Treasury Without a Treasurer: What Happens When the Tools Arrive Before the Policy
Published: August 25, 2026
Where are companies below the treasurer threshold improvising, who carries the risk when they get it wrong, and why does cheap automation make professional judgment more valuable? Pac O’Shea, Co-Founder and CEO, Round Treasury, digs for answers.
On Saturday, March 11 2023, many finance directors across Britain spent the weekend sitting down with a banking app open on a phone and a list of accounts open on a laptop. They worked out how much of their company’s cash was placed with one particular bank. Some were doing counterparty analysis for the first time in their careers. Almost none would have called it that, and almost none found a document telling them what the answer should be.
That was the weekend Silicon Valley Bank UK went from holding around £6.7bn of deposits to being acquired by HSBC for £1 on the Monday.
That weekend is not a criticism of those finance directors. It is a description of the world below the line where a treasurer exists, which is the world in which I work. Down there, the cash job is not a role. It lands on whoever already owns everything else in finance, usually a finance director with payroll on Thursday and a board pack due Friday.
Treasury in a company that has never employed a treasurer does not look like nothing. It looks like improvisation, and the improvisation is rarely reckless. One person can add a supplier and approve the payment because the finance team is four people and two are part-time. The rolling cash forecast lives in a spreadsheet built by someone who left in the spring. Money moves into a better rate without anyone reading the notice period, because the rate was on the first page and the notice period was on the second.
The document that does not exist
The Association of Corporate Treasurers’ (ACT’s) guide for a new group treasurer says policy is a good place to start. It sets out what that policy should carry: risk appetite, roles and responsibilities, authorisation limits by instrument and risk type, a list of permitted banks, and confirmation and settlement procedures.
Read that list from below the treasurer line and it describes a document that has never existed. Not a stale version. Nothing.
This is what I mean when I say automation is not abdication. Software can read an invoice, surface an exception or execute a rule more consistently than a tired person at 6pm on a Friday. It should not decide whether money is allowed to move. That decision belongs to fixed permissions, approved rules, and a record of what happened.
Where a policy exists, automation can enforce it. Where no policy exists, it takes whatever the company was doing already and performs it faster. Once that habit is automated, it becomes harder to inspect and change.
The strongest objection comes from your side of the line, and it is a good one. A company with £4m, one currency, no debt and no pension scheme does not have a treasury issue. It has a savings decision and a bookkeeping issue . Putting the language of a profession around that can inflate a clerical task into a discipline. A fair amount of what gets sold into this market is a yield product with governance vocabulary printed on the box.
Most of that is right, and I would rather concede it than argue. What these companies mostly need is hygiene, not treasury. But three exposures arrive earlier than the balance sheet suggests.
The first is concentration. The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) raised the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) deposit protection from £85,000 to £120,000 on December 1 2025, and a company holding £2m clears that ceiling on its first day.
The second is payment authority. UK Finance recorded £41.3m lost to invoice and mandate scams across 2,305 cases in 2025, and slightly under half came back.
The third is timing. Funding payroll on the day it falls due is not a product feature and nobody sells it.
In practice, that risk lands on the finance director, often without the standing to say no to a founder. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiner’s (ACFE’s) 2026 study of 2,402 fraud cases found that more than half involved either an absence of internal controls or an override of controls that existed. The smallest organisations carried the highest median losses. None of that is news to a treasurer. It is news to many of the people doing the work without one.
The mechanics of treasury have moved downmarket quickly. Balance visibility, sweeps, and approval routing are now available to much smaller companies. The judgment has not moved with them. It still sits in the ACT syllabus, in policies that took years of argument to settle, and in the working memory of people who have lost a fight about counterparty limits and learnt from it.
A pre-treasury conundrum
Someone has to tell these companies which questions they should ask before the software starts acting. It will not be the vendors, mine included.
Somewhere in HSBC’s records there is a receipt for £1. It bought a bank holding £6.7bn of deposits, and it bought several thousand British finance directors a question nobody had asked them. Three years on, in most of those companies, the answer is still not written down.
The interesting question, then, is not whether these companies should have a treasurer. Most do not need one. It is whether the accumulated judgment of a treasury function can be made available before a company is large enough to employ one.
That is what good automation should do. Not replace judgment, but make it explicit. Not remove accountability, but make the boundaries of delegated decisions clearer. Not simply move money faster, but make it harder to move money for reasons nobody has properly considered.
For years, the scarce resource in treasury was execution: someone had to know the banks, move the cash, monitor the positions, and manage the process. As those tasks become software, the scarce resource shifts. It becomes judgment.
And that may be the paradox of AI in finance. The more cheaply we can automate the mechanics, the more valuable it becomes to know what should happen in the first place.
Round Treasury is a finance operations platform for UK companies below the size at which a treasury function exists.