In our Treasury Management series, RBC speaks with Canadian businesses and the specialists who advise them about how money moves through an advanced treasury operation – and what leaders are learning about managing cash flow, payments, and risk along the way.
This article is built on conversations with RBC Treasury Solutions specialists who work alongside Canadian businesses every day, the companies putting new tools to work and insights on Canada’s shifting payments landscape. You’ll hear how leading finance teams are turning treasury from a back-office function into a source of strategic advantage – and the frameworks they’re using to get there. If modernizing operations is on your agenda, these insights can help you decide where to focus and how to begin.
For Canadian businesses, the way money moves in, out, and through their organization is now changing faster than it has in decades.
Several factors are converging at once: real-time payments with the launch of Canada’s new Real-Time Rail – artificial intelligence, application programming interfaces (APIs), embedded finance, and rising expectations of visibility and control.
Learn more about how Real-Time Rail is Coming to Canada and will modernize payments for finance teams.
Together, they’re reshaping what a finance team can do – and how quickly they can do it. Technology is a big part of the story, but it isn’t the hero. Rather, it’s what the technology enables: a shift from treasury reporting on what already happened to reporting what’s happening right now.
“We’ve moved from asking ‘where is my cash?’ to asking ‘what can I strategically do with that cash?’” says Stephen Miller, Vice President, Cash Management and Commercial Channel Solutions at RBC. That shift – from looking backward to looking forward – is one that affects the whole finance team. With greater visibility, CFOs can weigh risk and capital allocation precisely, treasurers can more easily manage liquidity across increasingly complex banking structures, and controllers can find automation that gives their teams time back. Each of them has a stake in the change – and a role in leading it.
In the stories that follow, RBC treasury solutions specialists and the Canadian businesses they work with map out where working capital management stands today – and the new tools, processes, and approaches that are driving treasury innovation.
Setting the stage: Treasury’s shift from cost centre to strategy
For a long time, treasury was a reactive, back-office cost centre. It reported what happened yesterday, closed the books each month and handed the numbers to the CFO. While it was a necessary function, it wasn’t where strategic decisions were made.
Today that’s changing, because the information treasury works with is no longer trapped in the past. When a finance team can see its cash position as it stands right now – not just as it stood yesterday or even last month – treasury can start to shape decisions instead of simply recording them.
The financial supply chain
Money moves through a business much the way a supply chain moves goods. Every company runs on a version of the same cycle: make a sale, invest in the supplies or services to fulfill it, deliver, collect the cash and redeploy that cash into producing the next sale. Call it the financial supply chain – the continuous loop of money flowing in and out as the business operates.
While this cycle exists in every business, what differs from one company to the next is how much visibility they have into each stage – and how much they can influence the velocity of cash while there’s still time to act.
From reacting to planning: The acceleration of finance operations
Traditionally, procurement, sales and treasury have each managed their own part of this cycle – buying, selling, and moving money – as separate departments, with separate systems and separate reporting schedules. When those functions stay disconnected, treasury can only see the cycle in hindsight. It can report on cash flow, but it can’t influence it.
That hindsight is beginning to ease as the three functions become connected. Over roughly the past few years, treasury has moved from an operational cost centre toward a role in day-to-day strategy, helping shape same-day decisions about purchasing, new markets, and capacity. When sales, procurement, and treasury share real-time data, treasury can answer a question like: Can we afford this contract, and how fast can we turn it around? while the decision is still live.
“Within the companies that are leading the way, sales, procurement, finance and treasury are all connected, which creates both efficiency and opportunity,” says Miller.
The speed at which the cycle turns is just as important as the visibility into it. “For companies without visibility, that cycle turns slowly,” Miller says. “For companies that have it, the cycle accelerates – and a faster cycle means more potential sales, executed faster and with more intention behind them.”
Four Days, One Million Dollars
A Toronto food distributor serving a Western Canadian client opened a lockbox to receive cheques closer to his customer. The change shortened his collection cycle by four days.
