The Future of Liquidity Management: Trends and Technologies Shaping 2025

Liquidity management has become a crucial part of the treasurers' day-to-day job as treasury moves from a custodian of cash to a strategic department that drives financial stability, resilience, and growth. In the past couple of years, we have witnessed seismic shifts in how businesses manage their liquidity - the traditional models and systems relying on manual processes to obtain visibility and forecasts are being abandoned in favour of more advanced technology that hinges on real-time insights. Surrounded by market volatility, ever-changing regulations, and technological disruptions, CFOs and treasury managers of multi-subsidiary businesses recognise that the stakes for optimising liquidity are high.

In this article, we explore the key trends and technologies reshaping liquidity management in 2025, offering strategic insights for treasury professionals seeking to transform their operations and create competitive advantage in an increasingly complex business environment.

For multi-entity businesses, fragmented cash flow visibility remains one of the most persistent challenges preventing them from effectively managing and optimising liquidity. The fragmentation of the financial ecosystem is caused by the multitude of banking relationships across various jurisdictions, disparate systems, and siloed data across various business units. The implications for treasury are vast:

Incomplete cash visibility: In the 2024 Global Treasury Survey from Deloitte, 64% of finance leaders listed the lack of visibility into cash and global financial operations as one of the most concerning challenges.

Reconciliation complexities: These stem primarily from two factors - manual work and cross-border operations. Manual data entry and processes are error-prone and consume valuable time, while cross-border operations complicate cash visibility and transfers with currency conversions and banking standards.

Forecasting limitations: Without real-time and comprehensive visibility into cash positions across entities, forecasting becomes unreliable and inaccurate. While it is possible to base forecasts on educated guesses and historical data or patterns, this can lead to poor decision-making, which puts your business at a disadvantage in a highly competitive market.

Fluctuating liquidity needs: Treasurers need to constantly juggle maintaining sufficient cash reserves while considering the cost of idle funds. Market volatility, seasonal business cycles, and unexpected disruptions add to these fluctuations.

Regulatory compliance burdens: Especially when operating across multiple regions, keeping on top of the changing regulatory frameworks around liquidity reporting demands granular data and analytics capabilities. Meeting these requirements without streamlined systems creates significant operational friction.

For cross-border businesses with multiple entities, these inefficiencies can translate to actual cash losses due to inefficient fund deployment, excessive borrowing, or maintaining unnecessarily high buffer levels. The solution lies in embracing technological innovations that can unify fragmented data and deliver actionable insights.

Traditionally, treasurers needed to wait hours, if not days, to see the updated cash position. With transactions and money movements happening continuously, by the time data from different sources is aggregated and consolidated, it tends to be out of date and, therefore, inactionable.

In 2025, real-time liquidity management is no longer a 'nice-to-have'; it becomes a necessity that fundamentally changes how treasury departments operate and how businesses, overall, manage their cash and liquidity.

Real-time liquidity management is largely based on API connectivity, which allows for instantaneous data exchange between treasury systems, financial operation tools, banks, and financial service providers. With this, finance professionals can access live cash positions across all accounts and entities at any time. This allows them to immediately identify any shortfalls or surpluses and redeploy cash accordingly.

Thanks to event-triggered mechanisms that execute predefined actions when certain conditions are met, treasurers can streamline and automate parts of liquidity management. For example, if an account balance exceeds a threshold, funds are reallocated, or liquidity issues in an account trigger automated alerts across departments.

Another technological advancement that helps optimise liquidity is cloud-based treasury management solutions. With their universal accessibility, collaboration between central and regional treasury functions becomes less siloed. Unlike on-premise treasury systems, cloud platforms are scalable and capable of handling increasing volumes of transaction data, which power more sophisticated analytics.

As 2025 progresses, we'll see these technologies evolve and become core assets in the treasury department that go beyond just providing visibility, truly enabling informed decision-making.

No technological advancement to date has had a more profound impact on liquidity management than the integration of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. Today, these technologies are no longer a gimmick; they have matured enough to be fully integrated into treasury operations.

Modern AI-powered forecasting systems offer capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago:

From macroeconomic factors to weather patterns and social media sentiments, AI algorithms can spot correlations among seemingly unrelated factors influencing cash flows.

AI models adjust forecasts as new data becomes available, maintaining ongoing accuracy. This is a stark shift from the predominantly popular, static model.

ML algorithms can be trained to flag unusual patterns in cash flows that may indicate fraud, payment issues, or emerging business challenges, enabling proactive intervention.

Treasury teams can analyse how multiple factors, including market disruptions or acquisitions, impact liquidity. By modelling multiple scenarios at the same time, AI evaluates thousands of potential outcomes and helps arrive at better-informed decisions.

