In case you missed it, Gartner’s Top 5 Finance Trends and Priorities for CFOs in 2025 just dropped. One key takeaway: In 2025, effective CFOs will prioritize “the unsolved aspects of transformation" with AI leading the way – overtaking traditional automation and finance tech.
This shift toward AI-based solutions is primed to help CFOs tackle one of their top challenges: harnessing data and analytics to move from reactive finance functions to proactive, strategic operations. The roadblock in their path? A glaring talent gap with CFOs reporting digital talent underrepresented on finance teams by 50-75%, thus actively hindering the success of these transformative efforts.
The good news is CFOs don’t need to wait for an influx of digital finance talent to make data work for them. With the right tools, they can take a proactive approach to cash management today.
The Achilles heel of traditional cash management & cash forecasting: Data is everywhere — and thus, nowhere
Finance leaders today don’t need more data; they need usable data. Data fragmentation is Finance’s greatest enemy to achieving that goal. Financial data often resides across a complex ecosystem of banks, ERP systems, payment platforms, legal entities, and currencies. Accessing, extracting, and standardizing this data is typically a manual, resource-intensive process that’s prone to error — hindering timely decision-making.
The consequences of fragmented financial data include:
- Outdated and inaccurate cash reconciliations and cash forecasts
- Cash shortfalls requiring costly short-term loans
- Strained vendor relationships due to missed, partial, late, or erratic payments
- Missed investment opportunities for excess cash
- Erosion of investor and board confidence
Why Finance leaders struggle to break free from manual processes
So why do many finance leaders stick to manual processes? In addition to the talent gap we mentioned earlier, most finance leaders are bandwidth-strapped. They are focused on ensuring cash-safety, fulfilling their department’s foundational responsibilities, leaving little room to explore transformative initiatives.
The result? A reactive approach to critical financial issues. Instead of anticipating challenges and opportunities they are forced to respond after the fact – leading to missed opportunities for growth and delays in making critical decisions.
AI can break this cycle. Let’s explore how finance leaders can turn to AI to tackle these challenges.
3 core benefits of using AI to guide your cash management and cash forecasting
The most effective way to transition from reactive to proactive cash management is adopting AI-powered solutions. While AI has been dismissed as a buzzword in some industries, its applications in finance are practical and transformative.
AI can analyze vast amounts of financial data and extract insights that traditional methods fail to uncover, and dynamically update cash data and forecasts in real time as new information flows in.
Here are three tangible ways how AI can revolutionize cash forecasting:
1. Consolidating and Enriching transaction data across your organization
AI has the power to make sense of your inflowing data — before you even see it. One of the most significant challenges for finance leaders is turning disparate data into actionable insights and doing it in a timely manner. AI excels in this area by seamlessly integrating your data from multiple sources—banks, ERPs, payment systems, and more—and transforming it into a unified, enriched dataset.
Here’s how it works: AI de-duplicates, standardizes, and adds business context to each transaction before it even reaches your analysis stage. Details like ledger categories, counterparties, dates, amounts, and currencies are automatically captured and presented in a consolidated format.
This process reduces manual data handling, reducing human error and freeing you and your team to focus on higher-value tasks and strategic decision-making.
2. Reconciling new transactions, contextualizing, and updating cash forecasts in real time
AI completely transforms the traditional manual process of reconciling transactions and updating cash forecasts by automatically matching and enhancing context. It minimizes errors and eliminates the need for repetitive tasks.
One of AI’s key strengths is automatically matching bank transactions to AR/AP records, reducing discrepancies and enriching each entry with business context - think ledger categories and payment details – before incorporating them into your cash forecasts.
For example, advanced AI algorithms can:
- Reconcile bank records with AR/AP systems and flag exceptions for resolution or review based on the confidence with which it makes that match.
- Apply contextual clues to constantly new inflowing data. This inflow comes with even more clues to add to the program, teaching the evolving model to continually improve in its suggested matches (and reasons for those suggestions).
Consider this scenario: You create a cash flow forecast today, and tomorrow 1,000 new transactions land across various accounts. With conventional treasury management processes, that original forecast is now outdated and needs to be readjusted requiring manual updates. With AI every transaction is automatically categorized, and integrated into the forecast in real-time, keeping your cash forecast accurate and up-to-date.
This shift turns cash forecasting from a static task into a continuous, proactive process. Treasury leaders access dynamic rolling forecasts that adjust automatically, ensuring their decisions are always based on the latest data — without time-consuming manual intervention. The result is agile, proactive cash management that keeps you prepared for evolving financial realities.
3. Generating actionable insights that drive growth
AI does not just help with aggregating and reconciling data in real time and improving forecasting accuracy - it also identifies actionable insights and risks that you can use to drive efficiency and growth.