That single adjustment let him bring in an extra million dollars that year – just by compressing his cash flow cycle. “The economic value of accelerating that cycle is enormous,” says Miller. While this is a small business example, the mechanics scale; for a commercial enterprise, there are more zeros.
The four forces behind treasury’s shift from reporting to strategy
Several developments have come together to make this shift possible and make now the moment for businesses to act.
A common data standard: Payments are increasingly carrying richer, more detailed information through a global data standard known as ISO 20022. More detail travelling with each payment means data integration and reconciliation – matching money to the right invoices – gets faster and easier.
Real-time connections: Application programming interfaces, or APIs, let a company’s systems and its bank’s systems exchange information instantly. It works much the same way as ordering a coffee on your phone: your account updates in real time, and you know the moment the order is ready. Payments and balances can now work the same way.
Artificial intelligence: AI can consume large volumes of data, connect the dots, and perform steps that used to be done by hand – including matching payments and, in turn, reconciling payments that once took days of manual remittance work.
The move to the cloud: As companies migrate off aging mainframe systems, they’re rethinking how they connect with their banks and what they can do with their data. Outside of pure competitive pressure, Miller notes, this migration is often the single biggest trigger for treasury modernization.
The cost of standing still
The flip side of all this opportunity is what it costs to stay where you are – and the gap between companies that act and the companies that wait – is widening. The Business Development Bank of Canada estimates that if more firms matched the digital maturity of Canada’s top performers, it could unlock nearly $350 billion in growth. Adoption alone isn’t the advantage – companies that build real capabilities with the tools, rather than simply buying them, see the greatest benefit.
For treasury specifically, the cost adds up in five ways:
Cash sits idle: When no one can see the full position, money often stays parked across foreign currency accounts and short-term investments. “It’s like leaving money in a drawer instead of putting it back in the business,” says Miller.
Slower payment means slower sales: For businesses that extend credit, a customer can’t order again until their last payment is matched to their account. Every day of delay means a day of orders not placed.
Manual reconciliation has a labour cost: Some large corporates bring teams in at staggered hours across Europe, Asia, and North America purely to match payments to invoices. Historically, poor data has also made it hard to reconcile payments.
Every manual step is a point where something can break: More handoffs mean more openings for fraud and error.
Competitors pull ahead: Companies that have digitized treasury operations have a better understanding of their costs, so they can quote faster, take on tighter turnarounds, and handle volatility better.
How businesses benefit from modernization
If the cost of standing still is on one side of the ledger, the return on modernizing treasury systems is on the other. The returns tend to snowball, building both the capacity of the finance team and the capital available to the business. Here’s how that can play out:
Teams get time back
The most immediate benefit to modernization is time. As routine work gets automated, people can move from rudimentary, repetitive tasks to higher-value work, such as analysis, planning, and partnering with the rest of the business.
It’s worth stressing that transforming systems doesn’t have to mean reducing jobs. More often, the shift provides the opportunity to elevate people’s roles. “People are frequently repurposed to create more value than they were creating before,” notes Miller. For example, the finance professional who once spent days reconciling accounts can now help decide where the company should deploy its cash.
The compounding effect
The benefits of investing in treasury innovation build over time – and gradually reach across the business.
As Miller notes: “The leading treasurers are beginning to realize that these compound. You make one investment, and it has a ripple effect across the rest of the business. As long as you’re monitoring that – not just from a treasury perspective but what it’s doing for sales and procurement – there’s a value curve there that simply didn’t exist before.”
What holds companies back
If the case is this strong, why doesn’t every company move faster? Part of the answer is history: as a cost centre, treasury has historically received minimal investment, and treasurers have had to build the value case for every dollar.
But the math has changed. AI has reshaped the cost equation, as work that once took many developer hours can now be done in two or three. That makes the business case easier to make than it was even a few years ago.
For companies ready to modernize, the path forward isn’t a single leap. Instead, teams are building three disciplines in a deliberate order, each one making the next more effective.
