Grace Ong
The year 2025 confirmed a single truth: corporate success depends on resilience. We’ve moved beyond reacting to market shocks where enterprises must now be structurally engineered to anticipate, absorb, and capitalise on them. In 2026, resilience is the core competency that separates leaders from laggards.
This requires an integrated vision across Treasury and Finance, Strategy, Tax, and Operations, with data and analytical intelligence embedded into every decision layer. The next twelve months represent an inflection point for building the intelligent, resilient enterprise.
- Transparency and risk intelligence: Corporates must move beyond execution to pricing risk accurately, leveraging tools and analytics to strengthen financial relationships and governance.
- AI and integration for agility: Predictive intelligence and unified data platforms will transform treasury and operations, enabling proactive decision-making and scalable resilience.
- Strategic capital allocation: A healthy balance sheet and precise funding strategies—supported by market intelligence and internal liquidity optimisation—will secure growth and investor confidence.
The new transparency mandate: Pricing risk, not just execution
For too long, the cost of accessing financial markets during volatile FX and rates environments was treated as a given. The focus now shifts from executing transactions to understanding the risk premium carried by financial partners to quantify operational risks.
Tools like Tradefeedr TCA within LSEG Workspace bring transparency to the forefront. For treasurers, this means moving past “best execution” toward “best relationship.” By analysing Liquidity Provider scores and execution costs pre- and post-trade, businesses gain leverage and build trust with banking counterparties.
Treasurers are also increasingly responsible for commodity exposures. Integrating commodity hedging into treasury operations is a strategic value-add. Leveraging commodities research and insights from Workspace enables effective hedging of large Capex or working capital exposures, supporting more stable financial reporting.
Market intelligence is equally critical for Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Access to aftermarket research and private company analytics strengthens financial governance narratives. Demonstrating robust modelling and risk mitigation validates a company’s commitment to protecting shareholder capital in uncertain times.
The bottom line, every financial relationship and operation should be benchmarked, optimised, and aligned with strategic goals.
The AI engine for agility and value
The real impact of AI in 2026 lies not in automating simple tasks but in re-engineering corporate structures for agility.
AI’s ability to analyse vast datasets—from real-time market sentiment and news to internal cash flows—transforms Treasury from a cash management unit into a predictive engine. It further enables Corporate Strategy and Development to make proactive, capital-efficient decisions during volatile market or geopolitical conditions.
AI-powered workflows can visualise cash pooling for working capital, optimise hedging strategies, and even identify opportunities for strategic de-risking through spinouts or carve-outs. This moves enterprises from accidental structures to analytically optimised designs.
For risk management, AI becomes a co-pilot—consuming real-time market data to dynamically alert on optimal hedging strategies as well as turning actual cash flow from vast working capital datasets into real credit risk insights from group subsidiaries and supply chain vendors. This shifts the treasurers’ functional role from reactive loss mitigation to proactive value generation.
Embedding AI across decision layers creates a culture of foresight instead of short-term firefighting for organisations thinking ahead for strategic growth.
Breaking down silos: Integration for faster insights
AI and transparency are only as strong as the data foundation they rest on. Increasingly, the focus is on dismantling legacy silos through unified connectivity across treasury management, ERP, CRM, and operational systems.
Resilience demands that data flows with simplicity and speed for insights. Implementing true, data-driven connections between finance, operations, and manufacturing ensures that financial realities—cash, FX exposure, financing costs—mirror operational realities like invoices, inventory, and supply chain needs.
Straight-Through Processing, supported by standardised data references, reduces manual reconciliation and friction. A unified data fabric also enables tax, finance, and vendor management teams to apply compliance and risk checks universally to ensure audit readiness and mitigate interconnected risks.
The goal is to move from fragmented applications to an integrated platform that supports operational resilience.
Financing the resilience dividend: From liquidity management to strategic capital allocation
Resilience is the payoff in strategic funding. Capital markets reward efficiency, and successful debt issuance depends on a well-managed balance sheet.
Bond markets, private credit, and hybrid lending structures offer options—but capital must be allocated with precision. Corporate Development and IR should link new debt directly to structural investments like AI initiatives that promise long-term margin resilience.
Timing matters. Treasurers must hedge rate exposures and plan tranches using market intelligence to optimise funding costs as well as leverage supply chain insights for working capital management to unlock internal liquidity, reducing reliance on volatile short-term funding.
The hallmark of an intelligent enterprise is the ability to calculate costs and benefits of each funding mechanism with precision, thereby ensuring investor confidence.
Conclusion
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