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A renewed focus on cost control, preparations for new ISO 20022 milestones, and the development of contingency payment systems are all things we can expect to see more of in finance and treasury in 2026. Read on to find out my take on these and other trends shaping finance and treasury operations for the year ahead.
Trend one: a renewed emphasis on automation in the face of rising costs
National insurance increases, rising energy costs, and new trade tariffs; corporates have been hit with a slew of increased costs over the last 12 months. Unfortunately, the future outlook is not particularly rosy, given geopolitical volatility and macroeconomic uncertainty, which means finance and treasury leaders will be paying particularly close attention to costs. Finance and treasury teams will be expected to find efficiencies along with the rest of the wider business. Practically, this means they will be looking to reduce the size of teams and/or putting in place systems to reduce the reliance on headcount.
Trend two: AI will play a greater role in reporting, but less so for full-scale automation
When thinking about automation, much attention is paid to the role that artificial intelligence (AI) could play. However, we are not yet seeing mainstream adoption of AI to fully automate high-stakes finance and treasury operations. That said, there are simpler automation wins to be found by using bank connectivity solutions to integrate back-office accounting systems with banks to automate payments and bank statement feeds. One area where we are likely to see greater use of AI in finance and treasury is reporting. For example, AI could help surface valuable insights from data generated by payment and treasury systems, or automate the analysis of reports across different time periods, highlight differences, and deliver best-practice recommendations for optimisation, performing scenarios in seconds rather than hours.
One of the biggest challenges for corporates in 2026 in their automation efforts will be supporting both new ISO 20022 and legacy messaging formats. Currently, some banks already require customers to use ISO 20022 standard formats, such as pain for payment initiation and camt for statements; others are happy to still work with legacy MT formats and undertake the format conversions to ISO 20022; and all are working to different timeframes. This hybrid status makes it more difficult to automate information flows between back-office systems and banks. Connections between the two parts must be capable of ingesting a mixture of payment and statement message types and, where needed, converting them into the format accepted by their finance systems and banks.
Trend four: ensuring address data is fit for new ISO 20022 milestones
From November 2026, CHAPS and Swift will reject payment messages with unstructured addresses. Instead, messages must submit addresses in either a fully structured or, at a minimum, a hybrid address format, in which the town name and country are structured, and the rest is unstructured. In our experience, many corporates still don’t collect address data in a structured format, so this change could have significant ramifications and require finance teams to expend considerable effort sorting out rejected payments. Ensuring that address data held in back-office systems is clean and in the correct format is imperative.
Trend five: getting to grips with new Verification of Payee checks
October 2025 saw the introduction of the EU’s Verification of Payee (VOP) checks for SEPA credit transfers and SEPA instant credit transfers in the Euro area. Although an EU regulation, the new requirement also affects UK businesses that have accounts with EU-based bank branches and use SEPA credit transfers. One of the challenges for UK corporates is that VOP is set up very differently from the UK’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service. So it is not a case of simply replicating workflows from the UK system. Finance teams should therefore prepare for additional work on SEPA payments as the new system beds in.
Trend six: the growing need for contingency payment systems
Finally, following high-profile cyberattacks in 2025, there has been increased interest in contingency payment systems so that corporates can still make payments should systems go down. Contingency payment systems can range from ensuring there are physical copies of payment information and access to bank portals to make payments, to operating a second contingency payment processing system on a different IT infrastructure to serve as backup. Regardless of the path chosen, inaction is not an option. Businesses are under pressure to demonstrate operational resilience, while the government’s recent consultation on late payments is expected to lead to shortened timeframes for supplier payments, adding further impetus to drive for more resilient infrastructures.