The three disciplines Canadian leaders are building
For companies ready to modernize, the path forward isn’t a single leap. Instead, teams are building three disciplines in a deliberate order, each one making the next more effective.
Discipline one: Optimized liquidity and working capital
Many treasury leaders today can’t get a real-time answer to a key question: how much cash do we have, where is it and in what currency?
The reason typically comes down to structure. When cash sits across multiple banks, currencies, and jurisdictions, every source reports in its own format on its own schedule. Assembling a single, current picture becomes a genuine challenge.
Two capabilities can help solve it. Real-time cash visibility gives a live position across banks, currencies, and business entities – not a snapshot from yesterday’s close. And ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and accounting system integration connects a company’s book of record directly to its bank, so data flows both ways continuously instead of coming in as batches at set times.
The difference is being able to make same-day decisions with confidence, rather than reacting after month end.
“When a company gets a new order, they need to know if they can fund the supplies to deliver it,” says Miller. “That once meant rebuilding a forecast. Now it’s a question they can answer in the moment.”
This is why visibility is the first discipline: once a company can see its position clearly, nearly every decision that follows gets easier.
Discipline two: Streamlined payments and collections
Just as liquidity is about seeing your position, payments and collections are about acting on it – sending money out and bringing money in with less friction, delay, and risk.
For most finance teams, this is where the day-to-day work happens, and where modernization can have the biggest initial impact. Leaders building this discipline focus on three things: paying suppliers on terms that work for both sides, capturing the information that comes in with each payment, and building a banking connection that anticipates the business.
Paying suppliers on their terms
Traditionally, banks have come in at the very end of the payment process. The client does the matching and approvals, enters the basic information and sends it along. Leading companies are moving instead to integrated payables, where the bank helps recommend the payment decision itself – choosing the best route for each payment based on how quickly it needs to arrive, how much information needs to travel with it, and whether currency conversion is involved.
This kind of flexibility is important as suppliers often have their own requirements, both in how they want to be paid and when. A company that can meet them protects the relationship its business depends on.
Canada’s new Real-Time Rail – the soon-to-be-launched -payment system – adds another option to the mix, moving funds in real-time or seconds, around the clock, and with more data attached to each payment. The C.D. Howe Institute estimates it could add more than $3 billion to the Canadian economy in the first five years, in part through better cash flow management for business.
Getting paid – and knowing what you were paid for
A cheque used to arrive with at least an invoice number attached, but payment details were minimal. While wires or e-Transfers can arrive faster, funds often arrive as a lump sum with little or nothing to tie it to. This is further complicated when multiple invoices are aggregated into one payment.
The value of modern reporting tools is that they close this gap, tying each deposit to a name, a company and an invoice without hours of manual matching. Being able to see the cash position as it stands, rather than a day behind, turns a payment system into a decision-making tool. This is where new technology can create the most value, Miller notes, because the receivables side has seen limited investment.
A banking connection that anticipates and assists
When a company’s systems and its bank’s systems are integrated, the relationship can start to work ahead of events, rather than simply reacting to them. This can mean arranging financing before a known seasonal crunch, recognizing an unusual spike in activity as expected rather than suspicious, and putting solutions in place before they’re needed.
The data advantage
Payment data can also show a company where its cash is, whether it’s moving more slowly than it should, and where money is getting stuck. “If you are collecting in 60 days but all your peers are collecting in 30, we can help identify the issues and make changes to your payment terms and processes to close that gap,” says Miller.
There are levers on the paying side too – if a supplier accepts credit card payment, for instance, paying by card can free up roughly three additional weeks of working capital, depending on the card’s terms.
“A retail client of ours trimmed their bank accounts from over 200 to just one with RBC VAM, our virtual account solution,” Miller explains. “It improved their cash visibility and control and made bank account management and reconciliation much easier.”
One degree of separation
As Canada’s largest bank, RBC sits roughly one degree of separation from almost every company in the country. This means it can see payment patterns an individual business can’t – and can help clients act on them.
