A White Paper for CEOs, CFOs, and Transformational Leaders
by Otto Acuña N. MBA, CMC, CSSBB 🇨🇷 🇪🇪 – EXYGE Consulting | May 2025
In an increasingly volatile, uncertain and highly interconnected economic environment, the role of the corporate treasurer is undergoing a profound transformation. It’s no longer just about managing liquidity, performing bank reconciliations, or monitoring exchange rates. The modern corporate treasurer is positioned today as a strategic actor in high-level decision-making. This is highlighted in the article published by The Global Treasurer on May 20, 2025, “How Treasurers are Becoming Central to Strategic Business Planning”, which illustrates how this function has evolved from a transactional role to a leading one in business strategy.
However, this evolution is neither automatic nor linear. In order for a treasurer to successfully assume his new strategic role, he must first free himself from the operational ties that still anchor him to the past. And this is where operational excellence and automation come into play as fundamental prerequisites.
The Operational Trap: The Treasurer Caught in the Branches
Although many organizations have implemented robust ERPs, the day-to-day reality of treasury is still marked by manual processes and low-value-added tasks. From manual submission of information, to repetitive and cascading manual reconciliations between payment gateways, banks, accounting systems, and billing platforms, the modern treasurer continues to face an operational scenario that distracts and limits him.
This situation prevents “seeing the forest” – a metaphor that reflects how the strategic approach is diluted when day-to-day life is saturated by operational incidents. Reconciliations that don’t add up, chargebacks not detected in time, returns on multiple payment platforms, and distorted cash flows are just some of the problems that absorb resources and attention.
Beyond ERP: The Role of Targeted Automation
ERP systems have been fundamental to structure information and standardize processes, but they have obvious limits when it comes to dynamic and/or unstructured operations in how information is received (manually). Financial reconciliation, and particularly the automation of complex reconciliations, is a clear example of a need that ERP cannot cover on its own.
This is where specific solutions such as DaMap take center stage. This SaaS software, part of the EXYGE ecosystem, automates up to 93% of financial reconciliations thanks to more than 60 parameterizable algorithms. It does not require technical knowledge to use, allows incident management, and offers full traceability for audit and control.
Thanks to its ability to deploy in 4 to 6 weeks, DaMap reduces reconciliation time from weeks to minutes, with direct benefits in error reduction, operational efficiency, and real-time financial visibility. With more than 30+ million items reconciled monthly and a presence in more than 60 clients in Latin America, DaMap proves that intelligently applied technology can change the treasurer’s operational game.
In addition to reconciliations, special attention should be paid to capturing the information that is then processed in treasury – as early in the process as possible. Situations where there are receipts or manually gathered records that are sent or consolidated before reaching the ERP generate many possibilities of operational error and delays in the process.
The application of online forms, which can be implemented on cell phones (without requiring any additional device), which can capture photographs, barcodes, transactional information and additional context information can expedite and make the treasury operation much more efficient (higher data quality, fewer sources of error, controls integrated into the form itself to avoid errors). Easy and quick to implement, Low Code / No Code BPM (Flow Automation) platforms can make a huge difference in periods as fast as a few weeks.
The Strategic Impact of Operational Release
Freed from the operational burden, the treasurer can focus on his true strategic role: optimizing working capital, managing financial risks, proposing hedging strategies, collaborating with sales and purchases to improve payment terms, and participating in long-term financial planning.
In addition, he can lead financial innovation initiatives, from banking alliances to the implementation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence applied to cash flow forecasting. All of this requires time, focus, and an overview that is only possible when the operational foundations are solid and automated.
The Treasury as a Strategic Ally of the CFO and CEO
In this new context, the treasurer becomes an indispensable ally of the CFO, offering prospective analysis, scenario modeling and concrete contributions to decision-making. The treasurer’s closeness to the reality of cash makes him an invaluable source of insights for navigating complex and volatile economic environments.
For the CEO, having a proactive and strategic treasury function is a competitive advantage. It allows you to anticipate liquidity crises, evaluate investment opportunities in an agile way and operate with greater financial resilience.
How to start this transformation?
The first step is to recognize that the evolution of the treasurer’s role does not depend exclusively on his or her talent or will, but on the operating environment in which he or she works. Therefore, organizations must:
- Assess the current level of operational maturity of your treasury area.
- Identify tasks that are still performed manually and could be automated.
- Incorporate specific automated reconciliation solutions and low-code / no-code workflows.
- Promote a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence.
- Establish strategic KPIs that reflect the treasurer’s new role.
EXYGE’s Role in the Transformation of the Corporate Treasury
At EXYGE, we have accompanied multiple organizations on this path of transformation. From automating financial workflows to implementing tools like DaMap for automated reconciliations, our approach is based on combining strategic consulting, best practices and industry standards, technology, and change management to unlock the true potential of Treasury.
Our commitment does not end with the diagnosis or recommendation. We are involved in the “last mile” of implementation, ensuring concrete results and transfer of capabilities to the client’s team.
An invitation to reflect
If your organization still devotes significant resources to low-treasury-value tasks, it’s time to ask yourself: Is your treasurer focused on the strategic or stuck on the operational? Do you have the necessary tools to add value from the first level of decision-making?
We invite you to explore our services section and discover how we can help you transform your treasury function into a strategic driver for your business.
Additional resources
Our Chapter #1 of the Back-Office Improvement Show, the video-podcast dedicated to management improvement and excellence in the support areas of companies is dedicated to DaMap, our automated reconciliation partner. We invite you to watch the interview and see what this technology is all about.
