The pace of change in payments infrastructure has decoupled from the operational tempo of corporate treasury. Real-time payment networks are expanding reach and raising transaction limits in six-month sprints. Treasury rebalancing cycles, by contrast, still operate on monthly or quarterly cadences, dependent on batch processes, approval chains, and correspondent banking cut-off times that haven't fundamentally changed in decades.
This isn't a technology gap. It's a velocity mismatch. And for treasury teams managing multi-currency flows across jurisdictions, the cost is structural: capital trapped in nostro accounts because the time required to reallocate liquidity exceeds the window in which the optimal allocation remains valid.
FedNow has now attracted 1,725 banks and credit unions, representing 19.7 percent of U.S. financial institutions as of the first quarter of 2026. The transaction limit, which launched at $25,000, now stands at $10 million, a threshold that accommodates most business-to-business transactions and opens the door for broader institutional participation. In 2025, FedNow settled 8.4 million payments compared to 1.5 million in 2024, a 459% year-over-year volume increase, while settled value surged from $38 billion to over $853 billion. The Clearing House's RTP network, meanwhile, processed 142 million transactions worth $576 billion in the second quarter of 2026.
This acceleration isn't confined to the United States. The G20's cross-border payments roadmap, launched in 2020 with goals to make cross-border payments cheaper, faster, more inclusive and more transparent, has set quantitative targets for end-2027. By that date, 75% of payments are expected to make funds available to the recipient within one hour of initiation, with the remainder credited within one business day. The infrastructure is being rebuilt on a timeline that assumes treasury operations can keep pace.
They cannot, at least not in their current form. While 87% of organizations have implemented some level of treasury automation, only 39% describe their systems as fully automated. The gap between partial and complete automation is where velocity mismatches compound. A treasury team with real-time visibility but batch-based execution is still bound by the slower constraint.
Traditional rebalancing depends on banking cut-off times and batch-based settlement cycles. Stablecoin transfers, by contrast, can move value between entities or markets outside those windows, with settlement confirmed on-chain. But that optionality only matters if treasury can act on it, and most cannot. Every corridor requires management of its own settlement timing, local clearing access, and currency availability. Treasury teams cannot wait for demand to materialise; they need coverage in place across multiple markets simultaneously.
The result is systematic over-funding. Treasury teams routinely over-fund nostro accounts across multiple currencies and time zones to avoid failed settlements. A large global bank may maintain nostro accounts at dozens of correspondent banks in 20 or more currencies. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that roughly $27 trillion is held in nostro and vostro accounts worldwide to support cross-border settlement. This capital isn't working. It's waiting.
Depending on whose estimate you prefer, somewhere between $5 trillion and $27 trillion sits idle in prefunded nostro and vostro accounts around the world. Whatever the true number, it measures the same thing: how much capital the global financial system has to immobilise to compensate for uncertainty it cannot otherwise resolve.
For a corporate treasury team, the operational reality is more granular but no less constraining. By the time a rebalancing cycle is approved, executed, and settled, the payment corridor that justified the allocation may have already shifted. A new real-time rail comes online. A counterparty upgrades their receiving capabilities. A regulatory change opens a faster route. The liquidity you positioned last quarter is now optimised for a landscape that no longer exists.
Cash and liquidity forecasting remains treasury's most frequently cited challenge, cited by 49% of respondents, despite continued investment in technology and process improvements. The challenge isn't forecasting in isolation, it's forecasting in an environment where the variables are changing faster than the forecast cycle. A quarterly liquidity review assumes relative stability in payment corridors. That assumption is increasingly false.
The focus on creating scalable corporate treasuries has risen sharply, with 49% of respondents prioritizing it, an increase from 39% in 2022. Scalability, in this context, means the ability to respond to external change without proportional increases in manual intervention. But scalability without velocity is just larger-scale rigidity.
Liquidity risk management continues to be a top priority for treasurers, accentuated by global high interest rates and bank vulnerabilities in some countries. Treasurers continue to indicate the importance of improving cash flow forecasting capabilities, and the maturity of cash positioning capabilities continues to require development. The higher interest rate environment has driven treasurers to assume their role in the reduction of idle cash. The cost of idle capital has become harder to ignore. But reducing idle cash requires the operational capability to move it, and to move it faster than the payment landscape shifts.
Organizations are moving toward real-time, always-on liquidity models to improve visibility and control across global operations. The direction is clear. The question is whether treasury operations can close the gap before the accumulated cost of trapped capital becomes a structural competitive disadvantage.
The treasury teams that treat this as a technology procurement problem will find themselves perpetually catching up. The ones that recognise it as an operating model question, how frequently can we reallocate, how quickly can we act on new information, how do we match internal decision cycles to external infrastructure velocity, have a chance to turn liquidity management from a defensive function into a source of operational advantage.
The payment rails aren't waiting. Treasury structures that cannot match their pace will find their nostro balances growing not because of business growth, but because of operational drag, capital that should be deployed, sitting idle because the system designed to move it was built for a slower world.
References
[2] Bank for International Settlements, CPMI Cross-border payments programme
[3] Financial Stability Board, "Cross-Border Payments: Towards the Next Chapter," July 2026
[4] J.P. Morgan Payments, "Payments Outlook 2026 Trends Report," May 2026
[5] Deloitte, "2024 Global Corporate Treasury Survey,"
[6] Association for Financial Professionals, "2026 AFP Treasury Benchmarking Survey Report,"
