Earnings Season Signals CFO Shift Toward Time to Cash and Embedded Payments

Third-quarter earnings season offered an unexpected storyline of the ascent of platforms that don’t just move money but build ecosystems around it.

B2B networks, payment infrastructure providers and procurement marketplaces stole the spotlight not through flashy artificial intelligence announcements but through liquidity control.

Green Dot , for example, entered the final stretch of 2025 with renewed momentum in its B2B and embedded finance operations, posting a 21% year-over-year increase in revenue for the third quarter.

During Marqeta ’s third-quarter 2025 earnings report, executives stressed that, globally, the embedded finance sector is forecasted to grow at a compounded rate of 40% through 2027, reshaping everything from lending to corporate payments.

Behind these quarterly results lies a bigger shift in corporate finance thinking. As enterprises discover that shortening time to cash can unlock resilience even in uneven demand cycles by shrinking uncertainty and turning revenue into usable capital, payments are increasingly no longer being viewed as a back-office function or cost center.

Instead, they are becoming a strategic asset for chief financial officers who can turn them into a source of data, insight and velocity.

Read also: B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash to Manage Uncertainty

From Transaction Speed to Financial Intelligence

Historically, payments represented the infrastructure that carried revenue from customer to ledger. In 2025, they’ve become a strategic data layer.

Every embedded transaction generates information about timing, counterparty reliability and behavioral patterns. Collectively, this data can give CFOs predictive insight into liquidity risk, supplier performance and customer solvency. The companies that learn to harness it can frequently forecast better, negotiate smarter and deploy capital more dynamically.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “ Time to Cash : A New Measure of Business Resilience ,” introduced a new metric for agility, Time to Cash . The research found that the legacy era of closing the books and looking backward has given way to a new paradigm, a living cash flow system shaped by 12 operational levers spanning the four dimensions of receivables efficiency, payables control, operational workflows and financial visibility.

The Time to Cash framework reframes resilience not as stability but as speed. Shorter Time to Cash cycles mean greater liquidity, sharper forecasting and stronger reinvestment capacity. They help turn finance from a defensive discipline into an offensive one.

The report found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead.

Enterprises that integrate embedded payments, automated invoicing and AI forecasting tools are not just speeding up transactions but, in essence, creating continuous visibility into where every dollar sits and how soon it moves. As a result, CFOs can make real-time capital allocation decisions without waiting for end-of-month closes.

See also: 3 Areas Where AI Generates ROI in B2B Payments

The CFO’s New Operating System

What’s emerging from these shifts is a redefinition of the CFO tech stack. Once dominated by static dashboards and ERP modules, it’s now giving way to a network of embedded, intelligent financial systems.

PYMNTS spoke earlier this year with Marqeta Chief Revenue Officer Todd Pollak about how payment processing has required significant innovation to accommodate the rapid growth of embedded finance services.

“Legacy providers, whether that be traditional banks, traditional credit providers, issuers coming to Marqeta and probably others, are asking questions about how they would get access to real-time capabilities,” Pollak said. “They want real-time APIs so that they can participate in the new economy.”

According to the Time to Cash report from PYMNTS, 70% of firms surveyed already use at least one AI tool to manage cash flow. The most advanced, those using agentic AI, capable of autonomous decision-making, have automated up to 95% their accounts receivable processes, compared to just 38% among firms without AI integration.

Still, the bottleneck is no longer data. Increasingly, it’s the integration of innovations like AI. Manual invoice approvals, late payments and disconnected systems still plague even top performers. The differentiator is how completely finance can embed itself across the enterprise fabric.

The implications also stretch beyond finance. In today’s operational environment, operations, procurement and sales are all tied to liquidity visibility. A delayed payment in one region can automatically trigger supply chain adjustments in another. Against this backdrop, embedded finance isn’t just changing how money moves; it can help redefine how organizations think.