With UK businesses anticipating a tough 2025, spend management platform Pleo is entering the treasury space with a new cash management offering.
A survey of 500 UK finance professionals for Pleo shows that 56% expect 2025 to be tougher than 2024. Despite this, 37% lack confidence in their business’s current level of financial agility.
With the UK’s economic outlook remaining uncertain, three quarters of UK finance leaders say that stress-testing their business’s financial health has never been more important. Additionally, 75% say that financial decisions now have to be made faster than ever before. This has created a situation where 76% of UK businesses say there is more pressure on financial decision-makers than ever before.
However, instead of being able to adapt to meet new industry demands, many are still stuck facing an age-old issue. Just over half of finance leaders say they’re unable to focus on mission-critical work because of time-consuming, manual treasury tasks. In fact, 163 working days a year are wasted on manual treasury tasks.
Nearly three quarters of respondents agree that having a single overview of all accounts, and currencies in one place is the most important thing for full financial visibility. However, the average finance team uses seven tools to manage their business’s finances - 40% of which don't integrate or have poor integration. This has created a scenario where 37% of businesses say they are not confident that they have enough visibility to make informed decisions and remain reactive to key financial events.
Pleo's answer is a suite of treasury tools, which will be rolled out throughout this year, starting with a financial dashboard giving businesses a consolidated overview of their funds. This will then be followed by multi currency accounts and FX trades, automation for cash management and monitoring, configurable alerts, sub-accounts and treasury accounts generating yield.
Amit Kahana, head, credit, treasury and cash management, Pleo, says: "Automation of manual workflows and processes, reconciliation and integrations with their other tools is at the core of what we do. Hence for us, stepping into treasury was an easy decision, especially as so many of our customers already use our cash management tools."