Most treasury teams aren’t growing. In many cases, they’re shrinking. But at the same time, expectations keep rising. CFOs want faster reporting, tighter forecasts, and real-time answers to questions that span liquidity, capital structure, and risk.
That tension defined one of the most candid conversations at AFP 2025. In our session, “Creating Lean, Mean Impactful Treasury Teams,” treasury leaders from the Dallas Cowboys, CSG, and Alewife TMA shared how they’ve built high-impact teams without adding more and more staff, and how automation, APIs, and AI are now the core levers for scaling output.
It was a conversation that made clear that scaling the right way isn’t about replacing your people, but about providing them with tools that let them focus on the high-impact, high-engagement work that drives the biggest impact across the business.
This is a practical look at how lean teams are operating today, where they’re investing their time, and what they’ve stopped doing entirely.
Lean, Not Limited (Unless You Ignore Tech)
As every lean treasury team knows, there are ways to improve efficiency without adding headcount or tools, and most teams have already tried them.
Three strategies came up repeatedly:
Sharpening Prioritization
Lean teams often get more disciplined long before they get more automated. They triage work aggressively, focus on the few daily tasks that truly matter, and let low-value requests wait. It buys time, but only in small increments.
Redesigning Internal Workflows
Several leaders emphasized how far you can get by refining handoffs with accounting, AP, and FP&A. Clearer submission deadlines, standardized formats, and well-defined roles cut down on back-and-forth. It reduces friction, but it doesn’t remove manual workload.
Building Trust Across the Business
Treasury often scales faster when relationships are strong. Educating internal stakeholders, as Michael Powers, CFO & Treasurer at Alewife TMA noted, speeds up approvals and reduces delays. Being seen as a partner rather than a gatekeeper helps work move through the organization with fewer blockers.
These levers shouldn’t be ignored. They make life easier, they reduce noise, and they help a lean team stay balanced. But there’s a limit. None of them meaningfully change the volume of manual work and none of them eliminate reconciliation drags or the lag between when cash moves and when you see it.
But what they do is lay the foundations for a robust, scalable digital transformation project.
Automation Is the Only Real Capacity Lever
Each panelist emphasized that automated bank data aggregation and reporting were the key turning points in creating a scalable treasury function. Two themes stood out.
1. Automation Is Easier To Justify Than Headcount
Kyle Fisher, Senior Manager, Treasury & Investor Relations at CSG, put it simply:
“It’s easy to justify the cost of automation over a new hire, because the ROI was immediate and the risk is lower.”
Erica Proctor, Senior Treasury Manager at the Dallas Cowboys experienced something similar:
“By choosing a TMS that required almost no IT involvement, I could do the bulk of the implementation myself and still keep daily operations moving.”
What she gained back was time, enough to lead a company-wide credit card migration that never would have been feasible before automation.
2. Automation Stabilizes Operations During Uncertainty
While automation can drastically improve capacity with day-to-day operations, Powers noted that this benefit carried over during periods where problems arose.
When a KYC issue froze activity in a particular country, real-time visibility meant he could take corrective action immediately. Before automation, he would have been reacting after the fact.
Once the systems were live, it led to faster reporting, fewer surprises, and more bandwidth for forward-looking work.
The Technologies That Actually Scale a Lean Treasury Team
This panel isn’t just looking at digital transformation from a theoretical standpoint. They’re leading organizations that are actually doing it, which means getting into the details of exactly which technologies create real capacity when headcount grows. There are a number of key areas that stand out:
API-Based Bank Connectivity
Every panelist underscored how central API banking is to running a modern treasury function. Unlike file-based or host-to-host methods, APIs deliver balances and transactions automatically, throughout the day, without reconciliations or timing gaps. Instead of waiting for files or chasing missing statements, teams start with a clean, real-time view of their cash positions.
For lean teams, it’s the difference between spending hours gathering data and spending minutes acting on it.
Cloud-Native Platforms That Preserve Full Transaction Detail
Legacy systems often strip out metadata, require manual uploads, or limit how much history you can store or search. By contrast, cloud-native treasury platforms keep all transaction details intact, index everything, and make it searchable instantly. This matters for lean teams because every workflow becomes faster and more accurate when the data hasn’t been flattened or lost along the way.
