Treasury’s Growing Role In Africa’s Growth

The global financial crisis left corporate treasurers with an uncomfortable truth that money which appears to be available can dissipate rather quickly when everybody reaches for it all at once. Companies that had treated liquidity largely as a balance-sheet management issue discovered how much depended on being able to get hold of cash when markets stopped behaving normally, and the years that followed produced a treasury function far less willing to take that access for granted, particularly where buffers were thin or too much confidence rested on a handful of banking relationships and funding lines that had never been tested under real strain. In that sense, 2008 did its job, teaching companies to worry about whether the money would be there.

Nearly two decades later, we are seeing that the money can be there and still prove surprisingly hard to put to work.

Cross-border payments are becoming technologically faster at the same time that the financial system around them is becoming more politically and economically fragmented, leaving companies with a curious problem: they can know where their cash is almost instantly and still face growing uncertainty over how freely it can move. Hard-currency shortages can complicate conversion in one market, regulation can change the economics of moving funds in another, while the correspondent relationships that have traditionally carried cross-border payments have themselves become thinner in parts of the world. None of this necessarily reduces the amount of cash on the balance sheet; it changes the degree to which that cash can be relied upon as immediately deployable liquidity.

Research suggests treasury has already spent years improving the things it can control from the inside out, investing heavily in automation and tighter control over cash. PwC’s 2025 Global Treasury Survey found that 94 per cent of respondents already operated a dedicated treasury management system and 65 per cent planned to expand their use of APIs, but forecasting still relied heavily on manual consolidation even among large companies and satisfaction with forecasting remained worryingly low.

EY found something similar, just from a different angle: 73 per cent of respondents still described digitising treasury functions as a challenge, even as the technology moves towards real-time liquidity management and increasingly automated payments.

The interesting part is the mismatch. Companies are getting progressively better at seeing cash and processing it, while the practical conditions governing whether that cash can be moved are becoming more complicated, which means the industry may be perfecting the tools for yesterday’s problem just as the problem itself is changing shape.

That should trouble treasurers because much of the operating logic built after the last great liquidity shock was designed to make cash easier to control from the centre. There was good reason for that, and there still is, though an arrangement can be beautifully efficient while everything is working and rather less impressive once one of the routes on which that efficiency depends becomes constrained. That is where transactional banking starts to earn a more strategic place in the conversation, because the bank sits in the actual pathways through which liquidity moves and can see where those pathways narrow.

A company may have perfectly sound liquidity at group level and still find that the route between one market and another has become slower or more expensive than the balance sheet suggests, which makes the banking architecture around that cash more consequential. The value of the transaction bank then is in helping the client understand the shape of that architecture across jurisdictions and, just as importantly, where it is likely to fail under pressure.

This is also why the old language of global consistency can be misleading. What we are hearing from clients at Absa is that the real difficulty is in making decisions across different markets that still add up to one coherent treasury strategy. That becomes harder when each market imposes its own operating conditions and payment realities, and it places a premium on banks that can hold the whole picture while still understanding the detail on the ground.

What companies really need is consistency of outcome across markets that are anything but consistent in how they regulate and clear transactions. That asks more of the banking relationship than the ability to provide the same product everywhere. It asks the bank to join up local knowledge with a broader view of the client’s liquidity, so that cash management reflects how money actually moves through the business. At that point, transaction banking becomes part of the company’s resilience architecture, because the way liquidity is structured begins to determine how much freedom the business has to act.

The ability to facilitate trade, optimise liquidity, strengthen supply-chain ecosystems, support cross-border commerce and enable efficient movement of capital is becoming a critical differentiator for financial institutions seeking to create long-term value for their clients and shareholders.

2008 pulled treasury much closer to the question of survival. The period ahead could pull it further upstream, into decisions about where a business can realistically grow, because a market is only as accessible as the company’s ability to fund activity there and bring the resulting cash back into productive use. Once liquidity starts influencing where expansion is practical, treasury stops sitting behind corporate strategy and starts helping determine the map on which that strategy can be executed.

*Themba Rikhotso is the Managing Executive, Transactional Banking, Absa CIB