Waiting for batch files, funds stuck in transit, manual reconciliations, and delayed cash visibility are challenges that have long defined corporate treasury.
Open banking has changed that. Across the UK, Europe, and Australia, secure APIs now enable real-time payments and enriched data aggregation for sharper forecasting and scenario planning.
For payment service providers, financial institutions, treasury management systems, and ERPs serving treasury teams, open banking can help you:
Deliver faster settlement, real-time dashboards, and lower costs compared to SWIFT or host-to-host feeds.
Increase platform stickiness by positioning yourself as a true treasury partner, not just a "utility" payments or software provider.
Expand your portfolio of services, including accurate, real-time forecasting and lending based on live cash positions.
In this article, we will show how open banking transforms treasury management and how embedding it into your infrastructure can help you solve pain points, differentiate, and win corporate partnerships with high revenue potential.
At Yapily, we help PSPs, fintechs, and financial institutions unlock new value with open banking. Want to know how you can position your products as solutions for treasury teams? Get in touch with a Yapily expert today.
How does open banking work in treasury management?
To manage a company’s cash, funding, and financial risk, treasurers traditionally rely on file-based connections, such as SWIFT, H2H, or EBICS, to retrieve bank account balances and transactions. In many cases, this data reflects yesterday’s end-of-day balances or today’s partial updates, and transactions often have to be manually matched with accounting entries in spreadsheets. For treasurers, this process means delays, human errors, and inefficient reconciliation.
With open banking, bank account data can be accessed instantly, in real-time. This enables treasury management systems (TMS) and enterprise resourcing planning systems (ERP) to offer their clients a much faster way to get the information they need.
To access open banking data services, you need to use an Account Information Service Provider (AISP). An AISP can quickly aggregate data across the company’s bank accounts. As a result, treasurers get to see balances and transaction data across all banks in real time, experience faster onboarding of new banks, and forecast more effectively.
As well as data services, open banking enables frictionless payments using a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), who can trigger a movement of funds from one bank account directly to another, bypassing card networks.
This means that treasurers get to make faster decisions when it comes to funding or sweeping cash between different entities. When integrated into a TMS or ERP, open banking also makes it possible for treasurers to initiate payments directly from their dashboards, creating a single, streamlined workflow.
For example:
Imagine a treasurer at a multinational retailer operating in five countries with 15+ bank accounts.
Traditionally, the treasurer would need to log in to multiple bank portals or pull SWIFT files to view yesterday’s balances (MT940) and partial updates from today that show lagging cash positions (MT942).
The treasurer would then spend a lot of time consolidating these balances into spreadsheets before deciding on funding or sweeping cash based on lagging data and incomplete estimations. Payments would be uploaded as files to bank portals or routed via SWIFT, which can take hours or days.
Open banking makes it possible for the treasurer to see live balances and transactions from all banks instantly in their TMS dashboard. The dashboard shows a multinational, consolidated cash position across 15+ accounts, which accelerates decisions, and payments can be initiated directly from the dashboard itself.
If, let’s say, the company’s UK entity has a €3M surplus while the German subsidiary is short €2M, the treasurer can initiate a real-time sweep between accounts right from their TMS.
This makes the treasurer’s decisions quicker, more accurate, and more seamless.
Six key treasury challenges solved by open banking
To position your products as solutions for treasurers, expand your customer base, and retain long-term partnerships, it’s important to understand what key challenges treasurers are dealing with, and how open banking helps solve them.
1. Fragmented bank connectivity
As businesses expand, treasury teams end up managing multiple bank relationships across regions. Accessing accounts often means juggling different connection methods such as SWIFT, Host-to-Host, bank portals, or regional standards like EBICS. Each comes with its own setup timelines, formats, and maintenance overhead, making multi-bank operations hard to scale and expensive to manage.
The open banking solution
Open banking provides a single API-based way to connect to multiple banks, with standardized data structures and authentication. This simplifies onboarding, reduces integration effort, and allows treasury teams to manage multi-bank connectivity without relying on multiple legacy access methods.
2. Lagging cash visibility
Many treasury teams still rely on periodic balance updates or batch statements. That means cash positions are often hours behind reality, forcing teams to hold larger buffers, delay decisions, or manually confirm balances before making payments.
The open banking solution
Account Information Services (AIS) give treasury teams near real-time access to balances and transactions across banks. With a consolidated, up-to-date view of cash positions, teams can make faster and more accurate liquidity decisions.
3. Slow payment execution and approvals
Payments often move slowly because initiation, approval, and execution are split across different systems. File uploads, bank portals, cut-off times, and manual approval chains can turn routine payments into multi-step, time-consuming processes.
The open banking solution
Payment Initiation Services (PIS) allow payments to be initiated directly from treasury systems through bank APIs. Approval workflows can be embedded into the same interface, speeding up execution and reducing reliance on manual processes and bank portals.
4. Manual reconciliation and exception handling
Transaction data varies by bank, with inconsistent references, formats, and descriptions. Treasury teams often spend significant time normalizing data and manually matching transactions to invoices, payroll, or intercompany transfers, increasing both workload and error risk.
The open banking solution
Open banking delivers standardized transaction data across banks, making it easier to automate reconciliation and detect exceptions earlier. This reduces manual effort and improves accuracy across high-volume payment flows.
