11 min read
Key takeaways
- Treasury teams are reimagining liquidity management through technology adoption and finance automation embedded into ERP platforms
- To combat escalating fraud risks, companies are implementing digital IDs that combine verified data with behavioral pattern analysis
- AI agents are projected to handle 15-25% of all U.S. e-commerce purchases by 2030
- 60% of Fortune 500 companies are implementing blockchain initiatives to help increase process efficiency
1. Reimagine liquidity: The shift to always-on treasury
Whether a business is expanding into new geographies or reconfiguring supply chains due to geopolitical strains, businesses need to be able to access funds quickly in any location or currency. Teams also need to be able to anticipate or respond to events in real time via programmable automation, to ensure businesses have the agility and resilience to withstand shocks.
Optimizing your treasury function
Treasury teams are reimaging their liquidity approach by investing in new technologies to build resiliency into the treasury ecosystem.1 For example, adopting real-time payments (RTP)2—such as PIX in Brazil3 or SEPA Instant in Europe4—means that treasury can keep hold of liquidity for longer, enabling last-minute payments compared to traditional payments like ACH, where you would need to pay a day in advance.5
New technology is also helping enable borderless liquidity, helping facilitate cross-border payments or intra-group financing for treasurers. By adopting virtual account structures for intercompany trade settlement, treasury teams can manage internal cash flows and optimize foreign exchange without moving funds between accounts or locations, improving liquidity and multi-currency management. Meanwhile, integrating cash-generating entities into multi-currency notional pools increases visibility over liquidity and provides an efficient way to access funding for operations.6
Liquidity focus
- Real-time liquidity—Real-time payments, streamlined infrastructure
- Borderless liquidity—Multi-currency capabilities, VAMs, inter-company payment optimization
- Resilient liquidity—API connectivity, notional pools, automated sweeping
New technologies and real-time connectivity are crucial to reducing friction and improving working capital across a more diverse landscape. Finance automation is increasingly being embedded into enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, which is cutting the administrative load and making it easier for procurement treasury teams to get visibility over working capital and access non-debt financing, anytime and in real time.
2. Digital identity: The future of fraud defense
Consumers and businesses now expect transactions to clear in seconds, so verifying identity is crucial to reduce the risk of fraud.
Losses from authorized push payments (APP) scams are projected to hit $3.03 billion by 2027.7 Meanwhile, 47% of businesses experienced fraud incidents related to ACH credits in 2023,8 according to a report by the Association for Financial Professionals. And $2.8 billion was lost to business email compromise attacks in 2024.9
Growth of digital IDs
To balance fraud prevention with the need to reduce checkout abandonment, businesses are introducing stronger security measures like biometrics or additional pre-payment control checks in payment processing.13 But there is a growing recognition of the need to combine data-based approaches with deeper behavioral pattern analysis. Digital IDs are a strong solution for this.14
Growing social acceptance of digital IDs, plus the heightened risk of fraud, have prompted regulators to take steps:
- In 2026, the EU is introducing a digital ID wallet for users to authenticate their identity15
- In India, the national ID scheme Aadhaar is powering over 2 billion monthly authentications as of 202516
- In Singapore, Singpass—a digital ID for residents to access public and private services—has 5 million active users as of 202517
These schemes underscore that digital IDs are becoming to global e-commerce what passports are to international travel.18
Prevention reigns supreme
With account-to-account (A2A) payments, once money leaves an account, it is gone for good—so pre-transaction ID controls are essential for supporting faster payments. Finance teams need to implement comprehensive counterparty validation, including real-time ID verification and layered defense mechanisms like real-time fraud detection and account intelligence tools to ensure their customers are who they say they are.
3. Payments evolution: Improving next-gen experiences
AI promises to change how people shop through the rise of agentic commerce. Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capability lets agents use delegated authority and advanced reasoning to search for and make purchase decisions for a customer.
"By 2030, AI agents are projected to be responsible for 15-25% of all US e-commerce purchases."19
To prepare for this, businesses will need to deploy “sell-side” AI agents that can optimize inventory, pricing and engagement to market their products to “buy-side” agents.
Improving the payment experience
Research shows there remains a mismatch between what consumers want and what merchants consider important. While 65% of consumers expect one-click payments, only 45% of merchants view a frictionless checkout as necessary.20
In response, using technology to create more personalized payments could include:
- Providing more payment options based on customer preference, such as bank transfers, direct debits, cryptocurrencies or account-to-account payments
- Personalizing payments through installment payments based on streamlined credit checks
- Creating personalized loyalty schemes—especially in the U.S., where 25% of respondents to a McKinsey survey said being able to collect points or discounts was a key factor behind their payment choice21
Embedded finance
Embedded finance will help companies launch payments ecosystems and business lines that can give customers the seamless shopping experience they crave. Creating a closed-loop payments ecosystem—where payments and rewards remain within a company’s platform—drives loyalty by helping enable a more frictionless checkout.
