Who will shape treasury in an AI-driven payments era?

An online webinar held ahead of the Sibos conference will examine how artificial intelligence, tokenisation and real-time cross-border payments could reshape corporate treasury and which institutions may capture emerging value as digital finance develops.

The panel brings payments and treasury experts together to discuss practical implications for treasury teams, including how faster payments, programmable money and AI-driven analytics will affect liquidity management, forecasting and risk controls. Speakers include Deepa Sinha, SVP and Head of Payments and Financial Crimes at BAFT; Ed Barrie, co-founder and chief product officer of Treasury 4, Inc.; and Suzhen Zheng, senior product manager for global payments solutions at HSBC. Scott Hamilton, a global payments and liquidity specialist, will moderate.

Panelists will examine the shift of treasury from an operations-focused function to a more strategic contributor to business decisions. The discussion will cover how instant payments change choices about transaction speed and liquidity, and how treasury processes, visibility and governance must adapt when payments settle in seconds and remittance details travel with transactions.

The webinar will compare adoption patterns across markets. Some US treasury teams continue to treat instant payment methods as occasional, higher-risk options, while practice in the UK and Europe shows broader use cases and different operational risk profiles.

Speakers will address cross-border payments and interoperability among banks, fintechs and new payment infrastructures. Developments designed to improve settlement and connectivity between networks and consortia could reduce friction and accelerate funds movement between jurisdictions. The panel will also consider how tokenisation and programmable money may create new methods of transferring value and what treasury teams need to account for when integrating those capabilities into cash management systems.

Technology topics include wider use of application programming interfaces to deliver real-time financial data to treasury systems and advances in artificial intelligence applied to forecasting, liquidity planning and automated decision-making. The conversation will note a shift from gathering larger volumes of data toward generating actionable outputs that support faster funding and risk decisions. Panelists will discuss approaches to testing and scaling intelligent automation and predictive analytics inside treasury workflows.

Risk, governance and resilience will be a substantial part of the conversation. Panelists plan to highlight cybersecurity, fraud prevention, third-party dependencies and supply chain disruption as issues for boards to consider alongside innovation. Discussion will cover governance frameworks, accountability for AI-augmented decisions and the operational controls needed to maintain trust in an always-on payments environment.

The panel will outline where treasuries can focus investment, options to improve visibility across real-time flows and the governance measures required as treasury responsibilities expand across local and cross-border operations.