Five Things Every Treasurer Should Have on Their Agenda for 2026

The second half of 2026 is shaping up to be one of the more demanding operating environments in recent memory for corporate treasury. Geopolitical volatility, diverging interest rate cycles, accelerating technology adoption, and the quiet but steady advance of digital assets are all landing simultaneously. Against that backdrop, treasury teams are being asked to do more, faster, and with the same headcount.

The following five priorities reflect where the profession's attention is concentrated right now, and where teams that have not yet acted face the greatest risk of falling behind.

1. Build Scenario Planning Into Your Operating Rhythm

Long-term planning has changed. What used to be an annual forecasting exercise has, for many treasury functions, become a continuous discipline of scenario modelling and rapid reassessment.

J.P. Morgan's EMEA Treasurers Forum, drawing on polling from finance leaders across 26 countries and 60-plus industries, found that treasurers entering the second half of 2026 are skewing toward stable or worsening economic conditions rather than decisive improvement.

That’s a rational response to an environment where the distribution of outcomes has widened considerably. Tariff ups and downs, central bank policy uncertainty, regional political instability, and energy price volatility have made point forecasts less useful than range-based models that stress-test liquidity under adverse conditions.

The practical implication for treasury is that scenario planning needs to move off the spreadsheet and into the operating infrastructure. Teams relying on static, batch-based cash positioning cannot refresh their models quickly enough when conditions change, and in 2026, conditions are changing faster than planning cycles were designed to handle.

2. Get Serious About Real-Time Cash Visibility

This one has been on the list for years, but the gap between intent and execution remains significant and the cost of that gap is rising.

EACT's latest technology survey found that real-time reporting and dashboarding is the number one technology priority for treasurers in 2025-2026, ahead of real-time liquidity and real-time payments. 

PwC's 2025 Global Treasury Survey shows how wide the execution gap still runs. Only 57% of treasury teams use a treasury management system, and 36% still rely on manual processes to capture and manage their data. Teams pulling from fragmented sources across banks, ERPs, and legacy systems end up making funding, investment, and hedging decisions on positions that are already out of date.

The key challenge facing treasurers is putting in place the infrastructure to support the desire for change. Manual bank portal log-ins, delayed ERP balance updates, and the absence of API-driven connectivity mean that many treasury teams are making funding, investment, and hedging decisions on yesterday's data. As the J.P. Morgan survey makes clear, the value of flexibility is rising in a volatile macro environment, and flexibility requires visibility. A treasurer who cannot see their full cash position in real time cannot act on it.

Trovata's cash visibility tools are built on API-native bank connectivity that delivers real-time positioning across banks and entities, replacing manual aggregation with a live, structured data feed.

3. Reassess Your Approach to FX and Geopolitical Risk

Geopolitical risk is no longer a background consideration for treasury.You don’t have to look too carefully to find examples of why cross-border issues are becoming more relevant and complex.

The consequences for FX and liquidity management are concrete. Tariff structures that multinationals spent years planning around have been revised in a matter of weeks. Sanctions and export controls emerge with little notice. Currency exposure in affected regions can shift quickly, and counterparty risk in emerging markets requires continuous reassessment rather than periodic review.

The teams achieving that in volatile conditions are the ones who have moved from siloed FX and liquidity workstreams toward integrated, real-time exposure management, where tariff risk, FX position, and counterparty concentration are viewed together rather than separately.

4. Define Your AI Strategy, Especially Around Cost

AI adoption in treasury has moved from evaluation to early deployment. The 2026 Tradeweb survey found that 22% of treasury teams are already deploying AI solutions, most notably in cash forecasting. BBVA's analysis of corporate treasury trends places agentic AI at the centre of treasury's technology agenda for the year.

But AI adoption without a cost governance framework is a risk in itself. As covered in our analysis of the automation-vs-AI distinction, the per-unit cost of AI inference is falling while enterprise AI bills are rising, because agentic workflows consume significantly more tokens per task than simple interactions. EY's analysis shows that an orchestrated agentic workflow in 2026 costs roughly 30 times more per interaction than a simple linear workflow did in 2023.

The strategic question for treasury is deciding workflows genuinely require AI for enhanced efficiency, and which would work better or as well with simple automations. Reconciliation, payment execution against pre-approved rules, and threshold-triggered cash sweeps are automation problems; they're deterministic, rule-based, and cheap to run at scale. 

Cash flow forecasting under uncertainty, cross-entity liquidity optimisation, and anomaly detection across high transaction volumes are AI problems. Deploying frontier models on the former category is a cost discipline failure and treasury, of all functions, should recognise it as one.

5. Move From Stablecoin Awareness to Stablecoin Readiness

Stablecoins are not yet mainstream in corporate treasury. But the pace of regulatory development and the practical use cases being validated by early adopters mean that ‘we'll look at this later’ is becoming a less comfortable position.

The US GENIUS Act, signed in mid-2026, creates the first legislated federal framework for stablecoin issuance, bringing regulatory clarity that the market has been waiting for. For treasury teams, the most immediately relevant use cases have the potential to become fundamental to their operations. 

Cross-border settlement in corridors with limited banking infrastructure is the clearest near-term application. Moving liquidity that would take five to ten days via correspondent banking rails can instead happen in four to eight hours, with improved predictability and lower intermediary cost.

The practical implications for working capital efficiency are significant. Reducing float time from days to near real-time gives treasury more control over cash deployment, allows for more precise reserve management, and reduces the need to pre-fund accounts ahead of transfers. None of this requires a fundamental change to treasury's existing banking architecture, as stablecoins function alongside traditional payment rails, not instead of them.

The reason to act now is preparedness rather than urgency. Treasurers who understand how these instruments work, where they add value, and how they intersect with their existing policy and governance frameworks will be in a better position to move quickly when the right use case arrives. Those who have not done the groundwork will be playing catch-up under pressure.

The Common Thread

Across all five priorities, the underlying requirement is the need for clean, real-time data across the full banking architecture. Scenario planning only works with current positions. Visibility is meaningless without complete data. Geopolitical risk management requires integrated exposure views. AI produces reliable outputs only when it is operating on structured, normalised data. Stablecoin integration is most effective when it sits alongside a live view of traditional cash flows.

The treasury functions best positioned for the second half of 2026 built their data foundation first. Everything above it becomes easier to deploy once that foundation is in place.

Trovata is built on API-native bank connectivity and automated cash management, giving treasury teams the real-time data foundation that makes everything else possible. Explore the platform or book a demo.