Preface
This will be a defining year for Canadian businesses as they continue to navigate economic uncertainty, ongoing trade tensions, and heightened cyber‑crime risks. Despite modest growth expectations and a cautious interest‑rate outlook, many companies remain resilient, supported by steady consumer demand and accelerated adoption of digital technologies and AI that are reshaping financial operations.
For treasury and finance teams, this environment presents both pressure and potential. Businesses must manage liquidity carefully, strengthen safeguards against operational and cyber threats, and modernize long‑standing processes. At the same time, emerging opportunities in new global markets, real‑time payments, automation, and data‑driven decision‑making can enhance efficiency, improve visibility, and support strategic capital allocation.
This playbook offers practical, actionable steps—across liquidity, operations, people, and controls—to help commercial clients protect their business, optimize working capital, and build a more agile, technology‑enabled operating model. With the right strategies and tools, Canadian companies can move beyond volatility and position themselves for growth in 2026.
2026 will be pivotal for treasury
After a 2025 marked by significant global events—a shifting interest rate environment, market volatility, rapid developments in automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for treasury departments.
In response to these developments, corporate decision makers are adopting a risk-driven mindset. They’re experiencing and preparing for ongoing volatility. Liquidity, operations, people, and controls are at the heart of every treasury department, and in 2026 treasurers are focused on the various factors that are impacting these areas.
It’s not enough to know the most important trends affecting your industries; you’ll need to understand how to be ready to meet these challenges and opportunities head-on. Across the four areas mentioned above, our 2026 Treasury Playbook calls for treasury departments to adopt three practical actions:
Protect. Take a holistic approach to your cash management needs for both efficiency and security reasons. Key actions include digitizing workflows and processes, and securing your infrastructure with the right solutions that mitigate operational risk.
Provide. Build your organization around a technical and banking infrastructure that enables you to work effectively and efficiently. Train and educate your team on how to use that infrastructure to deliver the biggest impact.
Prepare. Establish the foundation for the future by getting your data ready for use with AI, including creating a data inventory, ensuring quality, and defining ownership roles. Once your data is in order, take advantage of analytics to make data-driven decisions. Begin aligning treasury more closely with the business to ensure you’re moving in lockstep with your organization’s broader data strategy.
Liquidity: Access to cash is king
With an uncertain interest rate environment and high cash levels, it’s imperative for corporates to find new liquidity and capital strategies.
Protect
Optimize working capital and look for ways to improve your cash conversion cycle.
Review payment and collection methods, trade terms and processes, all of which can help ensure your company is maximizing its access to cash.
Monitor your working capital metrics to identify potential issues early.
Provide
Look for opportunities to centralize liquidity management, which helps you gain real-time visibility on your cash holdings and improve forecasting, among other benefits.
Revisit your account structures and examine opportunities to virtualize accounts or automate sweeps. Also, review and rationalize your banks and accounts regularly.
Ensure your organization has a cash investment policy that is reviewed on a regular basis.
Prepare
Focus on improving your cash forecasting. When you’re better able to predict future cash flow needs and identify potential shortfalls, you can make informed strategic decisions and use scenario planning to manage potential risks.
Use dashboards to simplify access to data.
Explore and adopt AI-driven tools to realize more robust analytical capabilities.
Operations: Automation and AI opportunities
Technology solutions hold the promise of making treasury more efficient and unlocking value. Many treasury teams may not be ready to adopt AI given the state of their data, so it’s imperative to establish a data-first approach and acclimate your staff to the technology to drive effective AI use cases.
Protect
Digitize workflows and implement automation of manual tasks to reduce operational risks.
Accelerate migration from paper to electronic payments wherever possible. Explore new payment rails such as Real-Time Payments and adopt digital payment channels wherever possible.
Partner with your banks and third-party providers to find turnkey, configurable solutions to implement change sooner.
Provide
Advocate for treasury’s technological needs in enterprise-wide investments.
Identify gaps and explore both internal and third-party solutions to address those needs.
Incorporate treasury and its business requirements in broad-based initiatives to upgrade corporate platforms or build new capabilities.
Prepare
Survey your data infrastructure and work with your bank to develop a treasury data strategy.
Invest in resources to understand how to collect, cleanse and normalize data for use with AI tools.
Align your efforts with your company’s broader data and AI strategy, leveraging internal initiatives where appropriate.
People: Time for your team to up its game
Advancements in technology mean treasury departments will evolve from completing operational tasks to providing strategic insights. As a result, treasury will need to right-skill their teams and foster cross-functional partnerships across their organizations.
Protect
Provide teams with the technological tools they need to reduce time spent on operational tasks.
Solicit feedback from your treasury team members on ways to improve day-to-day tasks.
Invest in tools for automating cash reporting and analytics processes.
Provide
Arm your treasury team with training and continuous education.
Upskill treasury teams in technical and data analytics skills through training and new talent acquisition.
Establish cross-functional partnerships to help create a culture of business fluency where treasury can bring strategic value to your company.
Prepare
Position treasury as a strategic partner and advocate for a seat at the table in all major strategic decisions.
Increase your team’s exposure to industry and market insights.
Promote treasury’s value proposition across different projects, highlighting the insights and ideas that can scale across the organization.
Controls: Fighting fraud on all fronts
Fraud is a constant and ever-evolving threat that continues to increase in volume, velocity, and sophistication. And the risk exposure compounds—if you’re at risk, so are your customers and suppliers. When they face heightened risk, it inevitably comes back to you unless strong safeguards are in place.
Protect
Partner with your bank to ensure you have the appropriate alerts, blocks, and filters in place to minimize risk of unauthorized transactions. Take advantage of your bank’s fraud mitigation resources. (Learn more about BMO’s resources here.)
Keep your internal controls, including approval authority, up to date. Perform spot checks to make sure staff are executing these controls properly.
Monitor user and activity reports regularly.
Provide
Establish a culture of fraud awareness.
Educate teams on fraud methods and how to respond appropriately to an attack.
Check in regularly with external partners, including your bank, to keep up to speed on the latest threats.
Prepare
Regularly review and refresh your business continuity plans for any event that has an operational impact, including fraud or other business disruptions.
Document, exercise, and train your team on all necessary steps for invoking the plan in the event of a disruption. (Learn more: NextGen Treasury: Protecting Your Business from Digital Threats.)
Put your playbook into action
After the many challenges corporate treasury departments faced in 2025, it’s crucial to start taking concrete steps right now to stay ahead of the game in 2026. At its core, the playbook enables you to reinforce treasury leadership. Executing on this playbook will help put you in a position to safeguard your organization, anticipate challenges, and plan for growth. These actions should be ingrained into your everyday activities, and they should be regularly reviewed and updated in response to changes in corporate strategy, market dynamics, or economic conditions.
As you consider how your treasury department plans to move forward in 2026, remember to engage with your banking partner for the insights and end-to-end solutions—including real-time data and connectivity capabilities—to help you meet these challenges and opportunities proactively and decisively.