5. Inaccurate forecasting and conservative cash management
Forecasts built on delayed or incomplete data tend to be overly cautious. Unexpected inflows or outflows aren’t reflected until later, which can lead to idle cash, unnecessary borrowing, or missed investment opportunities.
The open banking solution
Real-time and intraday data from open banking enables more accurate forecasting and faster scenario analysis. Treasury teams can adjust plans based on current cash positions rather than historical snapshots.
6. Heavy compliance and audit workload
Maintaining audit trails, monitoring transactions, and proving compliance often requires manual data aggregation from multiple banks and systems. This slows audits, increases operational effort, and raises the risk of gaps or inconsistencies.
The open banking solution
By centralising account data and transaction history across banks, open banking makes it easier to maintain complete audit trails, monitor activity in near real time, and support compliance and reporting requirements from a single source of truth.
To learn more about how your business can help improve treasury operations through open banking, book a no-obligations call with one of our experts.
What to look for in an open banking solution for treasury management
Open banking can make treasury faster and more transparent, but providers vary widely in coverage, account types supported, and product depth. If you’re choosing a platform to improve treasury operations and support long-term corporate clients, pressure test it with five questions.
1. Does it cover the banks and markets you need?
Coverage isn’t just “how many countries.” You need strong connectivity in the specific regions your clients operate in, plus depth across major banks in those markets. If a client can’t connect every account they rely on, visibility and payments break down fast.
2. Can it reliably support business and corporate accounts?
Some providers are consumer-first. Treasury teams need stronger support for business and corporate accounts, including higher volumes, more complex account structures, and payment workflows. Validate corporate-grade reliability in your target markets.
3. Does it support both AIS and PIS?
AIS improves cash visibility and forecasting. PIS speeds up execution by enabling payments directly from treasury workflows. You can stitch providers together, but it increases maintenance and operational risk. One platform that supports both is far simpler to run.
4. Does it include data enrichment?
Raw bank data can be hard to gather insights from. Enrichment like merchant normalization, categorization, and recurring payment detection makes data easier to analyze and use in forecasting, reporting, and cash management.
5. Will it scale with corporate complexity?
Treasury needs don’t stay static. Look for a platform that can handle growth without adding friction, including fast onboarding for new accounts, consistent performance at higher volumes, predictable pricing, and support for audit trails and monitoring as compliance demands increase.
Why partner with Yapily to facilitate treasury management
Yapily is a leading open banking infrastructure platform that fits all of the criteria listed above. Founded in 2017, we provide our clients with a single integration that handles data retrieval and payment initiation across banks. With Yapily, you can connect to over 2,000 banks across 19 European countries
By partnering with us, fintechs, PSPs, and financial institutions spare treasurers the burden of managing fragmented bank connections. Plus, we deliver extensive bank coverage, a trustworthy infrastructure, and data enrichment to help treasury teams streamline their operations.
Leverage our scalable infrastructure with robust business & corporate account connectivity
If you’re servicing treasury teams, you need an open banking partner with excellent corporate and business account connections.
Yapily fits the bill. We have the most extensive business account connectivity on the market, and we also offer multiple payment options, from bulk payments to scheduled payments and VRPs.
Our infrastructure was built to scale. We can scale each service independently based on demand, which improves performance during transaction spikes, such as on payroll days, and it also accelerates time-to-market, as your teams can test and release individual services rather than the whole system.
We have security at the front of our mind: we are ISO 27001 certified, we implement SCA protocols, all data transmitted through our platform is encrypted, and we undergo regular security audits.
For example, our robust infrastructure has made it possible for the users of AccessPay, a corporate-to-bank integration platform that feeds data into a TMS and other systems, to connect and aggregate their entire corporate banking estates in one click.Instead of manually downloading data and relying on spreadsheets, Yapily has enabled treasury teams using AccessPay to benefit from real-time visibility into their cash position and payment processes.
Implement Yapily’s open banking infrastructure to help treasurers achieve their goals
Open banking is becoming the default foundation for modern treasury workflows. If you want to win and retain corporate customers, you need infrastructure that can scale across banks, markets, and business account types. Book a call to see how Yapily can support your treasury use cases with strong coverage, corporate connectivity, and a platform built for reliability.
Get in touch to find out more about our corporate and business account connectivity, wide geographic coverage, and scalable infrastructure.
FAQs: How to leverage open banking for treasury management
1. How does open banking improve operations for treasury teams?
Open banking makes it possible to centralise access to multiple bank accounts via a single API, which helps reduce operational effort for treasurers. It also provides real-time balances and transaction data, reduces manual reconciliation, speeds up payments, and improves funding and sweeping decisions.
2. How secure is open banking for corporations?
Open banking is very secure. It works under regulated standards like the PSD2 in Europe and CDR in Australia, and it relies on encryption, SCA (Strong Customer Authentication), and the user’s explicit consent.
3. Can open banking handle cross-border payments?
Yes, open banking can support cross-border payments where banks and providers offer international APIs. This enables faster, lower-cost transfers compared to legacy methods.
4. Is open banking better than SWIFT, H2H, or EBICS?
Open banking is generally faster, cheaper, and easier to implement than SWIFT and H2H. It also offers more extensive bank coverage in Europe than EBICS.
5. Can open banking support treasury analytics and scenario modelling?
Yes. Since open banking provides real-time, granular data across all accounts, it enables more accurate cash flow analysis, liquidity planning, and scenario modelling for treasurers.