The ongoing economic impacts of the global pandemic make liquidity, cash management, risk management, and forecasting top priorities for many organizations. And treasury professionals are rising to the occasion. They're continuing to deliver their core functions, while also leveraging their unique expertise and insights to drive value across the enterprise. At the same time, many treasury teams are providing a sense of stability to their organizations in these turbulent times.

These are the findings of a recent benchmarking study conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) and treasury expert Ernie Humphrey. Together, we surveyed 246 treasury and finance professionals from organizations that span a range of industries, including retail and wholesale, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, and professional services. In addition, the research team conducted interviews with seasoned treasury practitioners to gather insights regarding:

• Key skills for treasury success moving forward,
• Practices that drive greater value from treasury and efficiency across treasury operations,
• Trends in treasury tools and technology, and
• Measures of treasury success.

The resulting research report, "Delivering Treasury Success in the 'Next Normal,'" provides a better understanding of the ways in which the landscape of treasury has shifted in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research, along with APQC's ongoing Open Standards Benchmarking research in treasury operations, provides a picture of critical success factors for treasury across the landscape of skills, measures, processes and practices, and technologies that will help drive treasury's effectiveness and value as we move beyond the pandemic and into the "next normal."

Treasury Skills of the Future

Treasury practitioners told us that investments in people are just as important as investments in treasury tools or systems—perhaps even more so. "You can set up whatever systems and structures you'd like," said one treasurer, "but they're not going to be successful if you don't have the right team and they're not ready for it."