Built-in fraud protection
Every additional manual touchpoint in a process is a potential point of failure – a place where money can be misdirected or a fraudulent instruction can slip in. When a company’s systems are integrated with its bank through a single connection, there’s one set of controls to manage rather than many, which narrows those openings.
This embedded security has become increasingly important as the threats have grown more sophisticated. Canadians reported a record $704 million in fraud losses in 2025, and tactics are getting more convincing, from vendor and business email compromise, AI-enabled impersonation and even deepfake video calls of executives authorizing payments. Modern, integrated systems don’t eliminate the risk altogether, but they can reduce the number of entry points and make unusual activity easier to catch early.
The Food Dudes: Managing Cash Flow Through Seasonal Swings
For Toronto hospitality operator The Food Dudes, seasonality can create significant swings in cash flow. Managing when money goes out – and when it comes in – is essential to keeping the business running year-round.
Making payments work
From accommodating suppliers’ preferred payment methods to meeting strict payment deadlines, electronic payments give The Food Dudes greater control over how and when suppliers are paid.
Getting a clearer view of cash
Detailed reporting also helps the finance team identify incoming payments and reconcile them quickly – particularly when a single event may be paid for by several people. Up-to-date visibility into its cash position gives the team better information for day-to-day decisions.
Planning for seasonal gaps
The company’s Honda Indy Toronto partnership illustrates the challenge: roughly half the costs are paid in June, the event takes place in July and payment arrives weeks later. By planning ahead with its RBC team and arranging financing in advance, The Food Dudes can prepare for that gap rather than react to it.
For a seasonal business, proactive cash management helps keep operations moving even when revenue doesn’t arrive evenly throughout the year.
Read the full story: How The Food Dudes Built the Financial Systems to Manage Cash Flow Year-Round
Discipline three: FX and international capabilities
For businesses that operate across borders, currency is a constant source of uncertainty. While the instinct may be to try to predict where rates are heading, the discipline is to stop trying.
“Nobody can predict currency movement,” Miller says. What a business can do instead is gain confidence in what its foreign exchange costs will actually be, trading the impossible goal of forecasting the market for the achievable one of managing exposure.
Several capabilities can step in to support this discipline. Exchange rate optimization applies the bank’s data models to a client’s specific upcoming obligations, while international payment tracking and automated conversions reduce the manual work and the guesswork. And AI-driven controls watch for manipulation and unauthorized trading.
The connective tissue is embedded finance – the next step beyond APIs and the engine behind embedded FX. Where an API triggers an exchange of information between two systems, embedded solutions exist inside the client’s own systems. That means the bank can see a company’s upcoming foreign-currency invoices and recommend a hedge against them, delivered where the client already works rather than in a separate portal.
Given increasing regulatory complexity (what’s required for a payment to clear is changing rapidly across jurisdictions), integration helps businesses keep pace without having to absorb the extra work internally. This is a meaningful advantage at a time when geopolitical volatility is keeping currency markets, and the rules that govern cross-border payments, in near-constant motion.
Group Lacasse: A Multi-Layered Approach to FX Management
Groupe Lacasse is a Quebec-based commercial furniture manufacturer that sells more than 70 per cent of its products in the U.S. Foreign exchange is therefore an everyday business consideration. Its approach combines several strategies to help manage currency exposure and protect margins.
Using a mix of FX tools
Lacasse uses forwards, options and spot transactions as part of its long-term FX strategy. Forward contracts help the company manage future exposure and provide time to adjust if currency conditions become less favourable.
Building FX into pricing
For customized U.S. projects, the finance team factors the current exchange rate into pricing, helping the business account for currency from the outset rather than after a contract is won.
Keeping a close watch
While currency assumptions are formally reviewed during the annual budgeting process, the finance team monitors exchange rates weekly – or even daily. That regular oversight helps Lacasse stay responsive as currency and broader market conditions change.
These strategies give Lacasse multiple levers for managing an important variable in its U.S. business.
