Finance teams are facing difficult constraints this year. They’re being asked to deliver more, with less budget, less headcount, and in many cases, operating on margins of just a few percent. In that environment, every payment matters, every error is felt, and liquidity stops being a theoretical concern and becomes something that needs to be actively protected day to day.
All this while the cost of doing business has risen sharply, cyber threats continue to intensify, and regulatory reforms continue to reshape operations. Each of these challenges will mean finance leaders must confront some uncomfortable truths about how their operations really work.
The organisations that thrive in 2026 won’t be those with the biggest transformation budgets or the most ambitious AI roadmaps. They’ll be the ones that finally close the gap between knowing automation is necessary and actually delivering it. Because for most finance teams, there simply isn’t enough capacity left in the system to absorb more regulatory demand, more volume, or more complexity without technology doing more of the heavy lifting.
The efficiency mandate
Improving financial efficiency and cost control isn’t new, but 2026 is different.
Organisations are now stress-testing their growth plans and ensuring they can operate at the low end of their scenarios for a prolonged period. Rising costs, sluggish demand and a mounting tax burden mean that Finance teams must maintain service levels without adding extra resources.
For a long time, treasurers and finance leaders could deliver incremental improvements to satisfy their leadership. Today, incremental improvements are no longer enough. To protect internal reputation, treasury and finance leaders need to demonstrate strong controls, fewer payment errors, and a visible reduction in exceptions – even with less resource. Being the team that “gets it wrong” carries a cost that goes beyond fines or remediation, it erodes trust internally and increases scrutiny when things go wrong.
That’s where the real divide starts to show. Roughly a quarter to a third of organisations have fully automated their financial processes. They’ve reduced manual friction, error-prone workflows, and created space for teams to focus on higher-value work like continuity planning and cash optimisation. The rest sit somewhere in the middle. Partially automated, still reliant on workarounds, still stitching processes together manually.
That middle ground is more dangerous than it looks. Partial automation often creates as many problems as it solves. Manual steps creep in between systems. File handling becomes fragmented. Teams spend more time managing gaps and handling exceptions than analysing data and delivering strategic insights into the business. You’re automated enough to see what’s possible, but not enough to realise the benefits.
Financial Services firms tend to be further ahead here. That’s not surprising given their technology-first culture. Corporates, by contrast, often describe themselves as “progressing” when in reality, they’re still heavily dependent on manual processes. It’s clear that the gap between the two is widening.
Manual processes cost more than time
When finance teams are dependent on manually creating and exporting payment files to banks, then manually downloading statements to reupload them to ERPs, they’re introducing risk. Every manual workflow is an opportunity for fraud, internal and external, or error. Additionally, the fragmentation of financial data across multiple portals makes accurate, real-time cash visibility across multi-bank environments nearly impossible.
Working capital optimisation is a top priority for corporates. But optimising working capital requires knowing where your cash is, when it’s moving, and what’s coming next. You can’t optimise what you can’t see.
There’s also a quieter cost. The same manual processes that drain team capacity also create the data gaps that prevent strategic decision-making. Teams are too busy processing transactions to improve the systems that would eliminate the processing burden.
A reality check on AI
Everyone’s talking about AI in finance right now. 68% of firms expect to have AI embedded in a significant portion of their operations within the next 18 months.
AI isn’t a silver bullet for efficiency. It’s a tool that only works when you have the right foundation in place. Limited internal expertise is a major blocker. But the structural issues run deeper: poor master data quality, regulatory concerns, budget constraints, particularly for corporates already struggling with transformation budgets.
AI can’t fix bad data. It can’t make sense of fragmented systems. It can’t reform processes that were never designed for automation. The most successful AI implementations in the near term will focus on targeted, high-control use cases. Fraud detection, pattern recognition in payment data, enhanced forecasting. However, what we won’t see very soon is fully autonomous payment decision-making. Finance operations are complex, they carry real consequences, and until more testing has been done, they will require human judgement.
Getting the foundations right
Finance teams need to get the basics right first. Bank connectivity solutions already play a critical role in automating key processes: payments, bank statement retrieval, cash positioning. These aren’t cutting-edge technologies. But they’re the foundation everything else builds on.
Creating a unified data layer between internal systems and banks is one of the most practical steps organisations can take. It removes fragmented file handling. It strengthens control over payments and data flows. It creates the clean, consistent foundation that finance transformation and AI initiatives depend on. And it is the central control plane which can turn into a source of data intelligence.
Most organisations haven’t fully automated their payment operations. Many are still creating payment files manually or relying on partially automated workflows that introduce risk. This matters more than ever with new fraud prevention legislation, intensifying cyber threats, and expanding regulatory requirements around payment data.
The organisations getting this right are removing manual friction wherever teams are still exporting files, copying data, or manually reconciling information across systems. They’re building that unified data layer before chasing the next technology trend. Making sure finance and treasury data is accessible, high-quality, and standardised. This is what enables everything else, from cash visibility to AI-powered forecasting.
Looking ahead
The pressure on finance teams isn’t easing. Volatile trading conditions will continue. Skills shortages will persist. The organisations that thrive won’t be those with the flashiest AI implementation. They’ll be the ones that fundamentally rethink how finance operations work. Not just digitising existing processes, but redesigning workflows to be automation-first.
2026 will separate the finance teams that adapted from those that didn’t. The question for every finance leader is simple: which side of that divide will you be on?
AccessPay’s Finance Trends 2026 Report, based on insights from 130 finance and treasury leaders, is available now.
