The digital transformation revolution reaches everyone. Where treasury teams used to focus on cash flow organization with Excel spreadsheets, they now integrate more advanced technology to help them. AI in treasury offers many advantages — if you know how to harness it! Read on to find out how Artificial Intelligence is positively disrupting treasury management.
Trustpair is the ultimate tool for corporate treasury teams. Thanks to ongoing account validation, our predictive algorithm software prevents third-party fraud from happening and streamlines business processes. Request a demo to learn more!
Improves Your Cash Flow Forecasting
Generative AI in treasury management is transforming the way corporate treasurers can forecast their cash inflows and outflows. The main advantage of AI in treasury is that it helps make sense of huge amounts of data.
The main Treasury Management Solutions providers now offer AI integrations. Using these solutions, companies leverage data to predict their cash flow by using:
- Internal data, like the historical data of the company based on past performance.
- External data, like the market conditions and supplier compliance changes.
With machine learning, you can teach AI to replicate processes and create new data like cash flow forecasting, or predictive models.
This technology is often used in banking and payment solutions, which help with the automation of your corporate processes. This leads to increased efficiency and also better analytics. Some software services even give you real-time insights.
AI makes data management and modeling faster and more accurate than before. In a few clicks, decision-makers can access sensitive analysis with different variables.
Companies can know months in advance the working capital they’ll need and if their current strategy will reach their liquidity needs. If not, they can adapt their strategy to ensure there is enough cash to meet their financial obligations in the future.
For instance, an organization whose forecasted liquidity is low in the next quarter can decide to redouble their efforts in accounts receivables, by ensuring their unpaid invoices get collected.
Using AI for cash forecasting results in more:
- Accuracy: treasurers have access to real-time data.
- Depth: various scenarios can be run depending on season, subsidiary, country, etc.
- Personalization: treasurers can choose to tailor their report based on their specific company’s needs.
Using AI in treasury management allows finance teams to create better forecasts both short-term and long-term.
Artificial intelligence helps companies optimize their cash management, helping them weigh their options for their operations and investments. As a result of this technology, corporate leaders can make better decisions now and in the future.
Increases Your Teams’ Productivity
The second advantage of AI in treasury is that it automates manual tasks and streamlines processes. Treasury innovation often comes as software that allows teams to reclaim hours of their work week.
Where it would have taken employee hours to run numbers on a spreadsheet, Artificial intelligence, and machine learning can now help categorize, simplify, connect, and predict future data in a matter of minutes.
Artificial intelligence in treasury replaces the time-consuming, lower-value tasks (such as data input or report creation). AI does it quicker and more reliably.
For instance, Trovata AI is a software add-on that builds models and reports using normal language. Instead of having an Excel expert create one in a few hours (or days), this add-on can generate various scenarios without complex formulas.
Finance professionals can spend less time on repetitive tasks while improving their decision-making via 2 AI applications:
- Robotic Process Automation (which replicates processes)
- Generative AI (which creates new data, like ChatGPT),
All of this contributes to streamlining internal processes, increases the productivity of the Treasury, Finance, and Accounting teams — and benefits the organization at large.
Enhances Your Risk Management
AI in treasury helps with preventing the operational and financial risks of your business. Software solutions that use AI can closely monitor your external environment conditions such as:
- Changing market conditions,
- Emerging trends,
- Competitors analysis.
AI helps you stay informed without needing to spend hours on getting informed. For example, instead of having to read the news every morning, you can use software services that monitor global banking trends for you and send you alerts on your topic.
Software that uses AI can predict an increase in risk in any category based on their access to worldwide data and help you cope with it, improving your treasury risk management.
It can help with your supplier management by spotting that a legal inquiry has been started against one of your suppliers. As a result, your purchase team can plan for the worst and find a replacement so your production doesn’t stop.
Using artificial intelligence in treasury management helps prevent disruption that could harm your business. It can also come up with recommendations based on data to mitigate those risks. For example, you could ask an AI tool to:
- Predict your overall profit margin over the next 6 months, based on the information found online and in your company systems.
- Come up with a plan to increase it, using a variety of financial and business strategies.
Of course, that’s not to say that AI tools should make your corporate decisions. However, they assist decision-making by creating different scenarios and calculating different variables quickly. In other words, AI empowers management with information so they can be proactive instead of reactive with treasury challenges — enhancing the strategic position they hold.
Strengthens compliance
AI helps treasury stay compliant with the ever-changing regulatory landscape your business evolves in by:
- Automatically monitoring your payments for any irregularities that could indicate illegal activities.
- Helping you stay up-to-date with the latest regulations, and inform you of applicable changes so you can adjust your banking and business processes to remain compliant.
Compliance is a very complex field, and AI’s guidance can make a huge difference in how you deal with it. Using AI software to assist with compliance gives you peace of mind, knowing you’re staying on top of the matter. It can take away your need to read tedious legal regulations and instead opt for a summary for your teams.
For example, AuditBoard is a centralized risk management platform that integrates an AI element. Their software helps reduce noncompliance risks by monitoring the current regulatory obligations and identifying potential gaps.
Protects against Payment Fraud
This application of AI in treasury can help protect your business against fraud! In 2023, 96% of US companies were targeted by at least one fraud attempt according to our recent survey.
Fraudsters can penetrate your network and commit third-party fraud through:
- Impersonating your suppliers, a member of your top management (CEO fraud), or a government official to get you to reveal sensitive information that will help steal assets.
- Hacking into your network through cyber or social engineering attacks, for example by changing your suppliers’ banking information for their own and receiving undue payments (invoice fraud).
Scammers also use AI to come up with believable schemes that will hurt your company. The worst thing is: you will likely not realize your defenses have been breached before fraud has been committed.
That damages your reputation, your supplier relationship, and your liquidity, as the average loss in 2023 amounted to:
- $100,000 per fraud event.
- 36% of companies lost more than $1 million on average.
- 25% more than $5 million.
The good news is that AI helps with fraud detection by spotting any suspicious activity before any payment is sent out. Nowadays, most banks and financial institutions use it to increase their payment safety.
Trustpair is an anti-fraud software that continuously and automatically checks your suppliers’ credentials before payments are sent. Ongoing account validation eradicates your risk of third-party fraud while ensuring you remain compliant.
We use predictive modeling to spot any anomalies in your payments and raise the alert in case of suspicion. We’ve worked with large international businesses, who like the peace of mind of knowing who they send their money to 100% of the time. Trustpair prevents and detects third-party fraud in your business so your treasury team can focus on strategic decision-making.
Learn all about the future of treasury in our dedicated white paper!
Key Takeaways:
- AI in treasury helps with automating tasks, monitoring external threats, ensuring fraud protection, leading to better data-backed decisions
- Corporate treasurers need to leverage this opportunity, as scammers also use AI. Using trustpair offers complete protection against third-party fraud.
