Tariffs, artificial intelligence, currency volatility, and geopolitical changes are among the forces affecting treasury functions worldwide. At the EuroFinance annual Treasury & Cash Management Summit in the West Coast, three senior treasurers shared a simple message: get the basics right, and everything else will follow.

Jennifer Bifano, vice-president and assistant treasurer at Nike, a supplier of athletic shoes and apparel was joined by  Sunny Gutta, director of treasury at Reddit, the social-media platform and Susan Davis, global treasurer at Riot Games, the privately held developer of League of Legends and other online titles. Their organisations differ in scale, ownership structure and strategic context. On one point, however, all three converge: treasury must own the cash narrative and how to secure a seat at the table.

Priorities and balance sheet discipline

At Nike, Bifano said the treasury has just launched a plan spanning several years called “Treasury 2030”. “Our priorities start with our people,” she said. “Without our people, we can’t do anything, and we can’t unlock potential without our people.” Alongside talent, she identifies technology, financial risk management and partnerships across functions as the plan’s main pillars. “We are an enabling function, but we are now here to be that strategic enabler — to create value for Nike,” she said.

At Reddit, Gutta described her team’s priorities as focused around three themes: improving efficiencies, strategic planning and ensuring resilience. “The core mandate is liquidity planning, capital allocation and risk management, and that will always be our priority number one,” she said. “External events are not going to change it. If anything, we need to be even more ahead of the game and ensure that the business is able to operate seamlessly during these external disruptions.”

Davis at Riot Games places technology at the top of her list. “Tech is a number-one priority for us, leveraging technology to drive a more integrated finance organisation” she said. She is also focused on staffing. “Levelling up where it makes sense,” she added, adding that she is looking for people “who have the ability to execute on the transformation we’re looking for, but also subsequently be able to lead on a strategic level.”

Forecasting is the third priority. “As an exporter of games, we’re constantly looking at currency volatility and seeing how that’s impacting our forecast,” she said.

Technology and its role

On artificial intelligence, she is measured. “AI is a huge focus. We’re not quite there in treasury — we’re trying, we’re working on developing use cases — but we’re following the enterprise,” Bifano said.

“We’ve leveraged the technology we have at our hands to further push our boundaries and what we can offer as a function.” —Jennifer Bifano, Nike

Gutta described a deliberate move away from siloed systems. “We’ve always had a very siloed approach to treasury — ERP is accounting, TMS is treasury-specific,” she said. “I think we are breaking those barriers quite a bit now. Teams are beginning to think about how we leverage technology across multiple teams, across all of finance.” Reddit’s TMS implementation extends to accounts payable and accounting, automating workflows across all three functions. “Cash management is not just treasury’s function. It doesn’t end with us — it goes on to accounting, it impacts the P&L reporting,” she said.

Davis sees her TMS primarily as a connectivity and payments tool. “We see our TMS as being the connectivity to all of our global banks — it allows us to secure data, it’s also connected to the payment rails, so it’s secure processing for transactions,” she said. For everything else — strategic reporting, financial analysis and data management — she is looking elsewhere. “AI-enabled technology is really allowing us to take the business intelligence process outside of these large ERP or TMS systems,” she said. Riot is assessing a centralised data repository for finance and is evaluating a single platform for reporting. “We really think it’s a win-win if we can get everything onto one platform allowing finance teams to integrate more seamlessly rather than having to manage things independently,” she said.

The seat at the table

All three say the treasury’s standing in their organisations has improved, though each identifies room for further progress. Bifano described a structural change that has helped. About three and a half years ago, Nike moved treasury into a corporate-finance structure alongside investor relations, strategic finance, corporate development and new business. “Having treasury in that intersection has really moved the needle for us in terms of being at the beginning of the conversation,” she said. But she added: “There’s no finish line. As a leader, I put myself in the right position, in the right conversations — and I use my voice when I’m at the table. You have to do that.”

