Treasury Teams Drop Spreadsheets as BofA Bets on Data Intelligence

Watch more: How Treasury Teams Can Harness the ‘Right’ Data for Actionable Insights and Smarter Payments

Corporate treasury professionals are no longer reactive gatekeepers of cash. Empowered by data-driven insights, real-time visibility and purpose-built technology, the finance function is emerging as a strategic orchestrator of evolving payment infrastructures.

And it’s all thanks to data. But raw data alone doesn’t deliver value.

“Treasury teams … have so much data, but many continue to be reliant on spreadsheets to do their cash positioning and forecasting,” Jennifer Sanctis, managing director, CashPro at Bank of America, told PYMNTS. “They’re building reports and conducting analyses in a very manual and time-consuming way.”

Relying exclusively on static, end-of-day reports is akin to driving while staring at the rearview mirror, particularly as payments become faster and more digital.

That’s why the future of the office of the chief financial officer (CFO) is about identifying the right inputs, applying intelligent tools and harnessing these insights to drive smarter payments, optimize liquidity and elevate treasury’s role across the enterprise.

Bank of America’s answer to the problems facing treasury teams? A multi-year investment in what it calls “data intelligence,” a strategy to transform CashPro from a transactional treasury portal into a predictive, insight-driven ecosystem that offers dashboards like payments efficiency, supplier propensity, cross‑border payments and fraud protection.

Data Intelligence Transforms Treasury Chaos

Treasury innovation isn’t just measured in data, numbers, spreadsheets and systems. Instead, Bank of America measures it in time. Specifically, how much time corporate treasury teams are losing every day to inflexible, manual systems.

After all, in an era where corporate finance leaders face volatile markets, complex regulatory requirements and heightened security threats, time is more than money. It’s a key competitive element core to survival. Through client conversations, Bank of America realized it had a unique advantage in solving for treasurers problems: the enormous volume of transaction data already flowing through CashPro every day.

“It’s just a matter of applying the right technology to put it to work,” Sanctis said.

The first major milestone came in 2022 with the launch of CashPro Forecasting, a tool designed to quickly model cash flow forecasts and offer customizable views into global cash positions. Adoption was immediate and enthusiastic, and continues to see demand with 24% year-over-year growth in July alone.

“We regularly hear from clients about how much time it’s saved and given them back,” Sanctis said. “In such volatile macroeconomic environments, that’s invaluable.”

What surprised the CashPro team was how quickly clients started using Forecasting in unexpected ways. Clients began to build transaction workspaces, search by BAI codes to model out service charges and even analyze payments from specific beneficiaries, all within a user-friendly interface. Some users were producing a forecast, while others were doing a deep dive into granular customizations.

The tool’s flexibility proved to be its greatest asset, and it revealed a critical truth about product development in the treasury space: when given the right data tools, clients will find ways to extend their value far beyond the initial design.

From Forecasting to Dynamic Reporting

The team understood early on that sophisticated analytics mean little without trustworthy inputs. This focus led to an initial push for data “cleanliness and order” across CashPro’s systems.

“Data intelligence isn’t very intelligent if it’s not grounded in sound, accurate data,” Sanctis said.

Once the foundation was set, Bank of America layered on tools to make that data more accessible. One of the simplest yet most effective additions was CashPro Search, a universal search bar that pulls from multiple data sources, allowing clients to find transactions without navigating across multiple modules.

The results were immediate and continue to see growth in adoption. This July set a record for monthly searches.

“It’s the place where our clients come first when they’re looking for information,” Sanctis said.

The evolution of CashPro’s data capabilities is best summed up in what Sanctis called the “Three P’s” framework: personalized, proactive and predictive.

“Data intelligence is about getting data to our clients in a way that they can make their decisions faster and more effectively,” she said.

This principle of harnessing the right data for an operational edge underpins CashPro Insights, which Sanctis describes less as a product and more as a philosophy. The system flags key security and payment patterns who clients are paying, how, where funds are going, and whether transactions are protected with appropriate fraud prevention measures.

“Our objective with CashPro is to make doing business easier for our clients … not only as a powerful tool, but as a digital partner in their financial decision-making,” Sanctis said.