse,” Davies said. He positioned AI as part of treasury’s longer automation journey rather than a sudden break from the existing operating models. Treasury functions have already spent years automating workflows, improving information access and reducing manual processing. AI extends that progression, moving potentially from recommendations towards more advanced decision support. But decision ownership remains a hard boundary. Davies said none of the treasury clients he personally engages with are comfortable yet with allowing AI to make or execute treasury decisions autonomously. The limiting issue is accountability. “When something goes wrong, nobody wants to explain that AI made the decision.” Zotos described the current popular AI models as probabilistic rather than deterministic, and being useful in generating recommendations but not replacing human judgement. That distinction is likely to shape treasury AI adoption for some time. Advisory is becoming part of transaction banking differentiation The broadening of treasury’s responsibilities has also changed what clients expect from banking partners. Zotos’ treasury advisory function reflects that shift directly. The team includes former corporate treasury practitioners, creating peer-level engagement with clients confronting operational and strategic challenges. The objective is not conventional consulting. It is to help treasury teams think through developments such as automation, policy changes and process redesign. Zotos described the model through a simple analogy. “My team diagnoses, and the salesperson prescribes.” The wider ambition, he said, is for the broader organisation to think more like advisers rather than purely product providers. That reflects the nature of treasury relationships. “These are long-term relationships,” Zotos said. Clients increasingly expect banking partners to understand their operational challenges rather than simply presenting products. Davies made the commercial implication explicit. “A payment is a payment,” he said, arguing that basic payments execution is increasingly becoming commoditised. Davies argued that in an increasingly commoditised payments environment, differentiation comes less from moving funds and more from advisory quality and service execution. The first helps deepen strategic relationships. The second matters when exceptions, problems or operational complexity emerge. Asia is reshaping treasury expectations Asia Pacific (APAC) featured prominently while discussing trade finance trends because of changing trade patterns and the pace of infrastructure development. Davies noted that intra-Asia trade has evolved significantly over the past five to six years. Flows are no longer simply between Asia and Western markets. “Intra-Asia trade is not just east-west. It’s moving in every direction.” That has practical implications for treasury. Many clients are increasingly headquartered within Asia, with supply chains and treasury flows concentrated within the region rather than linked primarily to Europe or the United States. Bank of America’s response has been to expand domestic operating capabilities across multiple Asian markets to support both multinational and regionally headquartered clients. That local market presence also matters in execution. Davies pointed to practical areas such as foreign exchange and beneficiary currency handling, where understanding whether a beneficiary account should receive local currency, and embedding that knowledge into the payment workflow, can improve execution efficiency and pricing. Zotos argued that Asia is also structurally ahead in payments infrastructure. “Asia has probably the most advanced payment infrastructure environment in the world,” he said. He pointed to a concrete measure: More than half of global real-time payments volume now sits within the region. Regulators, he said, have played a major role in driving infrastructure development and are increasingly pushing cross-border interoperability. According to Bank of America, the Asia-Pacific payments market has reached an estimated $18 trillion in transaction value and continues to grow at a double-digit pace annually. In subsequent remarks, Winnie Chen, head of GPS for Asia Pacific, noted that 'APAC has clearly taken a lead in advancing real-time cross-border payments'. “This momentum is being driven by a rapidly evolving payments ecosystem, strong regulatory collaboration, and the accelerated development of innovative tech-driven payments solutions,” she added. Davies compared that with North America, where comparable regional interoperability remains less developed. For treasury teams operating in Asia, infrastructure expectations are already materially different. Treasury’s challenge is disciplined evolution For Davies and Zotos, practical discipline remains around stronger visibility, better operating processes and selective adoption of new tools, rather than transformation for its own sake. Treasury teams are being asked to engage more strategically, respond faster to volatility and adopt new tools that improve visibility and efficiency, while remaining accountable for control, liquidity discipline and operational reliability. Technology can support that transition, but it does not remove the need for judgement. The harder question is how far treasury’s evolution should go without undermining the operational discipline that remains its foundation.
