From revisiting the fundamentals to upskilling for AI, what financial professionals read and watched most in 2025 signals their outlook for 2026. Below are the AFP resources that defined the year.

Jump to:

• Best of treasury
• Best of payments
• Best of FP&A

By the Numbers: Financial Professionals in 2025

See 20 key statistics for financial professionals on salary, fraud, treasury management and tech trends.

Treasury

The most popular treasury article and training resource focused on cash management and forecasting, which AFP’s research identified as the top priorities for treasury professionals. Developing treasury policies and selecting treasury metrics were also top of mind for the AFP community.

Top Treasury Guides of 2025

AFP Executive Guide: Selecting the Right Treasury Metrics

• Key insight: Efficiency metrics track productivity and workflow, while effectiveness metrics measure how well a process achieves its goal. To be useful, these two types of metrics must complement each other.

AFP Executive Guide: Virtual Account Management 2.0, underwritten by J.P. Morgan

• Key insight: Virtual account management can deliver several benefits to organizations, including real-time consolidated cash visibility, centralized control of interest and borrowing, consolidated treasury structures and faster reconciliation.

Top Treasury Articles of 2025

Choosing the Right Statistical Method for Cash Forecasting

• Key insight: Selecting the right statistical cash forecasting method depends on data availability, business complexity, cash flow volatility and the forecast horizon.

How to Decide Whether to Lease or Buy Capital Assets

• Key insight: The decision to lease or buy capital assets goes beyond examining clear-cut costs and also considers the operational and strategic implications of each option.

10 Treasury Policies Every Company Should Have

• Key insight: Treasury policies help companies ensure consistency in how treasury activities are carried out and communicate the expected standards for treasury processes to employees and contractors.

7 Most Widely Used Treasury Skills to Acquire

• Key insight: Treasury professionals are taking on a more strategic role, optimizing capital allocation, proactively managing risk and ensuring their organizations remain resilient in an ever-changing global landscape.

Choosing a Current Asset Investment and Financing Strategy

• Key insight: When choosing a current asset investment and financing strategy, financial professionals should consider several factors, including management’s risk tolerance, sales stability and predictability, lender concerns, the interest rate environment, availability of funds and supplier reliability.

Top Treasury Training Resources of 2025

Virtual Workshop: Cash Flow Forecasting and Modeling

• Key learning objectives: Understand cash flow drivers and constraints, implement effective forecasting techniques and integrate short-term cash flow models with long-term financial plans.

AFP Digital Badge: AI in Treasury

• Key learning objectives: Explore practical use cases for AI in treasury, recognize common risks and limitations of large language models (LLMs), and learn how to write high-quality AI prompts.

Bank Fee Analysis: Preparing for Mission Impossible

• Key learning objectives: Understand the fundamentals of bank fee analysis concepts and learn how to build a bank fee analysis model.

Chart Your Treasury Course: AFP 2025 Treasury Benchmarking Survey Insights

• Key learning objectives: Explore the priorities and challenges of treasury teams and identify the skills required to be an effective treasury professional.

Implementing a Treasury Policy in a Newly-Created Treasury Department

• Key learning objectives: Understand the considerations involved in developing a treasury management policy and understand the implications for the structure and management of treasury operations.

AFP members enjoy complimentary access to Digital Badges, on-demand webinars and event recordings on AFP Learn. Not yet a member? Join AFP today to unlock access.

Payments

Fraud detection and mitigation remained a major focus of the payments conversation in 2025. ISO 20022 and innovations in cross-border payments were also of interest to the AFP community.

Top Payments Guides of 2025

AFP Payments Guide: Seismic Shifts Are Coming for Cross-Border Payments, underwritten by Wells Fargo

• Key insight: Emerging standards like ISO 20022, the rise of real-time payment systems and the adoption of stablecoins are reshaping global money movement.

2025 AFP Payments Guide: Reducing DSO for Better Cash Flow, underwritten by SAP Taulia

• Key insight: Days sales outstanding (DSO), which tells you, on average, how long it takes to collect payment after a credit sale, provides valuable insight into a company’s cash flow.

Top Payments Articles of 2025

Accounts Payable Job Descriptions

• Key insight: Accounts payable professionals are responsible for invoice processing, vendor and account management, compliance and documentation, and account reconciliation.

Accounts Receivable Job Descriptions

• Key insight: Accounts receivable professionals are responsible for invoicing and billing, collections management, payment processing, and compliance and documentation.

No More Delays — the ISO 20022 Fedwire Deadline Is Here

• Key insight: ISO 20022, a common global messaging standard that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) syntax, enables more efficient, cohesive cross-border transactions and allows for richer data to be sent via payment messages.