BCG research estimates that the total addressable market for embedded finance in the U.S., Canada and Europe is around $185 billion across payments, capital solutions, accounts and card issuing.22
4. Always connected: APIs, data and automation
The introduction of the ISO 20022 data standard is revolutionizing payments by providing richer transaction data to support more automation and robust transaction monitoring. Payment reconciliations will be faster, while harmonized data structures will enable more seamless cross-border payments.
AI-powered treasury
With its ability to capture and analyze huge volumes of data, AI is expected to be transformational for treasury. CFOs and treasury leaders expect AI-enabled capabilities to unlock ROI in areas like risk management, revenue, and spend analysis and forecasting.23 Their confidence is well-founded—organizations with advanced insights capabilities are three times more likely to report double-digit annual revenue growth than those relying on basic information.24
Embedded everything
Finance teams are also looking to build digital-first treasury operations through embedded banking capabilities. As many as 88% of financial professionals believe direct bank connectivity is very or extremely beneficial, while 85% say they would likely switch banks to get direct accounting or ERP connectivity.25
By embedding banking and treasury functionality into ERP and treasury management system (TMS) platforms, businesses can access live balances, initiate payments, track transactions, and automate cross-border reconciliation, forecasting and liquidity management.
5. Blockchain realized: Increased adoption and new opportunities
Blockchain technology has moved quickly from theory to reality. Some 60% of large Fortune 500 companies are looking to implement blockchain initiatives, with increased use of deposit tokens, central bank digital currencies and stablecoins.26
The growth of asset tokenization
Asset tokenization will continue to grow, with the potential for asset classes such as bonds, securities and repos to be tokenized and recorded on blockchain networks. About 60% of institutional investors are looking to increase their exposure to digital assets, with tokenization being an important driver.27
From systems to networks
Blockchain will also facilitate a move away from systems-based infrastructure into a world of network-based architecture that allows for greater interoperability and programmability.
Instead of having separate accounts for different financial services, individuals could have a single wallet that serves as ID and as a means for holding multiple assets, not just cash. The movement of those assets is then governed by smart contracts recognized across financial institutions.
Network-based infrastructure also enables the possibility of shared ledgers rather than a general ledger at an individual institution, allowing use cases to extend beyond cash and payments into assets such as derivatives, securities and FX, and capabilities such as composability, atomic settlements and new clearing gateways.
Integrated processes
Systems-based architecture often requires disparate financial processes, sometimes across different legal entities in different geographies. Networks enable organizations to integrate processes and payments so they can be automated and run in parallel. Tasks that used to take days can now be completed in hours.28
What’s ahead?
As businesses navigate these shifts, progress in one area can pave the way for opportunities in another. For example, reimagining liquidity can help improve opportunities across working capital, which can then be used to fund AI projects that can in turn help improve fraud detection and security.
We’ll continue exploring these five trends in this series. Sign up for our newsletter, The Month In Payments, for the latest news, trends and innovations shaping the world of payments.
References
European Commission, “European Digital Identity.” Accessed January 2026.
HSBC, “Real-time treasury: smarter liquidity, stronger control and quicker decision making,” Sept. 14, 2023.
Banco Central do Brasil, “PIX powered by Banco Central”
European Payments Council, “SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Rulebook and Implementation Guidelines”
Stripe, “How long do ACH payments take to process?” October 9, 2023.
J.P. Morgan, “How to complement FX strategies with liquidity and multi-currency management,” 2022.
Paymentsdived.com, Dec 2023, “Authorized payment scams climb in US”
Association for Financial Professionals, “Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report 2024.”
FTC, March 2025, “New FTC data show a big jump in reported losses to fraud to $12.5 billion in 2024.”
Biometricupdate.com, Nov 2025, “Deepfake attacks now occur every five minutes, Entrust report warns.”
US Bank, May 2025, “Fight the battle against payments fraud”
The Payments Association, “The future of payments: How fraud is reshaping the payments ecosystem”
The Payments Association, “What is behavioral biometric analysis?” July 14, 2021
European Commission, “European Digital Identity.” Accessed January 2026.
pib.gov.in, “UIDAI records 231 crore Aadhaar authentication transactions in November, 8.47% growth over Nov 2024.”
The Payments Association, “How are digital IDs reshaping industries for a secure and seamless future?” January 22, 2023
Bain & Company, “2030 Forecast: How Agentic AI Will Reshape US Retail.”
Klarna, Oct 2021, “Retailers and shoppers out of sync on the value of physical stores.”
McKinsey, October 2024, “State of consumer digital payments in 2024.”
BCG, September 2025, “Moving Embedded Finance from Promise to Practice.”
BCG, June 2025, “How To Get ROI from AI in the Finance Function.”
Forrester, May 2024, “Data-Driven Insights and AI: Informing And Automating Complex Decisions.”
Nine Wave, September 2025, “85% of CFOs Say They’d Switch Banks for Direct ERP-to-Bank Connection.”
CoinDesk, June 2025, “Blockchain Initiatives Have Been Adopted by 60% of Fortune 500 Companies, Deloitte Baseline Survey.”
The Block, October 2025, “State Street finds institutional investors on pushing their digital asset exposure within three years.”
Bank for International Settlements (BIS), “Project Helvetia: Settling tokenised assets in central bank money,” December 3, 2020.
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