EuroFinance

At EuroFinance’s 30th annual International Treasury & Cash Management Summit in Miami, the treasury roundtables were a hit among attendees—chatham house rules applied but EuroFinance asked treasurers to summarise their conversations, with a wide range of topics covering supply chain finance, LATAM markets,AI transformation and more

AI in Treasury         

The treasury transformation roundtable surfaced a detail that is worth sitting with: at the time of the discussion, only one company in the room was actively using AI in its treasury operations. Most of the others were in the earlier stages — setting up systems, establishing reporting processes, laying the groundwork. The gap between the conversation about AI in treasury and the reality of AI in treasury, at least in the rooms at Miami, is still significant.

That is not necessarily a cause for alarm. It may simply reflect the fact that genuine transformation — as opposed to incremental tooling — takes longer than the conference circuit sometimes implies. Participants noted that the most pressing issue for many treasury teams is not AI adoption but something more foundational: visibility into cash forecasting. One company, notably, was building its own AI tool to manage FX and rates. Others had not yet reached for the technology for those purposes.

“AI is helping with tasks such as analysing large datasets, identifying patterns, but human intervention is still needed.”

Resilience versus cost — and the challenge of trust

The supply chain and trade roundtable opened with an observation that set the tone for much of the week: the area of responsibility for treasury has grown considerably over the past five years, and geopolitical tensions have made that growth feel uncomfortable. Attendees noted that regional tensions — Colombia, Ecuador, tariffs, trade route disruptions — are no longer abstract concerns that filter down from the macroeconomic commentary. They are operational problems landing on treasury desks.

One theme that emerged with some force was the regionalisation of supplier bases. Companies are increasingly sourcing closer to home, and regional banks are repositioning themselves to offer more globally-capable solutions to match. But the underlying tension — resilience versus cost — has not resolved itself. Everyone in the room understood that building in redundancy is expensive, and that the business case for resilience is hardest to make before problems occur.

“In times of volatility, trust with lenders is key,” according to one of the attendees.

Cash investments and the forecasting gap

The fundamental asymmetry between forecasting cash inflows and outflows. As participants said, cash inflows are easier to forecast than outflows. Accounts receivable is more predictable than accounts payable. And yet the entire architecture of short-term investment decisions depends on getting both right.

Several participants described a shift in their investment approach — moving away from time deposits towards money market funds — partly as a response to this forecasting uncertainty, and partly as a way to preserve liquidity without sacrificing yield. The practical challenge that followed: how do you time payment forecasts with investment decisions in a way that doesn’t leave cash idle or, worse, leave you scrambling for liquidity at the wrong moment?

The solution that emerged from the discussion was less a technical solution than a discipline: standardising payment processes to match deposit structures, and building the institutional habit of treating cash forecasting as a continuous activity rather than a monthly exercise.

Working capital

The working capital roundtable, identified a problem that is both organisational and financial: the misalignment between procurement and treasury that means payment terms, financing structures and supplier relationships are often managed in isolation rather than as parts of a single strategy.

Participants described the practical consequences. Payment creates friction with suppliers when supply chain stability is most important. Inflation is eroding the value of extended terms. And the people responsible for managing these issues — treasury, procurement, AP, AR — are often operating with different mandates, different metrics and limited visibility into what the others are doing.

The proposed remedies were largely structural: corporate goal-setting that aligns procurement and treasury initiatives; scorecards that allow treasury to measure procurement performance against financial outcomes; KPIs that reflect the full working capital cycle rather than individual departmental targets. This is not a new theory. In practice, participants suggested, it remains more exception than rule.

“Cash forecasting and cross-functional collaboration — these are the same problem,” the attendee noted.

Where the map gets complicated

The regulatory environment across Latin American markets remains deeply fragmented. Tax reform in Brazil is creating new compliance obligations. Cross-border payments between Colombia and Brazil require navigating SWIFT and SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) compatibility issues that do not always resolve neatly. Currency controls in various jurisdictions mean that cash repatriation is not simply a matter of instructing a transfer — it is a planning exercise that can take weeks and requires both internal tax counsel and external advisers who understand the local regulatory landscape.

That kind of operational specificity — the sort of thing that does not appear in market commentary but that shapes the daily work of treasury teams operating across the region — was exactly what participants said they came to discuss. The conversation also touched on the role of AI tools in monitoring regulatory changes and news events that affect treasury operations across multiple jurisdictions. The consensus: AI can help teams stay across an information environment that is genuinely difficult to track manually, but it does not replace the judgement of advisers who know the market from the inside.

Risk management

The discussion ranged widely — from FX and treasury tools for managing LATAM exposure, to IT and cybersecurity training, to AI liability, to the enduring relevance of the COVID-19 operational playbook as a template for responding to future disruptions — thus highlighting the range of risks that treasurers now need to consider. One participant noted that reputational risk is increasingly a treasury concern as well as a communications one, particularly when supply chain or payment failures become visible to customers or the market.

The spirit of the conversation was pragmatic rather than anxious. Risk, the group agreed, is not something to be eliminated — it is something to be understood, categorised and managed with tools that are appropriate to its nature. The more pressing challenge is building the internal frameworks to do that consistently, before the next disruption rather than in response to it.

Liquidity management

The liquidity management roundtable got into questions of governance that sit beneath the surface of most treasury discussions. What should a global liquidity policy actually specify? How do you set a minimum cash level that is genuinely useful — flexible enough to accommodate seasonality and one-off events, but firm enough to mean something when challenged by a business unit that wants to deploy more capital?

Participants raised the role of transfer pricing as a mechanism for managing liquidity across entities — a topic that bridges treasury and tax in ways that can generate productive tension between departments. The question of KPIs came up here as it did elsewhere: how do you define a measure of minimum cash that actually monitors the business in real time, rather than simply reporting a historical position?

That is what the roundtables at the EuroFinance roundtable discussion in  Miami offered. Not a finished picture, but a working one.