Check Fraud Needs a Rebrand

• Key insight: Although check fraud remains the top source of fraud in the United States, year after year, many businesses continue to use checks, particularly for B2B payments.

Managing Vendors to Prevent Fraud

• Key insight: One of the most prevalent types of fraud is vendor fraud, in which a supplier or vendor — or someone impersonating one — deliberately manipulates payment or vendor information to steal money through the procurement process.

Top Payments Training Resources of 2025

Payments Fraud Persists: Prepare Your Business Today

• Key learning objectives: Identify new ways fraudsters are evading anti-fraud protections and understand how organizations are implementing fraud controls.

Enhancing Your ACH Payments Strategy

• Key learning objectives: Learn about the ACH resources for fraud detection and monitoring rules and tools.

Cross-Border Payments: Bracing for Seismic Shifts

• Key learning objectives: Analyze emerging instant cross-border payment initiatives and identify how they are shaping the future of global transactions.

Fortifying AP Against Ever-Evolving B2B Payment Fraud

• Key learning objectives: Discover the potential for embedded payments to minimize fraud and reduce costs.

Paying Faster to Maximize Working Capital

• Key learning objectives: Understand the differences between common payment modalities and their respective impacts on cash flow.

AFP members enjoy complimentary access to on-demand webinars and event sessions on AFP Learn. Not yet a member? Join AFP today to unlock access.

FP&A

The most popular FP&A content from 2025 underscores FP&A's role as a data-driven storyteller. The AFP community sought resources to communicate complex data effectively and took a keen interest in learning practical ways to integrate AI into finance workflows.

Top FP&A Guides of 2025

AFP FP&A Guide to Communication Skills for Finance

• Key insight: Strong communication skills are the key to success in finance, turning data into actionable insights that drive influence and results.

AFP FP&A Guide to Building an FP&A Function

• Key insight: Establishing an FP&A function requires defining FP&A’s mission, designing workflows, hiring and training the right people, and aligning technology and data architecture.

Top FP&A Articles of 2025

AI Prompts for Finance: 15 Real-World Examples

• Key insight: Finance professionals are using AI chatbots to conduct research, brainstorm, anticipate questions from their colleagues, improve their written communication and complete technical tasks more efficiently.

10 In-Demand FP&A Skills to Develop

• Key insight: Hiring managers expect FP&A professionals to have both hard skills, such as traditional finance and accounting expertise and technology proficiency, and soft skills, such as communication and business partnering.

Why Aren’t FP&A Teams Using the EPM Tools They Bought?

• Key insight: The 2025 AFP FP&A Benchmarking Survey finds that FP&A professionals primarily use EPM tools for control and consolidation, rather than for advanced planning and forecasting. Many FP&A teams still manually pull fragmented data into spreadsheets, reconcile inconsistent models and spend more time formatting reports than analyzing results.

Useful Excel Functions for Financial Planning and Analysis

• Key insight: Finance professionals use a wide range of Excel functions, including financial, logical, lookup and reference, date and time, math and statistical, text and information functions.

Building an FP&A Function: Building Allies and Maximizing Corporate Value at The Fujitsu Group

• Key insight: For FP&A to be effective, it must be recognized as a distinct function, have an organizational structure that allows it to deliver value to finance and the business, and be appropriately staffed and equipped with the necessary tools.

Top FP&A Training Resources of 2025

Where is the ROI From AI?

• Key learning objectives: Understand ways to measure the ROI from AI, common approaches to implementation and scalability, and pitfalls to avoid.

Straightforward Strategies for AI Implementation

• Key learning objectives: Discover how large language models (LLMs) blend vast knowledge storage with the agility to learn new data and learn how to create real-world applications.

AFP Digital Badge: Financial Forecasting in Excel

• Key learning objectives: Learn how to integrate Power Query for seamless data extraction, apply lookup functions to categorize transactions and build dynamic income statements with pivot tables.

Virtual Workshop: Harnessing GenAI for Finance - Transforming Analytics, Insights, and Decision-Making

• Key learning objectives: Gain a clear understanding of generative AI, its capabilities and the essential data, system and process foundations for successful adoption.

Virtual Workshop: Make Your Business Communication Memorable and Actionable

• Key learning objectives: Learn how to make complex topics easy to understand through the power of a wall-crafted analogy and energize your business message with a strategic business storytelling process.

AFP members enjoy complimentary access to on-demand webinars and event sessions on AFP Learn. Not yet a member? Join AFP today to unlock access.