At Remitly, Cash Flow Efficiency Isn’t a Metric, It’s a Mindset

Watch more: Visa WCI: Remitly, Vikas Mehta

In an era of high interest rates, volatile currency markets, and rapidly shifting global flows of money, working capital has emerged as far more than an operational concern. For many finance chiefs, it has become a strategic differentiator.

“Working capital efficiency is the topmost important thing. In our business, treasury and cash flow functions aren’t secondary. That’s what we do,” Vikas Mehta, CFO at Remitly, said during a conversation hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

The shift of working capital becoming a core driver of growth strategies is visible across global payments, where liquidity and funding costs can make or break the customer experience.

Remitly’s own business model, for example, demands instant payouts to recipients around the world. The company must pre-fund many of those transactions, creating a complex balance-sheet dance: deploy enough capital to ensure a seamless customer experience, but not so much that cash sits idle.

“Even modest efficiency gains in how working capital is deployed can result in significant savings, about $19 million on average” noted Webster, highlighting how the role of the CFO has expanded from steward of the balance sheet to orchestrator of growth.

“We think about our internal North Star metric as free cash flow per share,” explained Mehta. “That deeply embeds working capital efficiency. Our ability to keep customer-facing investments high while maintaining healthy investor-facing margins comes from the way we manage that capital.”

By treating treasury as a core competency, Remitly itself has been able to sustain growth rates north of 35–40% on a $60-billion-plus transaction volume without eroding profitability.

“Every year we have a treasury OKR about reducing costs and improving working-capital efficiency,” he added.

AI Helps Move Working Capital From Back Office to Growth Engine

What has also changed across today’s uncertain landscape is the cost of inefficiency. High interest rates and persistent currency volatility mean idle cash now carries an opportunity cost, and trapped cash in emerging markets can distort even the best-laid plans. Treasury metrics once relegated to footnotes are increasingly moving into the CFO’s main dashboard.

AI-driven forecasting tools now allow treasury teams to predict liquidity needs with corridor- and even currency-specific precision. At Remitly, for example, models forecast peso-level demand over weekends, letting the company fund payouts just in time rather than maintaining large idle balances in local markets.

“We invest heavily in our data platform, in machine learning, and in AI,” said Mehta. “Forecasting becomes really important…We’re hyper-focused on data.”

Better forecasting reduces the cost of capital tied up in buffers while allowing them to respond faster to unexpected demand or volatility. It shifts liquidity management from a reactive exercise to a continuous, data-driven process. Even companies not at the cutting edge find that AI can improve visibility, standardize reporting across regions, and raise the baseline of treasury performance.

“Even lower-performing companies saw a boost in visibility and efficiency from AI deployment. It was the rising tide that lifted all boats,” Webster said.

Cash flow insights inform not just day-to-day liquidity management but long-term capital allocation. CFOs are spearheading a re-engineering of their banking relationships to match these new priorities.

“We never had a physical branch. As we look at bank partnerships, it’s very important to understand their technology roadmaps — especially as we explore stablecoins, blockchain, and other networks,” said Mehta. “I’ve been positively surprised at how forward-thinking the big banks have been.”

Optionality in an Unpredictable World

Behind these shifts is a new archetype of the CFO, One who can toggle between offense and defense as conditions demand. This duality is increasingly decisive in determining enterprise value.

For Webster, one of the most revealing findings of the Working Capital Index was the rise of the “adaptive CFO.” These leaders use working capital  to fund unplanned growth initiatives driven by the dynamic macro economic environment that has been the 2025 business undercurrent. Adaptive CFOs use working capital to to seize unanticipated opportunities, from advancing orders to secure more favorable pricing, accelerating payment to suppliers to secure more favorable working relationships and securing new supply chain partners by making and paying for new orders before net terms.

In the past, CFOs often faced a binary choice: conserve cash to protect the balance sheet or deploy it to chase growth. Now, adaptability itself is the advantage.

For Remitly, Mehta says that adaptability translates into optionality: maintaining a diverse set of capital tools to deploy as circumstances demand. He pointed to Remitly’s recently authorized $200-million share buyback program as an example: “It’s about being opportunistic for our long-term investors. It becomes an additional tool in our toolbox rather than an obligation.”

“Adaptability has become core to the day-to-day life of a CFO,” he added.

The next competitive frontier, he agreed, is slated to be agentic or zero-touch finance — automated liquidity deployment and credit-facility optimization.

“We have some of the best treasury leadership in the world, and our hackathons have put us at the top of the curve. But we have a high bar on risk tolerance and want to ensure systems are battle-tested. It’s early days,” said Mehta.