Treasury Guide 2026: Freeing Up Liquidity, Optimizing Working Capital

The “New Normal” for Treasurers

The world of corporate finance has lost its old certainties. Stable interest rates, reliable supply chains, and a predictable geopolitical environment are a thing of the past. Today, treasurers and CFOs are navigating a state of permanent exceptional circumstances – a “polycrisis” consisting of a mixture of inflation, interest rate reversals, geopolitical upheavals, and fragile global supply chains combined with high price volatility. This “new normal” is not a temporary phase, but a new reality that requires finance departments to rethink their approach. Purchasing structures are changing, and with them the traditional instruments and strategies of financial management, which are no longer sufficient to ensure the resilience of one's own company.

In this challenging environment, two disciplines are inexorably moving from the operational periphery to the strategic center: liquidity and working capital management (WCM) in the supply chain. Long regarded as separate functions of finance and purchasing, often focused solely on cost optimization, they are now merging under the unified strategic control of the treasury department. The central thesis of this article is that successful treasury of the future no longer views working capital as merely ongoing working capital management, but as a dynamic lever for creating strategic resilience and sustainable value creation. The focus is shifting from pure efficiency to flexibility, independence, and agility.

Treasurers will face three key challenges in 2026. This report outlines the principles of modern solutions that go beyond traditional financing instruments and shows how companies can turn their working capital into a real strategic advantage. It provides guidance on not only managing liquidity, but actively shaping it as a survival strategy in uncertain times.

 

The three key challenges in modern treasury

The polycrisis manifests itself in everyday treasury work in the form of concrete, often interrelated problems. Anyone who wants to secure the liquidity and stability of their company today is confronted with three fundamental challenges for which traditional approaches no longer offer satisfactory answers.

 

Challenge 1: Pressure on supply chains – the conflict of objectives

The first challenge lies at the heart of the value chain. For decades, the unilateral extension of payment terms (days payable outstanding, DPO) was considered the supreme discipline in working capital management. What seems logical from a purely financial perspective, however, proves to be a challenge in the polycrisis. Supply chain stability is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a business-critical priority. Continuous delivery to avoid being “out of stock” and securing innovative strength from the supplier network have become vital for survival.

This creates an acute conflict of objectives: the efforts of purchasing and treasury departments to maximize their own liquidity through long payment terms put pressure on precisely those suppliers on whose stability their own business model depends. Small and medium-sized partners in particular, on whose deliveries the purchasing company is often dependent, can find themselves in existential difficulties as a result of late payments. In addition, large suppliers often do not offer longer payment terms. The result is a creeping erosion of supply chain resilience. Quality declines, the relationship with the supplier is strained, the basis for future negotiations is weakened, and in the worst case, production losses are imminent. A modern treasury must resolve this conflict.

 

Challenge 2: Strengthening working capital

The most obvious way to obtain liquidity – resorting to a traditional line of credit – is increasingly becoming a strategic dead end. The reason lies in the balance sheet. Bank loans are reported as financial debt and inflate the balance sheet total. This has direct, negative consequences: important balance sheet ratios such as the debt ratio or the equity ratio deteriorate.

The effect is disastrous: a company that relies heavily on credit financing signals to the market a growing dependence on debt capital. This can jeopardize its rating and drive up the cost of capital for future financing rounds. Investors, analysts, and the financial institutions themselves view ever-increasing debt critically, which puts pressure on the company's value. The treasurer faces a dilemma: they need liquidity, but obtaining it through credit weakens the company's financial stability and external image. The demand for balance sheet-friendly, intelligent alternatives, including in the company's supply chain, is louder than ever.

 

Challenge 3: Technological hurdles – the complexity of traditional SCF solutions

In their search for solutions to the first two challenges, many companies end up with classic supply chain finance (SCF) programs, which are often structured as reverse factoring. The idea sounds promising: a financing partner pays suppliers' invoices early, while the purchasing company takes advantage of extended payment terms. In practice, however, these approaches often fail due to their own complexity.

Lengthy IT projects to integrate an SCF platform into the company's own ERP system tie up scarce resources for months. At the same time, complex contract negotiations with banks and financiers must be conducted. The biggest hurdle, however, is onboarding suppliers. This process is often tedious, time-consuming, and requires suppliers to be willing to join an external platform and enter into contracts with a third party.

