Treasury Is the New Glass Ceiling for Growing Companies

Growth can be a double-edged sword for mid market and Main Street businesses, and the sharp edge of that sword is pointed at their own legacy finance infrastructure.

For many firms, treasury is now a hard operational ceiling. As businesses expand across markets, currencies, payment rails and suppliers, complexity is compounding faster than most companies can absorb it. The challenge is not simply volume. Fragmentation is equally disruptive, as even small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) now depend on international sourcing.

The average company today may simultaneously manage real-time payment systems, ACH transfers, card networks, local wallets, SWIFT settlements, embedded finance products and region-specific regulatory requirements. Add dynamic supplier ecosystems, marketplace payouts, subscription billing and cross-border tax obligations, and the treasury layer starts to resemble a continuously moving operational network rather than a centralized accounting function.

The consequence is direct: growth itself begins generating instability inside the finance stack.

Read also: Can Your Treasury Function Put Money to Work Immediately?

The Role of Treasury When Complexity Compounds Faster Than Revenue

The primary challenge for growth-oriented finance teams is that treasury complexity scales nonlinearly. Revenue may double while payment endpoints, banking relationships, reconciliation exceptions and liquidity dependencies increase exponentially. A business entering five new markets does not simply add five additional operational variables. It introduces dozens of interlocking workflows involving local settlement rules, FX exposure, compliance frameworks and cash movement constraints.

This mismatch creates invisible friction inside scaling organizations.

“They’re under pressure to move faster, but often their internal tools haven’t kept pace,” Jennifer Sanctis, managing director of CashPro at Bank of America, told PYMNTS about treasury teams, pointing to fragmented systems and delayed insight into cash positions. “Speed without visibility creates risk and visibility without speed creates bottlenecks.”

Finance teams spend increasing amounts of time reconciling transactions across fragmented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, banking portals, payment processors and procurement tools. Cash visibility becomes delayed or incomplete as treasury staff resort to spreadsheets and manual interventions to bridge operational gaps. As a result, liquidity planning grows reactive rather than predictive.

A company’s ability to manage complex cash flows efficiently often reflects deeper operational capabilities: system interoperability, process standardization, data quality and executive coordination. Weak treasury infrastructure can expose broader structural fragmentation inside the organization. Companies capable of orchestrating global cash movement with precision can operate more aggressively because they maintain clearer visibility into risk, liquidity and operational exposure.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with Ingo Payments shows that 39% of SMBs function with less than a month’s operating cash at the ready, which makes them highly vulnerable to even slight interruptions to their payment cycles.

See also: CFOs Become the Source of Truth as Data Sprawls Across B2B

Liquidity Visibility Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage

The companies navigating this transition most effectively are not simply automating existing treasury processes. They are redesigning treasury architecture around real-time operational visibility. Rather than waiting for end-of-day reporting cycles, finance leaders want near-instant awareness of where cash sits, how it is moving and what obligations are approaching.

PYMNTS and Visa research has shown that cash-flow certainty is closely linked to confidence in growth. When finance leaders can trust their liquidity position, they are more willing to invest, extend supplier terms and accelerate payroll or vendor payments without fear of shortfalls. Elsewhere, PYMNTS Intelligence data found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead.

That expectation is reshaping investment priorities across the enterprise finance stack. Companies are deploying artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted reconciliation tools capable of matching transactions across disparate systems with minimal human intervention. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are replacing batch-based treasury workflows, enabling real-time integration between banks, ERPs, payment processors and procurement systems. Virtual account structures are helping firms simplify cash positioning across regions without multiplying physical banking infrastructure.

Data in the report “Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails. Here’s How They’re Getting There,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and The Clearing House, finds that firms using real-time payment rails consistently report materially better outcomes across nearly every operational metric that matters, from liquidity management and reconciliation to supplier relationships and strategic flexibility.

After all, unlike many operational constraints, treasury limitations are difficult to outgrow through momentum alone. As transaction ecosystems become more fragmented and global financial operations more interconnected, sophistication in cash management, reconciliation and liquidity orchestration is no longer a back-office optimization exercise.