Articles
March 20, 2025
Rocketing Revenue: Treasury Transforms Into a Profit Enabler
# Cash and Working Capital
# Risk Management
A Treasury Outlook Survey highlights how treasury leaders are taking steps to add value to the business, cutting costs and boosting revenue.
Corporate treasury teams are increasingly expanding their focus from mitigating risk to include actively creating value for the business, a trend underscored by the latest findings from NeuGroup’s 2025 Treasury Outlook Survey. The survey highlights the specific actions treasury leaders are taking to transform their functions into profit enablers, emphasizing working capital efficiency, cost of funding and risk-adjusted returns as key growth areas (see chart below).
- “Most members are wondering how they can take things past the preservation of capital and create additional value,” said NeuGroup head of research, Joseph Bertran, who conducted the survey. “They’re optimizing and tweaking processes as well as seeking ways to earn higher returns, while continuing to do what they’ve always done: minimize risk.”
Actions driving treasury’s strategic evolution. The responses to this question highlight several themes behind the actions that treasury teams are undertaking to elevate their function:
- Optimizing free cash flow and working capital: Treasurers are prioritizing strategies to free up cash and maximize liquidity efficiency.
- Improving cost of capital: A focus on strong credit ratings, as well as some members leveraging centralized corporate financing, reflects efforts to secure better capital pricing and lower funding costs.
- Cutting operational costs: Treasury teams are leveraging hedging strategies, tax optimization and legal frameworks to minimize risks and reduce friction costs in business operations. For one member of NeuGroup for Retail Treasurers, this includes reducing the use of costly armored car services.
From risk manager to profit enabler. These insights align with recent NeuGroup discussions that illustrate treasury’s increasing influence, including one member who helped her company’s product team refine a financial solution for a customer, eliminating unnecessary cash movements and reducing risk.
- In a new Strategic Finance Lab podcast available now on Apple and Spotify, recently retired Microsoft treasurer Anita Mehra recalls that early in her career, she was laser-focused on risk management, but time spent in a sales support role helped open her eyes to the day-to-day challenges of teams that are responsible for growing the company’s revenue.
- This shift in mindset—focusing on enabling revenue and then mitigating risk—became a guiding principle for her team. “In the end, if there’s no revenue, there’ll be no cash to manage, no job for any treasury function,” she says in the podcast. “We are revenue enablers first, and then risk managers.”
Enabling, not creating, profits. However, treasury should be careful not to promote itself as a profit center, which implies taking on risk in a way that could raise red flags with CFOs and boards, according to Laurence Tosi, founder of private equity firm WestCap.
- In a recent NeuGroup Insights video, Mr. Tosi explains why he recommends positioning treasury as a value creation engine, focused on optimizing financial operations to support business growth rather than encouraging the company take on risk.
- “In an increasingly digitized world, the treasury function is becoming a mix of both treasury finance, payments and money moves, and all of those things together need to be optimized,” he says.
- “A treasurer should be in the role of optimizing those functions so you can better support the cash needs and asset liability matches for your business. You don’t have to take risk to create value.”
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