Key SAP Treasury and Cash Management Updates

As part of SAP's ongoing product development efforts, Zanders once again participated in a dedicated on-site testing initiative during the SAP 2608 Partner Summit for Treasury and Payment Solutions, gaining early insight into a range of developments across Cash Management and Treasury.

These developments span a mix of established capabilities, evolving functionality, and innovations that highlight SAP's broader direction in treasury.

How to interpret these developments

To support understanding, the developments can be viewed across different levels of maturity:

• Established capabilities that are already usable or broadly available

• Evolving capabilities where scope and functionality are still expanding

• Emerging innovations that indicate SAP's future direction

What are the key benefits for the clients

• Better cash visibility through improved intraday insights and multi-account views

• Reduced manual effort via automation and template-driven processes

• Stronger governance and control across treasury operations

• Greater transparency in bank fees and interest validation

• Improved scalability and standardization across entities

• Preparation for more data-driven and automated treasury processes

Overall, these developments support a shift towards more efficient, controlled, and scalable treasury operations.

Bank Account Management & Cash Management Developments

Short Term Cash Positioning

SAP continues to enhance Short-Term Cash Positioning (STCP) with a strong focus on usability. (The core SAP app used by treasury teams to monitor daily cash positions.)

The introduction of flexible hierarchy allows treasury teams to analyze multiple bank accounts within a single structure, including intraday balances. This simplifies cross-account analysis, although highlighting negative balances is not yet supported.

Further improvements in intraday balance integration provide a clearer distinction between real-time and end-of-day positions, supported by enhanced visibility in the Manage Bank Account Balances app. This enables more effective liquidity monitoring throughout the day.

Bank Fee Analysis

Enhancements in Bank Fee Analysis are designed to reduce reliance on manual processes and improve scalability.

Key improvements include:

• Template-based bulk maintenance of fee conditions

• Built-in validation and error handling

• Automatic refresh of impacted fee items

These changes strengthen data consistency and reduce operational effort. However, value realization depends on data readiness, particularly the availability of ISO 20022 camt.086 files (standard bank fee reports) and clear ownership of fee condition management.

SAP is also exploring enhancements such as support for non-standard formats and AI-supported condition recognition.

Cash Register concept

SAP's evolving Cash Register concept introduces a central processing layer where cash-relevant data from different source components, such as Accounting, Treasury, and Logistics, is collected and stored before further processing.

This concept addresses a key challenge in current system landscapes, where cash data is often fragmented across multiple processes and applications. By centralizing the data at an earlier stage, SAP aims to increase coherence, transparency, and control over how cash flows are derived and reported.

When activated, this adds an additional step before cash data flows into FQM_FLOW (the central table used by SAP Cash Management to store and report all cash-relevant data), which results in a more structured and controlled flow of information.

From a business perspective, this approach:

• enables more consistent classification of cash flows

• supports integration across complex or multi-system environments

• improves traceability for analysis and audit purposes

• provides a stronger foundation for forecasting, analytics, and future AI use cases

This represents a structural shift in how cash data is processed and requires organizations to assess how it fits within their current design.

Interest calculation and verification

SAP is developing capabilities for automated interest calculation and verification based on daily bank account balances.

This helps organizations:

• validate bank interest charges

• improve transparency

• reduce manual reconciliation effort

The capability is especially relevant for organizations managing multiple accounts with different interest conditions.

However, withholding tax is currently not supported, which may limit full end-to-end reconciliation.

AI-assisted Bank Relationship Management

SAP is introducing AI-assisted capabilities for bank relationship management, available in newer SAP environments.

By using natural language interaction, users can retrieve and analyze banking data more easily, without navigating multiple reports or systems.

This supports:

• faster access to relevant insights

• reduced manual data gathering

• more efficient preparation of bank relationship reviews

While available, the scope of this capability is still evolving, and organizations should assess how it aligns with their data setup and governance requirements.

Treasury Upgrades

Governance and control

SAP is strengthening governance through enhanced Business Partner-level authorization, including a four-eye approval principle.

This improves control over sensitive treasury master data and helps reduce the risk of unauthorized changes.

Financial transaction templates and AI support (beta)

Enhancements in Treasury & Risk Management (TRM) introduce financial transaction templates supported by AI.

Capabilities include:

• Template creation from model transactions

• AI-driven transaction creation based on user input

This is particularly relevant for repetitive processes such as intercompany loans or bank-to-bank transfers.

This functionality is currently in beta and requires further validation.

Additional Treasury developments

Additional improvements include:

• Mirror transaction creation for automated replication of flows

• Support for using functional currency as a valuation currency (aligned with IAS 21 accounting standards)

This is particularly relevant for organizations managing financial data across multiple currencies. A key prerequisite remains that no existing financial postings are present before activation.

Zanders' perspective

Based on early testing and discussions with SAP, these developments confirm a clear direction towards more standardized, automated, and control-driven treasury processes.

Several enhancements, particularly in cash visibility, bank fee management, and governance, are already relevant for organizations looking to improve efficiency and strengthen control frameworks.

At the same time, newer capabilities such as AI-supported transaction creation and AI-assisted banking insights should be introduced gradually, starting with targeted use cases and expanding as the functionality matures

From a Cash Management perspective, current innovations appear to focus primarily on selected areas such as Short-Term Cash Positioning, AI capabilities, and new concepts like Cash Register.

At the same time, incremental improvements in widely used applications, such as Cash Flow Analyzer, Manage Cash Pools (V2), and Cash Position Today, were not a key focus during the testing phase, which may be relevant for organizations relying on these tools in daily operations. It is expected that SAP will continue to enhance these applications alongside newer innovations.

A key success factor across all developments will be data readiness and process alignment. SAP continues to make meaningful progress in improving usability, automation, and governance within treasury. A balanced and pragmatic adoption approach will be key.