Programmable Payments: Reimagining Working Capital for a Real-Time World

Published: June 22, 2026

A world of autonomous payments beckons. But treasurers must be in control, from the laying of the foundations upwards, says Thomas Mehlkopf, Head of Working Capital Management and Treasury Centre of Excellence, SAP Taulia. Here, he explains what this means in practice.

Over the past few years, the landscape of corporate cash management has changed beyond recognition. While the promise of real-time visibility and instant settlement has dominated financial discourse, the operational reality for corporate treasurers introduces complexity and a range of challenges. Organisations must look past the generic automation rhetoric, which we’ve been hearing for years now, to address the fundamental issue of liquidity predictability. Only once this has been acknowledged and addressed will we start to see some of the progress and transformation promised.

Liquidity predictability in a programmable era

When I speak to corporate treasury teams, they tell me the single greatest obstacle they face when it comes to programmable payments is the unpredictability of cash inflows and outflows. Leading with any other factor ignores this critical financial challenge. In a traditional treasury environment, cash management operates on deterministic schedules, batch processing, standard cut-off times, and predictable value dates. Programmable payments bypass this predictability by linking financial flows to real-time, dynamic triggers. When payments execute instantly and autonomously based on operational conditions, corporate liquidity positions can move rapidly and without warning.

For me, failing to prioritise liquidity predictability as the foundational challenge represents a key gap in current industry analysis. Treating programmable payments merely as an execution tool, without factoring in how they disrupt cash visibility, introduces operational risk. Without a structural framework to anticipate these rapid-fire flows, treasury teams face either sudden liquidity deficits or inefficiently trapped idle cash.

Condition-aware cash forecasting

To fix this predictability issue corporate treasuries need to change how they operate. The days of retrospective, spreadsheet-driven models are gone. Instead, we should be looking at adopting highly integrated technical architecture built on three pillars:

• Intelligent forecasting: Instead of forecasting cash based on historical averages or invoice due dates, forecasting engines must employ probability-weighting for trigger fulfilment. By continually evaluating the mathematical probability of underlying operational conditions being met, the system dynamically models the exact timing and volume of impending automated outflows.
• Event-driven liquidity buffers: Rather than keeping static, expensive capital buffers across different bank accounts, treasury must establish dynamic, event-driven liquidity buffers. These buffers automatically scale up or down based on the real-time proximity and fulfilment probability of upcoming payment triggers within the supply chain.
• Tighter systems coupling: There must be an unbroken, instantaneous feedback loop between the core trigger execution systems and the macro forecasting engine. The moment an operational milestone changes or a trigger condition approaches fulfilment, the cash forecast has to automatically ingest that data to revise the enterprise liquidity profile.

The ERP advantage

A widespread misunderstanding in today’s market is the assumption that traditional FIs are best positioned to manage and orchestrate programmable payments. While banks control the ultimate execution rail and the movement of funds, they operate completely blind to the operational reality of the enterprise. A bank cannot see a milestone delivery of goods, a quality control inspection approval, or real-time data from a moving shipment.

This is exactly where the broader ERP ecosystem possesses a huge advantage. An ERP system directly governs purchase orders, logistics tracking, production logs, and master vendor agreements. Because an ERP knows the operational conditions natively, it is uniquely positioned to forecast them. Banks simply cannot do this. By embedding programmable payment triggers directly into the ERP layer, corporates achieve the technical integration needed to maintain complete and accurate forecasting control.

Agent-to-agent payments

The evolution of programmable finance does not stop at rule-based automation. Current programmable payment models represent a bridge to a completely transformed economic landscape: a world where the payer is not a human at all. The next critical round of programmable payments is arriving via agent-to-agent (agentic) payments.

AI agents will shortly be able to, or in some instances can already, procure services, dynamically negotiate terms, and settle financial transactions autonomously on behalf of corporations. This represents a profound shift in enterprise finance. While traditional programmable payments focused on removing humans from execution, agentic payments remove them from the decision-making loop, propelling corporate treasury out of the era of pre-set rules and into a world of autonomous, real-time negotiation.

Designing the future of corporate treasury

Delegating both execution and financial decision-making to autonomous AI systems means we have to look at a new control framework. The treasury function cannot afford to be passive observers of this technological evolution. If corporate treasury fails to proactively design the governance, internal audit trails, digital signature authorities, and maximum exposure limits for AI agents now, they will be forced into reactively discovering structural and financial vulnerabilities later. For me, the mandate for the modern treasurer is a clear one. Seize control of the conditionality layer within the ERP, establish condition-aware cash forecasting, and actively architect the governance framework required to safeguard an autonomous, real-time corporate world.