Why Treasury Doesn’t Get the Recognition It Deserves (And What CFOs Are Missing)

Treasury’s Been the Junior Partner for Years

Go back 15-20 years, and a lot of businesses didn’t really have a Treasury function at all – it was the Financial Controller quietly doing the treasury work alongside everything else, because nobody had made the case for anything more. Treasury has made real progress since then. It’s no longer treated as an afterthought bolted onto Finance. But it’s still playing catch-up, and it’s still not as prevalent as it should be.

I’ve spoken to businesses carrying serious debt (the kind of balance sheet where you’d expect a dedicated Treasurer as standard) and found the treasury work split across six or seven accountants instead. Nobody planned it that way. It’s just never been questioned, and it makes zero sense once you actually look at it.

Outside the FTSE 250, most businesses I work with are still running Treasury with a single person, and that’s been the most consistent thing I’ve seen in 17 years of doing this. It’s not always because the workload doesn’t justify more – I’ve seen plenty of solo Treasurers covering everything from daily cash pooling to genuinely complex risk and funding work that would benefit from a proper team around it. It’s more that nobody’s ever stopped to question whether one person is actually enough. It’s just how it’s always been done, so it stays that way, right up until something breaks.

Why CFOs Default to What They Know

Here’s the bit that explains most of the rest, in my experience: most CFOs come up through an FD route, not a Treasury one. That’s not a dig – it’s just where their background sits, and people naturally back what they know.

The knock-on effect is a modernisation gap. Finance tends to get the investment case made for it almost automatically. Treasury has to build its own case, over and over, usually without anyone senior in the room who’s lived it from the inside.

A good CFO should know it’s hand in glove – Treasury and Finance modernising together, not one after the other. But when the person holding the budget has come up through Finance rather than Treasury, Treasury is the one that ends up waiting its turn. I don’t think it’s deliberate. I think it’s just human nature.

It’s not only something I hear anecdotally, either. The Association of Corporate Treasurers’ 2025 CFO Survey, run with Zanders, found that CFOs themselves recognise the greatest value sits in treasury, risk and transformation, but their time is still swallowed by reporting and compliance, at a real cost to the business. The value is there in black and white. The investment doesn’t always follow it.

It’s an Education Problem, Not an Importance Problem

Clients I speak to understand that liquidity and cash flow matter. Nobody’s arguing with that. What’s often missing is the next step – actually connecting a well-resourced Treasury function to how efficiently the rest of the business runs.

Ask most people outside finance what Marketing does, and they’ll have a rough go at it. Ask them what Treasury does, and more than once I’ve had people ask if it’s something to do with the government. It’s a function quietly managing a company’s cash, risk and liquidity day in, day out – and it gets almost none of the credit for doing that job well.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Here’s where it actually bites. I regularly see one person handling everything in a Treasury function – the day-to-day admin work, the cash pooling, and the more complex risk and funding decisions, all at once. A lot of that admin work is genuinely low-value. It doesn’t need a senior Treasurer’s time, but it eats hours out of their week regardless.

The fix is usually straightforward and relatively cheap. Bring in a Treasury Analyst on somewhere around £38-45K to take the repetitive work off the senior person’s plate, and you free them up to focus on the parts of the role that actually move the needle – forecasting, funding, risk. I’ve seen the maths on this play out with clients more than once. The efficiency gain is obvious, but the budget conversation still doesn’t happen because Treasury is rarely the department that gets first refusal on new headcount, however small.

It’s an understandable decision in isolation. Nobody’s deliberately underinvesting. It’s just never quite the priority, and that’s exactly the pattern this whole article is about.

Where Technology Fits

This same gap shows up in how Treasury invests in technology, and it’s worth flagging even though I want to dig into it properly in a future piece once I’ve spoken to more Treasurers directly.

It’s worth saying Treasury hasn’t stood still on tech. When I first started recruiting into this market, treasury management system implementations were new enough that businesses regularly brought in one of the Big Four, or an independent consultant, just to get the system in. That’s shifted a lot.

TMS providers now build in so much more out of the box that most treasury teams can run implementations themselves, without needing that outside help. People understand the technology better than they used to, and that’s a step forward.

But the AI conversation is a different one, and it’s happening much more slowly. A recent Coalition Greenwich survey of over 100 corporate Treasurers found that fewer than 10% currently use AI for core work like forecasting or fraud detection, and half haven’t started using it at all. Gartner’s broader research on enterprise AI adoption shows the same story – Finance and Treasury consistently trailing functions like Marketing and Supply Chain. It’s a pattern we’ve written about more broadly too – most AI programmes follow a similar path and stall for reasons that have very little to do with the technology itself.

I don’t think that’s reluctance from Treasurers themselves. It’s the same investment problem showing up one level down – it’s hard to get budget for AI tooling in a function that’s still fighting to get budget for the basics.

What Needs to Change

None of this shifts on its own. It takes someone in the room willing to make the case, loudly and often. In my experience, that’s always been where it’s fallen down – Treasury needs a strong-willed Treasurer with the personality to push its capabilities forward and actually show what the function is worth.

The other half of it sits with the CFO. The moment a business recognises that Treasury and Finance need to modernise together, not in sequence, everything downstream starts to shift – the budget conversations, the hiring, the technology, and ultimately how seriously Treasury gets taken across the rest of the business.

It’s the same conclusion we’ve reached looking at finance transformation more broadly: the technology rarely fails on its own – it’s the leadership case around it that decides whether it gets the investment it needs.

I keep coming back to the same thought after 17 years of doing this: Treasury doesn’t have a value problem. It has an attention problem. The businesses that get it right aren’t the ones with the biggest balance sheets – they’re the ones where someone senior decided Treasury deserved a seat at the table and then actually gave it one. Everyone else is still waiting their turn behind a finance system upgrade.

That’s the gap I’d like to see close. Not because Treasury needs rescuing, but because the businesses that keep underinvesting in it are quietly paying for that decision in ways they’ve never quite connected back to the source.

If you’re rethinking how your Treasury function is resourced or structured, I’m always happy to talk it through – get in touch directly at [email protected]

Sources

• Association of Corporate Treasurers / Zanders, 2025 CFO Survey — treasurers.org
• Coalition Greenwich (Crisil), AI in Corporate Treasury survey, reported via Bloomberg — bloomberg.com
• Gartner research on enterprise AI adoption, cited in Ripple Treasury, Agentic AI in Treasury Management — treasury.ripple.com