The result is sobering: such programs are rigid and hardly scalable. The strategically important “long tail” of small and medium-sized suppliers, whose liquidity is under the most pressure, is not reached. Instead of agile liquidity management, treasurers are left with a cumbersome tool that incurs high internal costs and fails to adequately meet strategic goals.

 

Solution approaches 2026: The principles of modern treasury management

The shortcomings of traditional approaches require a rethink based on three central principles: flexibility, independence, and simplicity. Modern instruments resolve the old conflicts of interest and give treasury back its ability to act.

 

The solution for the volatile macro environment: flexibility

The biggest challenge of the polycrisis is uncertainty. Liquidity requirements can change from one day to the next. A rigid financing structure, whether a fixed credit line or a cumbersome SCF program, is out of place here. The answer to volatility is flexibility.

The solution lies in the use of working capital instruments as flexible “on-demand” tools. Treasury can decide on a daily basis and according to need for which specific liabilities or cash flows it wants to generate additional liquidity. This is done by using working capital instruments in which the extension of the payment term is not recognized as a financial liability, as the original liability to the supplier remains as an operating liability and an additional payment term is granted without the benefit of a platform.

The result is a paradigm shift: working capital is transformed from a static balance sheet item into a dynamic lever. Treasury does not have to maintain expensive credit lines as a preventive measure, the availability of which is not even guaranteed in the event of a crisis. Instead, liquidity is procured from the company's own operating business exactly when and to the extent that it is needed. This is a decisive advantage when it comes to reacting quickly to market uncertainties or cushioning unforeseen liquidity bottlenecks – in an agile, balance sheet-friendly, and strategic manner.

 

The solution to the working capital dilemma: independence

The classic conflict of interest between optimizing one's own key figures and the stability of supplier relationships is the second biggest challenge in WCM. Modern approaches solve this dilemma with a simple but revolutionary principle: decoupling.

The solution is to completely decouple the extension of your own payment terms from the supplier relationship. Unlike traditional reverse factoring, which requires the active participation of the supplier, new instruments enable treasury to extend the maturity of a liability internally, while a payment service provider ensures that the supplier is paid on time on the original due date. The supplier is not involved, does not have to sign any contracts, and does not have to register on any platform. Their cash flow remains untouched and reliable.

The result is the resolution of the conflict of objectives. Treasury gains valuable liquidity without straining the supplier relationship or having to conduct complex renegotiations of payment terms. The stability of the supply chain is actively protected while the company's own financial goals are achieved. This independence gives companies the freedom to strategically manage their working capital without creating negative external effects.

 

The solution to technological hurdles: simplicity

In a world where IT resources are chronically scarce and agility determines market success, complexity is the enemy of progress. The answer to the technological hurdles of traditional SCF solutions is simplicity.

The solution lies in consciously choosing tools that do not require IT integration and, above all, do not require any supplier onboarding. Implementation does not tie up internal IT resources. All interaction takes place exclusively between the company and the payment institution. The workload for the legal department, IT, and purchasing is reduced to an absolute minimum.

The result is unprecedented speed. Treasury can use a new, powerful WCM tool within days instead of months. The ability to act is immediate and is no longer reserved for large corporations with large IT budgets, but is accessible to any company that wants to manage its liquidity in an agile and resource-efficient manner. Treasury becomes a proactive shaper of corporate finances.

 

Conclusion and outlook: Treasury as the strategic architect of financial performance

The rules of the game for finance departments have changed fundamentally. Overcoming liquidity bottlenecks and optimizing working capital are no longer purely operational tasks, but are at the heart of every corporate survival strategy. As this article has shown, traditional tools such as credit lines and classic SCF programs are reaching their limits. They are too rigid, too complex, and create new problems instead of solving old ones.

The future belongs to a treasury that is based on the principles of flexibility, independence, and simplicity.

• Flexibility allows you to respond to market volatility “on demand” and raise liquidity when it is needed without impacting your balance sheet.
• Independence resolves the harmful conflict of interest between your own optimization and the stability of the supply chain by decoupling the interests of both parties.
• Simplicity in implementation and application ensures that treasury can act immediately without being dependent on internal IT resources or the cooperation of third parties.

A treasury that internalizes these principles and chooses the right instruments transforms itself from a mere administrator of financial flows to a strategic architect of corporate resilience. It not only ensures survival in the “new normal,” but also creates the financial agility and performance needed to overcome ongoing crises and actively exploit market opportunities. The tools for this are available today—they are leaner, smarter, and more powerful. It is up to decision-makers to seize them and actively shape the year 2026.