“Cash is the oxygen for the business. We are the ones who own the vision of cash.”—Susan Davis, Riot Games

Gutta credits recent macro turbulence with having raised treasury’s profile at Reddit. “The regional banking crisis, rate volatility, supply chain disruptions — everything has brought so much visibility to treasury that you have to have the seat at the table now,” she said.

She argued that the seat alone is not enough. “Treasury can do so much more if we are right at the beginning, in the strategy deliberations, and not just at the end during implementation,” she said. Building that position, she added, requires a two-way effort. “The CFO needs to recognise the importance of treasury, but also as a treasury leader you need to build that relationship — to showcase that your team has the commercial understanding of the business beyond cash.”

Davis co-leads a steering committee at Riot that is redesigning the company’s financial operations. What began as a technology-prioritisation exercise has broadened into a mandate to redesign finance workflows beyond siloed disciplines. “Once we started making that shift and rolled that conversation out with leadership partners, the mandate became much broader,” she said. The North Star, she said, is “speed and accuracy of data real-time decision-making.”

She is direct about what treasury’s competitive advantage is in that conversation. “Cash is the oxygen for the business,” she said. “You need to understand that cash cycle, those levers that you can turn to move the dial — those are conversations you need to be having with your CFO.” She pointed to a forecasting project completed last year in which

Riot Treasury automated its long-term cash forecast, modelling all global cash flows.  “Forecasting is key — it gives us that strategic calling card. We are the ones who own the vision of cash.”

Managing the noise

On the question of how to balance core responsibilities against an increasingly demanding external environment, Gutta is clear about the hierarchy. “The core mandate will always be our priority number one,” she said. “Second comes what are the initiatives where treasury can support the broader organisation’s goals and objectives. Third comes what is more treasury-specific. But the core needs to be really, really solid.”

Bifano described a similar approach. “Mastering the fundamentals is always key, with an eye on process rigour and optimisation,” she said. She also stressed the importance of scenario planning. “We always try to present the risk and opportunities to the CFO and the senior leadership team — here’s the base case, but these are things you need to think about: the good, the bad and the ugly. What’s the art of the possible under those scenarios?” On agility, she added: “We have core priorities, but things are going to change. We need to be nimble — and as leaders, we have to flex that muscle with the team.”

Davis has asked every member of her team to apply a specific test to their daily work. “Are you making strategic decisions with the data and the reporting that you are producing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?” she says. “You have an opportunity to step into your function and literally stop doing work that you feel is not adding to those strategic questions. That needs to be elevated.” She added that technology now makes much of the routine support work seamless. “Often people say the reporting supports monthly close, or I need to support somebody else’s function. I think technology today allows us to make that seamless,” she said.

Talent and future team of treasury

Bifano said the demand for new skills is immediate. “It’s the ability to work with data — ambiguous data — and make sense of it, and code it, to drive better forecasting,” she said. Some of her team members are self-teaching. “We have teammates who are really going online, learning on videos how to code using Python,” she said. “It’s great to see the proactiveness, but that takes time. How do we infuse learning opportunities on the job?” She frames the solution as both immediate and ongoing: on-the-job learning, stretch assignments, and individuals taking ownership of their own career development. “We as managers and leaders help them grow their careers, but they own their own career advancement.”

Davis described the profile she is hiring for. “We want to bring in individuals who have the ability to execute on the transformation we’re looking for, but also subsequently be able to lead on a strategic level,” she said. “You’ve got to have people who can work in an adaptive environment — not necessarily people who have been working for years in treasury, but people who understand finance more broadly and can ask the right questions. You can’t be in every room, so you need your people to be able to get into those deep conversations.”

“Not just technical expertise — how you influence and create impact is going to be very important.”—Sunny Gutta, Reddit

Asked to name the single most important quality for success in the current environment, each gave a concise answer. Davis: “Having the right people with strong analytical skills, and they’re motivated.” Gutta: “Agility and communication — because not just technical expertise, but how you influence and create impact is going to be very important.” Bifano: “A strong analytical mindset, curiosity, and proactive communication.”