Automated Tagging and Categorization
This is one of the most underrated sources of scale. Automated tagging builds structure into your bank data, creating instant clarity across entities, currencies, and regions. It means recurring transactions, inflows, outflows, and patterns are categorized the moment they appear.
Tagging becomes the backbone of faster forecasting, cleaner reporting, and more actionable insights.
Scenario Planning and Forecasting Built on Live Data
Once the data foundation is strong, forecasting becomes far more efficient. Instead of copying data into Excel templates or rebuilding models each month, teams can run multiple scenarios, update baselines instantly, and stress test liquidity using today’s numbers. This is how small teams support strategic conversations with confidence, even without analysts dedicated to modeling.
Recommended: Beyond Spreadsheets – How to Automate Cash Forecasting
ERP, Accounting, and BI Integrations
Integrations extend treasury’s reach beyond its own systems. When balances, transactions, and forecasts flow automatically into ERP, accounting, and reporting tools, month-end close tightens, reconciliations shrink, and FP&A works from the same source of truth as treasury.
Taken together, these technologies reshape workflows around real-time data, eliminate repetitive tasks, and give small teams the leverage they need to operate at enterprise scale.
The Biggest Wins From Digital Transformation
The panel shared some of the biggest wins they’d experienced since bringing in modern treasury technology.
Proctor now closes out cash reports in minutes instead of hours. She spends more time optimizing liquidity buffers and tightening daily cash ranges work she simply didn’t have time to get deep into the weeds with before.
Fisher said that, “Trying to manage liquidity with outdated data was impossible. Real-time cash visibility transformed our treasury from reactive to responsive.”
In addition to better resilience during uncertainty, Powers also saw the big gains in the quality and credibility of treasury’s output. With clean, current data flowing in automatically, he no longer spends energy validating spreadsheets or stitching together reports from different systems.
That accuracy has strengthened treasury’s influence across the business. When the numbers are right the first time and delivered quickly, executives trust the analysis and involve treasury earlier in decisions that shape liquidity and risk.
The common theme across all these wins is that leanness doesn’t stretch the team thinly, it gives them back more time to focus on strategic work.
The Truth About AI in Digital Treasury
AI came up throughout the panel, but not in the breathless way much of the industry talks about it. The hype says AI will rewrite every workflow and make treasury teams obsolete, but the reality is far more measured.
AI is becoming a valuable extension of digital transformation, not a substitute for it. It accelerates work that treasury already leads, such as generating process maps, drafting reports, summarizing trends, and spotting anomalies that would take hours to find manually.
Powers has used AI tools to fast-track documentation and build clearer workflow materials while Fisher’s team at CSG is exploring task-based agents to support forecasting and analysis. Even organizations with strict security constraints (like those put on the Cowboys by the NFL) are evaluating where AI can support internal processes safely.
But every panelist stressed the point that AI only works when the underlying data is accurate, structured, and real time, and when a skilled treasurer is steering the output. Without that foundation, AI can’t provide meaningful guidance, and it certainly can’t replace judgment.
AI is another tool in the treasury toolkit. It enhances expertise, it doesn’t eliminate it. The teams that benefit most are the ones that pair modern infrastructure with the strategic insight to ask the right questions and challenge the answers.
Scaling Starts With the Right Foundation
The session made it clear that the path to a high-performing, future-ready treasury team doesn’t run through headcount. It runs through better infrastructure, smarter workflows, and the willingness to invest in tools that elevate the expertise you already have.
The teams that scale aren’t the ones working the longest hours or juggling the most tasks. They’re the ones who treat automation as core infrastructure, use real-time data as their baseline, and apply AI with intention.
Digital transformation isn’t about replacing people, but about giving a lean team the capacity, clarity, and confidence to operate at a level that used to require a much larger staff. With the right systems in place, treasury becomes faster, sharper, and far more strategic.
For leaders facing rising expectations with flat headcount, the ceiling is low without technology. But once you build the right foundation, the upside is considerable, and the impact is lasting.
Trovata offers the modern solution to digital transformation, giving treasury access to consolidate, real-time banking data, automated reporting and forecasting, AI integration, and much more.
To see how digital transformation could scale your treasury capabilities without growing headcount, book a demo today.
Hear from solo treasurer, Laura Loeffler, on standing up a solo treasury team from scratch in this episode of Fintech Corner:
