PayPal Cashes in on Treasury Overhaul to Scoop Team of the Year Award

When PayPal’s treasury team set out to fix its suboptimal technology stack stemming from acquisition and divestiture, it resisted the urge to throw everything out the window and start again. Instead, a new tech team was hired to focus on shifting the big ‘rocks’ holding treasury efficiency back, then tackling the smaller ‘pebbles’ causing friction in systems and workflows along the road to treasury optimisation. What followed was a disciplined, two-track delivery model that turned logic into concrete results.

Great treasury leaders know that lasting success is rarely about flagship moments. It’s a question of building the right team, creating the space for them to deliver, and holding the vision steady, even when the world feels unstable.

As PayPal’s Vice President and Treasurer Can Balcioglu puts it: “My priority was – and is – to build a scalable, zero-defect treasury operation that provides clear visibility and strong controls for efficient daily management. Over the past three years, our small but expert technology team has delivered remarkable progress through a focused vision, collaborative leadership, and steady incremental improvements.”

Looking back on those milestones, the scope of work undertaken, and the results delivered, it’s clear to see why PayPal is the worthy winner of TMI’s Treasury Team of the Year 2026 Award.

Investing in people to take tech further

The story begins back in 2022, by which time PayPal’s treasury technology stack had become difficult to navigate. Like many other rapidly growing corporate giants, PayPal was dealing with a proliferation of tools and spreadsheets that sat on top of heavily customised systems – many of which had been implemented by third parties with limited transfer of knowledge to internal teams. As a result, visibility was patchy, ownership was unclear, and change was inherently slow.

Rather than push for wholesale replacement, PayPal leadership made a deliberate choice to invest in optimisation – and to back that with people, not just budget. A new treasury technology team was formed, with a clear mandate to simplify the architecture, recover value from underused platforms, and re-establish control around core processes. The goal was to make the existing tech stack work sustainably, scalably, and with ownership sitting inside the business.

Delivering on intent

To help shape the direction of travel, a senior technology lead joined in January 2023. Within three months, a small team of four experienced specialists was in place, backed by Finance Transformation and later the Chief Technology Office (CTO) organisation – though reporting lines proved less important than delivery cadence. Previous attempts at modernisation had stalled. To build credibility, the new team focused on visible, verifiable outcomes that returned time to users without disrupting operations.

They took a two-track approach aimed at tackling the ‘rocks’ and ‘pebbles’ in the current tech pathway. The big rocks were essentially the foundational architectural changes required to support modernisation at scale, while the pebbles represented smaller, day-to-day friction points whose resolution would free up teams and compound trust in the programme.

This disciplined approach laid the groundwork for a much larger move: the consolidation of FX activity into a single strategic TMS. The project had been attempted twice before and abandoned. This time, the team ran a proof of concept (PoC) on a subset of trades, replicating valuation, hedge effectiveness testing and accounting treatment across both systems. When results aligned, the green light came. Within six months, the full portfolio had been migrated, with no trading pause and no loss of accounting continuity.

PayPal now operates with a single TMS as book of record for all derivatives, with reconciled positions and accounting continuity. Integration debt, which was blocking automation, has been cleared and the controls now sit in the system, not around it.

Moving more rocks

Alongside the FX challenge, cash positioning had long been a pain point. More than 90 region-specific spreadsheets were being maintained manually across the organisation, each with its own formatting, assumptions and exceptions. The treasury team standardised positioning in the TMS, with policy-driven workflows, automated logic, and auditable outcomes. The change removed duplication, reduced error risk, and recovered approximately 1,700 hours per year – time that was redirected to oversight and analysis.

With that foundation in place, the team went further, introducing a new model for FBO (for-benefit-of) cash positioning, integrating live signals from the PayPal payments platform – not just historical inflow and outflow data, but transaction-level payment and site intelligence. Thanks to this shift, forecast granularity improved and early-warning alerts on potential settlement mismatches were also enabled. At the same time, weekly positioning accuracy rose to 99.2%, supported by ongoing tuning and model governance, and giving treasury better tools to manage liquidity at scale.

Bank account management (BAM) also came under review. Previously, account data had been fragmented across spreadsheets, legacy business activity monitoring, the TMS, and the ERP – with manual reconciliation across the tools. Ultimately, the BAM platform was re-implemented as the system of record, with in-app approvals and clearly defined workflows. New accounts are now opened in BAM first, flow directly into the TMS, and are reconciled against the ERP weekly in a three-way process. This has not only strengthened life cycle controls but also laid the foundation for broader automation in cash and payments.

Sifting out the pebbles

Beyond the architecture, the team also focused on operational friction, identifying smaller daily inefficiencies that undermined speed, accuracy and confidence. Wire processing, previously reliant on multiple manual checks, now runs at 80% STP across approximately 3,000 wires per month. Redundant validations have been removed. Bots introduced in earlier phases have been retired. And operational time has been returned to the business without loss of control.

Automated cash visibility, which stood at 78%, was brought to 100% coverage across nearly 1,000 bank accounts and across six distinct product tenants. Native bank feeds were used wherever possible, and RPA was applied selectively for partners with lower technical integration options. Static data quality improved, defects were resolved more quickly, and service relationships were reshaped to prioritise delivery outcomes over time spent.

Policy-driven target balancing was also introduced to dynamically right-size operating account balances in real time, improving liquidity deployment discipline and reducing the need for manual intervention.

At the same time, key compliance controls – including European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) FX reporting, end-of-day reconciliations and trade-limit monitoring – were built directly into the TMS, strengthening first-line controls and producing audit-ready evidence as part of day-to-day operations.

What flowed from all of this work was better data and improved use of that data. Trade, cash, payments, and operational data is now surfaced in role-based dashboards, enabling teams to act on a shared version of reality, rather than stitching together reports from different systems.

In constant motion

Around 20 months into the programme, ownership of treasury technology moved from the CFO organisation to the CTO organisation. The proximity to engineering increased delivery speed and enabled deeper product alignment. And the transition proved the strength of the team’s model – delivery was never dependent on org chart placement. Sponsorship showed up in day-to-day decisions and treasury and technology were solving problems together, not passing them across organisational lines.

With that change in place, and architectural control re-established, the treasury team is now preparing for the next phase. Balcioglu says the plan is to responsibly layer applied AI onto a well-governed data foundation, expanding API-first connectivity to replace legacy file-based interfaces, and preparing for stablecoin integration in treasury processes such as intercompany settlements, IHB, and cross-border flows.

While the roadmap might be ambitious, the approach remains grounded with logical extensions of a system and operating model that is already delivering value. These goals are also a clear signal that PayPal’s treasury technology transformation has not ended – and that’s exactly the point.

Balcioglu notes: “This disciplined approach has driven sustained efficiency and productivity gains across the entire department. I’m proud of how our team has transformed operations, enabling treasury to focus on strategic liquidity management, supported by a robust TMS and well-designed data infrastructure. But that’s only the beginning.”

While the results so far are undeniable, and headline-worthy, the deeper story is one of method and building for the future. A focused team rebuilt capability, rewired ownership, and made the systems they had perform like systems they had only hoped for. And by putting in the hard graft, the treasury team not only has a better set of tools, but a way of working built to last.