Treasurers are a fastidious bunch. We round down, hedge our assumptions and recoil from anything that smells like marketing puffery. That instinct serves the function well when underwriting counterparty risk or signing off on a forecast, but it works against us the moment the question is whether to fund an investment in the function. Marketing projects a ten-fold return on a brand campaign; treasury, on the same merits, marks benefits to the floor, trims again for prudence and skips the important-but-hard-to-quantify benefits. The result is under-investment in value-additive technology and a treasury function that scrapes by with a spaghetti bowl of unintegrated point solutions and disparate data.

The fix is not for treasurers to learn to oversell. It is to apply the same rigor that makes us conservative, only in the C-suite's language: what investors expect, what the CFO measures, where the statements move. Walk into the CFO's office leading with counterparty risk monitoring, KYC and bank-account onboarding, yield optimization technology and hedge-ratio drift, and you have lost the room before slide three. Dory Malouf, who advises Kyriba customers on value realization after years as a practitioner, put it bluntly at an AFP Treasury Advisory Group meeting: "The CFO doesn't care about that list. They care about the core value metrics a TMS offers, not the technical nuances." The CFO presentation has to be in the language of the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement, period.

Tracey Knight, principal at Real Treasury and a thirty-year practitioner-turned-consultant, agrees. "Make sure you know what the company values, and what is important to the CFO and treasurer," she said. "Go to the investor deck and work your way back to the drivers that impact that." If investor-day materials emphasize global expansion, frame the TMS as scaffolding for payment, cash and FX across new countries; if acquisition-driven, as the platform that absorbs new entities.

Better still, hitch the TMS to budget that has already been allocated: the AI initiative the CFO has been asked to operationalize (cash forecasting, fraud detection); the ERP transformation that promises payment automation and cash visibility; the M&A integration playbook that has to absorb new entities cleanly. Funded mandates beat unfunded asks every time.

The technology doesn't change; the narrative does. Knight calibrates: below ~$100K of annual spend, the formal ROI often gets skipped; above $200K, the case has to be clear. The hard problem lives above that line, and treasurer conservatism amplifies it: "Treasury people are so conservative and unwilling to trust anything that it's hard to sell solutions."

Three moves close the gap: build the case in financial-statement language; lead with downside avoided, not upside captured; commit to numbers that are believable, achievable and tracked.

Start with the income statement. A modern TMS drives P&L impact through:

• Bank-fee rationalization, where treasury sometimes pays retail to its own counterparties.
• FX hedge execution savings as manual trades give way to automated multi-bank pricing, with forecast reliability lifting hedge ratios and multilateral netting, avoiding unnecessary trades.
• Yield on cash from real-time visibility or avoided marginal borrowing cost.
• Working capital and cash flow enablement through operational discipline and program engagement (SCF, dynamic discounting, factoring).
• Talent retention, a "fan favorite" in vendor value assessments, since modern treasury professionals will not stay in roles built on spreadsheets and a potpourri of bank portals.
• Bank-portal user and bank-account rationalization, eliminating per-seat portal fees, reducing fraud risk, compressing FBAR and audit cycles, and earning allies in tax and accounting.

The balance sheet is often where treasury's contribution becomes most visible to investors. Once visibility and netting are in place and cash flow forecasting improves, precautionary balances drop, unlocking trapped cash. Debt rationalization occurs when surplus cash stops sitting next to incremental borrowing. Quantifying these requires language a CFO knows how to evaluate: cash flow and P&L improvement. Present the range so the CFO sees thoughtful deliberation and understands the macro drivers.

The cash flow statement closes the picture. Working capital optimization compresses the cash conversion cycle; higher invested balances and reduced reliance on short-term funding follow. This can unlock total addressable market (TAM) with capex or value through repurchases in lieu of working capital. Clean TMS data is also the precondition for AI in both directions: as an avenue, vendors are embedding AI forecasting, anomaly detection and copilots inside the TMS; as an onramp, structured data lets treasury point enterprise LLMs at their own books and turn consultant weeks into hours. "AI is a multiplier on TMS value," Knight notes.

Lead with the downside avoided. "Frame the numbers, but also frame the risk mitigated," as Malouf advised. Reputational, financial and data integrity risks often compel a CFO more than dollar savings, especially when the alternative is payment workflows in email or paper approvals loose on desks. One of the most robust findings in behavioral economics is that people are roughly twice as motivated by avoiding losses as by acquiring equivalent gains. Quantify and qualify downside avoided, not just upside captured.

Believable, achievable and tracked. Kyriba's Business Value Lifecycle turns those first two words into discipline; the test is whether the pre-sale plan holds up post-go-live. Across 146 Kyriba post-go-live assessments, the average client benefit was roughly $5.9 million over three years and 1,735 hours saved annually across core treasury activities; the majority of value realizations came in higher than the pre-sale business impact assessment, according to Malouf. The biggest payoffs are often the ones not on the spreadsheet at all, according to one treasurer: real-time visibility, accurate currency exposures and a single source of truth that quietly improves every decision.

One trap. Treasurers default to productivity savings (hours, headcount, automation) because they are easy to count. CFOs care only at the margin, and selling a case on cutting your team is dangerous ground in an understaffed function. The CFO, as Malouf observed, does not care about productivity in small amounts. Lead with risk mitigation and financial statement impact; let productivity be the closing argument, not the opening one. Build post-go-live value tracking into the plan so twelve months in, the treasurer returns to the CFO's office with realized FX basis points, fee reductions and working capital released, not a renewal ask on faith.

Treasurers will not stop being conservative, nor should we. But the same discipline that keeps us from overselling can let us build a robust business case, and the CFO can become an advocate for rather than an adversary against it. The trick is to speak their language, not your own.

About the Author
Zac Nesper is a 20-year corporate treasury veteran who served as SVP & Global Treasurer of HP Inc. from 2018 to 2023. At HP, he led Project Orange — a multi-year treasury transformation that upgraded the TMS & delivered ~$100M in realized savings and $350M in net present value across 60+ countries. During his tenure, Zac managed a $400B annual derivatives portfolio, led the $5.2B Prudential pension risk transfer, and navigated HP through The HP separation into two fortune 50 companies and complex M&A and activist situations. Zac holds an MBA from Stanford and is a CFA charterholder.