For multi-subsidiary organisations, these transformative capabilities of AI translate into more accurate forecasts (according to industry reports, companies claim a reduced forecast variance by 10-30%), a reduction of safety buffers and idle cash, as well as proactive management of cash flow challenges thanks to early warning systems.

The emergence of digital assets such as CBDCs, tokenised assets, and cryptocurrencies is not a futuristic myth but a reality that treasury departments need to take into consideration as they will greatly reshape liquidity management from now on.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have gained significant traction, with major economies including the UK, EU, and China now developing and opening their CBDC frameworks. For treasury managers, CBDCs offer compelling advantages:

CBDC transactions settle in real-time, eliminating the delays associated with traditional banking methods and enhancing liquidity management precision.

Smart contracts automate certain treasury operations like conditional payments and self-executing liquidity protocols.

The digital nature of CBDCs provides increased transparency and enhanced compliance with regulatory requirements across jurisdictions.

Beyond CBDCs, tokenised assets, digital representations of traditional financial instruments on blockchain infrastructure are also opening up new possibilities for liquidity optimisation. These can be deployed as collateral, which reduces friction in secured funding operations. Treasury departments are also able to tokenise large, illiquid assets and mobilise portions as needed, improving balance sheet flexibility.

As for cryptocurrencies, they offer both challenges and benefits. By bypassing traditional banking routes for international transfers they reduce costs and settlement times. Cryptocurrencies are also used in some advanced treasury operations to mitigate volatility risks. Due to their unregulated nature, there are still major limitations and objections on how and when they can be deployed.

Over the next few years, we can expect digital assets to be more integrated into the mainstream treasury operations and treasury managers will be expected to stay up to date with the emerging technologies.

The regulatory compliance surrounding liquidity management continues to change rapidly and continuously keeps treasurers alert. The key trends that finance and treasury departments need to be aware:

Reporting requirements: There's an increased demand for more granular and frequent liquidity reporting from the regulatory bodies. Under certain jurisdictions real-time supervision models may be required.

Stress testing mandates: Treasury departments may be obligated to undergo more rigorous stress testing, with scenarios specifically designed to evaluate liquidity resilience during market disruptions.

Cross-border compliance harmonisation: Regional differences will remain in place however various international bodies are collaborating to standardise liquidity regulations and reduce complexity in compliance management.

Digital asset frameworks: Wider application of digital assets requires the introduction of new regulatory structures to govern them.

As a result, multi-subsidiary businesses will need to develop new and more advanced systems to manage compliance requirements. This may include automated compliance systems that monitor changes, assess their impact and adjust the required treasury operations. Investing in redesign and reorganisation of the data architecture in a way that is scalable and adaptive could be beneficial, while forecasting should include different regulatory scenarios.

Traditionally, treasury has been operated on a centralised model whereby the headquarters and individual subsidiaries have had little insight into each other's activities. In 2025, we see more and more businesses interested in collaborative systems that offer global visibility without sacrificing regional flexibility - for example, allowing for swift reallocation of funds between subsidiaries. These platforms not only feature communication capabilities, but also help disseminate best practices and insights throughout all treasury teams within the business, that way contributing to better informed decisions across the organisation.

Organisations with complex, multi-subsidiary structures will benefit from these collaborative tools by accelerating their liquidity decision cycles. It is estimated that the reduction in time required to make liquidity decisions can be cut between 60-80% when organisations combine AI with collaborative tools. Additionally, thanks to reduced silos and enhanced collaborations, distributed treasury operations and teams can be more resilient and adaptable when facing market disruptions or regional crises.

Undoubtedly, the trend of the treasury function becoming a strategic department driving operational resilience and growth will continue into 2025 and beyond. Looking at the emerging trends CFOs and treasury leaders of multi-subsidiary businesses should specifically pay attention to the following aspects in order to optimise their liquidity management:

Investing in interconnected systems that leverage APIs, cloud infrastructure, real-time visibility and AI capabilities is no longer optional but essential to remain competitive and even compliant.

Building teams that combine traditional treasury expertise with data science and technology skills are critical for capitalising on the trends in cash flow and liquidity management.

Shifting operating models to abolish silos and balance central control with regional autonomy will enable strategic alignment and local responsiveness.

Being aware of and educated about the emerging technologies like digital assets while maintaining operational excellence, will contribute to future resilience and competitiveness.

Developing the capability to anticipate regulatory developments rather than merely react to them creates strategic advantage in an increasingly complex compliance landscape.

Organisations that thrive in this new environment will be those that view liquidity not as a resource to be managed but as a strategic asset to be optimised. By embracing the technologies and approaches outlined in this article, treasury departments can transform themselves from cost centres to value creators, directly contributing to their competitive advantage and business success.