Designing for Certainty

Treasury Priorities in India and China

For treasury teams with exposure to India and China, the daily challenges continue to shift. FX rates still matter, but the harder problems are cash flow predictability, regulatory navigation, and building operating models that can hold a global policy together while executing locally. Two Bank of America experts explain where the real opportunities now lie.

Intra-Asia trade now accounts for close to 60% of total exports from the region, reflecting supply chains that have become deeply integrated – and increasingly complex to manage from a treasury perspective. More entities, more currencies, more transaction points, and a board that wants to understand the risk implications in real time.

India and China each illustrate how treasury priorities are evolving across Asia, from cash flow predictability and payment visibility to regulatory adaptation and operating model design. The point is not to compare the two markets, but to understand how developments in both are reshaping what treasury teams need to deliver: greater certainty in environments where complexity is unlikely to disappear.

From rate to reliability

Sanchay Agrawal, APAC Global Commercial Sales Head and Head of India, Global Payments Solutions, Bank of America, is clear on where the priority has shifted. “What used to be the focus – how can I get the best FX rate from a bank? – is no longer the key concern. It is now about predictability of cash flow, settlement certainty, and compliance. Pricing comes after that.”

Guo Lin, China Head of Global Payment Solutions and Head of China and Hong Kong Corporate Sales, Bank of America, sees the same shift playing out at scale. In cross-border e-commerce, a Chinese platform processing thousands of small payments daily may face only a modest exception rate – but at volume, that translates into meaningful reconciliation delays and timing gaps. “The real challenge is cash flow predictability,” she says. “Can you predict when cash arrives, in what amount, and without delays? Any uncertainty in execution directly impacts liquidity, working capital, and ultimately margin.”

The growth of cross-border e-commerce is also accelerating demand for real-time visibility across the payment lifecycle.  Treasurers increasingly need transparency not only into payment status, but also into the causes of exceptions, settlement delays and reconciliation breaks.  What was once viewed primarily as an operational issue is becoming a strategic treasury priority, as visibility directly influencing liquidity management, working capital efficiency, and decision making.  “Treasurers need greater certainty around cash flow timing, liquidity availability and operational execution,” says Lin.  “The ability to move money efficiently is important, but the ability to do so predictably is what ultimately creates value.”

The risks that follow from that uncertainty are familiar but increasingly consequential: execution risk, timing risk, liquidity risk and regulatory risk. The environment moves fast enough that a position taken in the morning can look very different by the end of the day. Real-time, cross-border visibility is therefore no longer a reporting aspiration; it is a practical requirement for protecting working capital, managing liquidity and giving the business greater confidence in its decisions.

The centralisation question

Full centralisation has long been an aspiration for global treasurers – a nirvana, as Agrawal puts it – but in practice it rarely survives contact with local regulatory reality. Increasingly, the stronger model is not full centralisation for its own sake, but a more deliberate hybrid: centralised policy, centralised risk oversight and aggregated visibility, combined with local execution where regulation, documentation or market practice requires it.

China makes the point sharply. A locally headquartered industrial group that attempted to centralise its FX management offshore found that because the underlying trade flows were onshore, execution had to move back locally. “The model that works best is quite clear,” says Lin, “centralise the thinking, keep execution in local hands, and connect everything through real-time visibility.”

Meanwhile, in India, structural innovation is helping bridge that gap. INR-based trade invoicing is being used by a growing number of clients to remove FX exposure from the local subsidiary and transfer it to group level – a meaningful development given INR is not yet part of global liquidity pools. Evolved netting structures are also gaining traction, reducing both cost and transaction volume. “As long as global goals are met,” adds Agrawal, “local teams should be given the power to execute.”

A regulatory inflection point

India’s regulatory environment is changing at a pace that few would have anticipated even five years ago. What once required five or six documents to execute a cross-border payment collection is now paperless. Non-residents can open INR accounts. Indian corporates can open dollar accounts overseas. The direction is unmistakable: simplification, digitisation and closer alignment with global practice.

Perhaps more consequential is a shift in how the Reserve Bank of India regulates. “For the past 30 years, the RBI has been very prescriptive,” says Agrawal. “Now it is becoming principles-based, which means banks will have more delegated authority. From a corporate perspective, this is positive – approvals will be faster, and the bank, which knows the client well, will be making the call.”

Structures and practices that were previously impractical or prohibited are opening up, creating a window to reconsider how India fits into a global treasury model. “Treasurers can use this regulatory change as a real opportunity to reconsider how global standards can be applied – how netting structures, natural hedges, and better FX management can be built in,” explains Agrawal. “That’s exactly what we’re working on with many clients.”

Technology’s limits and possibilities

Across both markets, technology adoption in treasury is following a consistent pattern: it starts where the data is richest and the operational value is most immediate. Cash forecasting, cash positioning, collections visibility, payment tracking and reconciliation are natural entry points because improvements can be linked directly to productivity, liquidity control and exception management. In China, Lin points to three areas where technology is already delivering: real-time payment tracking through APIs, AI-assisted reconciliation in high-volume cross-border e-commerce, and machine learning applied to short-term cash positioning across entities.

The ceiling for tech progression, though, arrives quickly. “Even the most advanced companies are still dealing with fragmented systems, missing or inconsistent metadata, and the absence of a unified treasury data hub,” says Lin. “AI works well at the use-case level, but scaling it across the organisation remains a challenge.”

For Agrawal, one of the major constraints sits upstream of the technology itself. “Whatever technology you put in, if the business does not give you proper inputs, you cannot do the best forecasting. Technology is not solving every problem. A human working alongside AI is far better than either alone.” In treasury, new tools earn their place only when the data, controls and business processes around them are strong enough to make the output reliable.

Beyond resilience: innovating for certainty

As companies revisit their tech stacks and workflows, they are also thinking more deliberately about resilience. Most corporates operating in the region have built some level of operational stability: they can execute payments, manage risk and maintain control at a functional level. The next phase is more demanding. It involves moving from managing exposure to generating predictability, and from operational execution to strategic contribution.

For Lin, three enablers make that transition possible: real-time transparency into not just payment status but the reasons behind exceptions; data standardisation, so that invoice and remittance information align and reconciliation delays are eliminated; and end-to-end integration of FX, payments, and reconciliation into a single connected workflow. “It is not just about introducing new technology,” she stresses. “It is about integrating data, systems, and processes to deliver greater clarity, connectivity, and confidence.”

Agrawal approaches the same destination from a different angle: seamless integration between bank platforms and regulatory systems; greater bank-side automation to reduce the manual burden on corporate teams; and regulatory clarity that enables processes to be designed proactively rather than in response to each new development. “Each client is different, and each treasury evolution is different,” he says. “Reaching a fully integrated, technology-heavy solution is not a race – and not every treasury needs to get there. What matters is that the direction is right.”

On that, both are unambiguous. “Volatility is not going away,” states Agrawal. “Regulation will continue to evolve, complexity will remain, and the treasurer’s job is to design to remove uncertainty.” Lin echoes that, adding: “The future of treasury is not just about moving money. It is about moving with certainty.” In a changing world, that may be the real measure of innovation: not simply adopting new tools, but using them to build treasury models that are more connected, more adaptive and more confident under pressure.