For example, AI can:
- Spot potential cash shortfalls early and recommend proactive steps to address them before they become a crisis.
- Identify idle cash across multiple accounts and suggest investment opportunities to generate returns.
- Flag anomalies such as unusual transactions or currency exposure risks, providing early warnings to mitigate potential losses.
Consider a scenario where you receive a real-time alert: “Your Euro currency hedging strategy is creating a $2.5 million exposure risk, with an exposure ratio of 2.7%.” With this insight, you can proactively adjust the strategy to protect the organization’s financial position - something that would be impossible without AI-driven insights.
Identifying and mitigating these issues lays the foundation for effortless efficiency and ensures your growth trajectory remains uninterrupted.
Beyond risk mitigation, AI also supports growth by uncovering opportunities like optimizing payment schedules and improving liquidity planning. These insights create a ripple effect of efficiency for the entire Finance team.
How to implement a proactive cash management strategy? Start with Statement.io
By now, you may be wondering "Where should I start my cash management journey with AI?" That's where Statement.io comes in. Our AI-powered platform empowers finance leaders to turn cash forecasting into a strategic advantage. Here’s how:
Connectivity and data enrichment
Data enrichment is at the core of Statement's platform. We automatically gather transactions from all data sources across your organization – banks, ERPs, expense management, payment platforms, and more and apply critical business context to every transaction.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Categorizing transactions by cash flow category
- Assigning counterparties automatically,
- Reconciling bank records with the transactions reported by your AR and AP systems, and assigning confidence scores to matches. For example, you can set a threshold to review only those matches with less than 80% confidence, focusing you on the transactions that matter.
Our platform even handles complex tasks like managing duplicate transactions and inter-entity money movements — tasks that previously demanded significant manual intervention.
Real-time cash forecasting updates
Once Statement.io has connected, analyzed, categorized, and enriched your data, it feeds the information directly into your rolling cash forecasts, updating them dynamically to reflect realities in real time.
How? Our AI analyzes historical trends, payment behaviors (for example customer payment habits at an invoice level), and data in your ERP. Then our AI creates cash forecasts with a level of accuracy and comprehensiveness that traditional methods simply can't match. The entirely autonomous process saves you time and ensures accuracy, equipping you with real-time information about what will transpire with inflows and outflows in the coming weeks and months.
For most of our customer’s finance teams, manual cash forecasting was such a resource- intensive burden that they couldn’t execute it on even a weekly basis. We change the game, making daily forecasting not only possible but effortless for you.
Actionable financial insights
We go beyond real-time cash forecasting to deliver actionable insights that help our customer’s finance teams optimize their cash management strategy, drive efficiencies and yep, identify opportunities for growth.
For example, our platform alerts customers to critical events like cash shortfalls, unusual transactions, or upcoming expenses and provides tailored recommendations for resolution. It also identifies idle cash across accounts flagging it as an opportunity for investment or reallocation – ensuring no financial opportunity goes unnoticed.
This capability is highly valuable for treasury teams tasked with ensuring that the business has cash in the right place at the right time. It helps them make more confident (and proactive) strategic decisions while enabling them to focus on other value-creating initiatives instead of combing through spreadsheets and bank account interfaces, which is no fun at all.
Here are real-world examples of how we helped our customers:
- Proactive Payroll Management: The Director of Treasury was automatically alerted that payroll was approaching, but the organization's cash reserves were concentrated in the wrong currency. Statement’s AI calculated the exact day and exchange rate to execute the transfer, ensuring the payroll process ran smoothly and without additional costs.
- Unlocking Idle cash: Another customer uncovered $10M in idle cash across a dozen of their corporation's 100+ banking partners. Statement.io identified these funds,, allowing the treasurer to consolidate and invest them, generating yield that would have otherwise been missed.
These insights not only improve cash visibility but also support better decision-making, helping our customers stay ahead of risks and capitalize on opportunities in real time.
Risk and fraud prevention
And last but not least, we actively safeguard your organization against risks by identifying unusual activity and potential fraudulent transactions early.
For example, fraudulent transactions – whether intentional or not – can be caught early with Statement’s AI-powered anomaly detection. Consider the recent high profile Macy case involving $151 million employee-led fraud scheme that began with a simple accounting mistake. Such anomalies would have been flagged by Statement.io early, helping to prevent a costly and embarrassing fallout.
Our platform goes beyond traditional safeguards by uncovering risks that would otherwise remain hidden. It provides our customers with a deeper level of visibility and assurance, ensuring they can confidently make financial decisions without worrying about overlooked threats.
Ready to transform your cash management and forecasting from reactive to proactive with Statement?
With Statement.io you are not just managing cash - you are leveraging AI to turn it into a strategic advantage. Learn why CFOs and treasury teams at leading organizations trust our intelligent, AI-powered treasury management and cash forecasting solutions.
