2022 Global Corporate Treasury Survey

About the survey

While conducting the survey, we observed some companies who were still dealing with impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic whereas other organisations considered the pandemic in the review-mirror and were now focused on new priorities and challenges.

In preparing this year’s survey, our team considered the following:

• What challenges and mandates are treasurers facing?
• What learnings did organisations have from the pandemic and how are treasury organisations evolving as a result (business continuity, focus, talent, and size)?
• How are technologies adopted and used by the treasury teams?
• To what extent are treasurers utilising technologies that complement treasury management systems?
• What regulations and trends are top of mind for treasurers?

Almost unanimously, most of our respondents have selected liquidity risk management and being a steward for financial risk management as critical mandates. Mandates working capital optimisation and enhancing governance and control over global treasury operations has gained more focus by treasury groups since the last time we conducted the survey.

Within the next 12 months, most surveyed organisations are planning to take actions to enhance liquidity management, improve cash forecasting activities, improve the capital structure, address market risk, and increase operational efficiency to better deliver on mandates and address common challenges that include visibility into global operations, limited digital/treasury systems capabilities, liquidity, and FX volatility.

Learning from the experience of navigating the pandemic over the past few years, the survey further revealed that many organisations are looking to take control of their own destiny and increase their readiness for a “next event” by addressing any gaps related to business continuity planning, strengthen FX risk management, and fraud risk management capabilities.

What was consistent across all company sizes was an increased focus of combining technical treasury experience with data/modelling, digital, as well as soft skills. A few of our respondents expressed that they believe that the treasurer of tomorrow will not only need to possess treasury domain expertise, but leadership, risk management, and technology skills to better navigate strategic treasury priorities of tomorrow.

The adoption of treasury management technologies in the cloud has increased since we conducted our survey last in 2019. Respondents also share how they have increased the adoption of APIs, automation, and visualisation technologies to complement treasury management systems (compared to our last survey in 2019).

From a Deloitte perspective, we draw from the survey that organisations are quickly taking actions to address liquidity management, financial risk, business continuity, and operating model priorities, many of which are learnings from what organisations experienced during the pandemic. Getting ahead of regulatory drivers, especially IBOR and ESG are top of mind and many are looking to technology (treasury management systems (TMS), APIs, automation, and visualisation technologies) to help enable these key priorities, many of which organisations are looking to address over the next year.

Key insights from the 2022 global corporate treasury survey

Highlights

• Enhancing liquidity risk management is considered as the most critical mandate given to treasury departments by the board or the CFO, echoing previous survey trends.
• Compared to 2019, working capital optimisation and enhancing governance and control over domestic and overseas operations, has become a larger focus.
• While turning treasury into a profit center had gain some momentum in prior surveys, it is still considered an exception as it tends to be limited to companies in certain industries (e.g., financial services and commodities trading businesses).
• Respondents considering financing growth via capital markets as ‘Not Important’ increased significantly between 2019 (7%) and 2022 (32%), showing a preference for organisations to rely on their bank facilities or to the equity market.
• 83% of respondents indicated that lack of visibility to exposures and reliability of forecasts as the top challenge while managing FX risk. Manual exposure identification and capture processes was a close second with 71%.
• Visibility into global operations, cash, and risk exposures continues to be the most challenging and time-consuming areas for surveyed treasury executives.

Survey demographics

A total of 245 interviews were conducted across Deloitte’s global network via a questionnaire:

• Respondents span all industries with most participants from the Consumer & Industrial Products industry.
• 56% of companies participating have revenues less than 10bn USD, whereas 24% have revenues between 10-50bn USD and the remaining 20% have revenues in excess of 50bn USD.

Get in touch

Deloitte has one of the largest treasury practices, with subject matter specialists across areas of digital treasury strategy, transformation, and technology. If this survey resonates with any issues your company is facing, please contact us.