Read the full story: How Groupe Lacasse Uses Foreign Exchange Management as a Strategic Lever
Seizing the moment
The three disciplines reflect how leaders can turn real-time visibility into a real advantage. What’s next is determining when to act and where to begin. The answers depend on what’s already happening inside the business.
The trigger points
Modernization rarely begins from a standing start. More often, a change already underway creates the opening – and the reason – to rethink how treasury works. There are a few moments that tend to prompt companies to move:
Entering a new market or business line. Expansion forces new infrastructure decisions anyway, which makes it a natural time to build in treasury capability rather than bolt it on later.
Competitive pressure. As peers digitize and begin to move faster – quoting quicker or turning around contracts sooner – the cost of staying still becomes tangible.
A planned cloud or ERP migration. This is often the single biggest trigger. When a company is already rebuilding how its systems connect, extending that to the bank is far easier than tackling it as a separate project later.
Six questions every finance leader should ask
The following questions can help you evaluate where the biggest opportunities, and the biggest gaps, lie today.
Can we get a real-time picture of our position across banks and by currency?
Is our bank integrated with our ERP, or does it sit at the end of the process?
Do we know what our foreign currency costs will be next quarter?
When a customer pays us, how long until that payment is matched to the invoice and their credit is freed for the next order?
If our biggest supplier emailed asking us to update their banking details today, how many people could act on it – and would we recognize it as a potential fraud attempt?
Is a cloud or ERP migration on our roadmap in the next 24 months?
How RBC treasury solution specialists can help
Treasury innovation isn’t a single purchase or event, but rather a series of decisions across systems, teams and time – and having the right partner can influence how well these decisions come together.
Here’s how RBC’s treasury solution specialists can help:
-
Specialists who work across the ecosystem. RBC’s treasury solutions specialists not only work with treasury, but with technology and procurement teams, as modernization spans all three. Teams share best practices across industries and help clients understand both what’s available today and how to think about tomorrow as treasury management evolves.
-
Platforms and products to support finance teams. Tools like RBC PayEdge bring automation and reconciliation to the payables process, connecting to the accounting systems businesses already run.
-
Data that turns transactions into direction. RBC Insight Edge offers benchmarking and market intelligence drawn from anonymized transaction, demographic, and location data, turning the bank’s data strengths into insights a business can act on.
What connects all three is a shift in the bank’s role – from executing transactions to helping balance risk across liquidity, payments and FX. It marks the difference between a transaction provider and a planning partner.
The moment to build
The convergence of real-time payments infrastructure, richer payment data standards and AI have made this a pivotal moment in the treasury landscape – a clear break from the incremental upgrades of the past decade.
The companies best positioned to benefit tend to build the disciplines in a deliberate order: visibility first, then payments and collections, then FX – with the right partners alongside them. While treasury still competes for limited technology dollars against other parts of the business, the case is easier to make than it used to be, now that AI has changed the economics of the work itself.
If there’s one question for treasurers and CFOs to answer heading into 2027, it’s this: how are we getting real-time, enriched visibility? It sounds simple, but for most companies it isn’t. Once you can see your position, everything after becomes clearer. The capacity is there – now it’s a matter of choosing when and where to start.
Revolutionize your treasury management
The treasury landscape is shifting fast. Discover how RBC Treasury Specialists help weigh risk and capital allocation, manage liquidity and automate cash management. When finance teams can see their cash position in real-time, they can start to shape better decisions and free up capacity to grow.
Talk to your RBC Relationship Manager.
Visit the Payment and Cash Management Solutions page for payment tools and solutions.
This article is intended as general information only and is not to be relied upon as constituting legal, financial or other professional advice. A professional advisor should be consulted regarding your specific situation. Information presented is believed to be factual and up-to-date but we do not guarantee its accuracy and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subjects discussed. All expressions of opinion reflect the judgment of the authors as of the date of publication and are subject to change. No endorsement of any third parties or their advice, opinions, information, products or services is expressly given or implied by Royal Bank of Canada or any of its affiliates.
