Bank of America wants AI to do treasury’s grunt work

That is increasingly becoming a job for AI. Bank of America announced this morning a new Payments Insights capability, part of CashPro, that analyzes payment efficiency, cross-border flows and working-capital performance and compares a company’s results with industry peers. The goal is less time spent assembling and sorting data, and more time deciding what to do with it.

The bigger question is what happens to the treasury job when AI moves from an experimental tool to something embedded in the systems teams use every day.

It’s the latest addition to CashPro Data Intelligence, BofA’s AI-powered suite of treasury analytics tools, which also includes cash forecasting and fraud-security scoring. CashPro processed 213 million payments in the first half of 2026, up 10% from a year earlier, according to the bank.

I asked Jennifer Sanctis, managing director and CashPro product executive at Bank of America, whether tools like this are leading companies to rethink how treasury teams operate.

“Over the last two years, the pressure on treasury teams to do more with less has only grown,” Sanctis told me. “We’re not necessarily seeing companies restructure their teams; instead, they’re looking for ways to free people from manual work so they can spend more time on higher-value analysis and decision-making.”

That tracks with what many CFOs have been telling me. Providing AI tools and training can free up finance and accounting professionals for higher-value work. Sanctis said the shift is pushing treasury staff to build skills that bridge finance, technology and data, while companies also focus on improving straight-through processing and managing costs.

A recent Deloitte report on treasury trends echoes the shift. The firm says agentic AI is moving “beyond pilots” to orchestrate entire workflows, including cash flow forecasting, risk analysis ,and fraud detection embedded directly into payment rails, rather than simply assisting with individual tasks.

Deloitte frames 2026 as a turning point defined by speed, control and resilience, as real-time payments and AI-led automation reshape how treasury functions operate. That’s consistent with what CashPro’s own advisory clients are describing on the ground.

Instead of a treasury analyst manually pulling payment data into a spreadsheet to spot trends, the tool surfaces patterns, opportunities and risks automatically, through dashboards and peer comparisons. According to Laura Fox, treasury director at Allegis Group, the value isn’t just having more data; it’s understanding it fast enough to act on it. Fox is a member of BofA’s CashPro Boards, client advisory groups representing different segments and regions.

For CFOs, the question worth asking your own team isn’t whether AI will touch treasury operations as it already has. It’s whether your people are being retrained fast enough to use it.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Jeremy Fox-Geen intends to step down as CFO of Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL), a financial technology company known for its USDC stablecoin and blockchain payment infrastructure. Fox-Geen will remain in the role through the end of December, or until a successor is appointed sooner, to support a transition. He has served as CFO since May 2021, helping lead the company through a $1.2 billion IPO. Circle has commenced a search for its next CFO with the assistance of an executive search firm.

Brea Schmidt was promoted to CFO of Crowley, a global logistics, marine, and energy solutions company. Schmidt will oversee enterprise financial performance and strategy, including fiscal planning, capital allocation, and governance. She joined Crowley in 2025 as vice president of finance and previously served as CFO of Alaska Communications.

Big Deal

U.S. business activity surged in September at the fastest pace in more than five years, with S&P Global’s flash Composite PMI jumping to 58.4 from 56.0 in August, the strongest reading since July 2021, and a fourth straight month of accelerating growth.

The survey data now points to annualized third-quarter GDP growth of 4%, with September alone signaling a 5% pace, while hiring climbed at the fastest rate in over four years as firms scrambled to keep up with demand. But the boom has a cost: input prices rose at the sharpest clip since October 2022, driven partly by renewed energy-price pressure and capacity constraints. This pushed S&P Global’s composite growth-employment-cost gauge to its highest level since June 2022—squarely into rate-hike territory.

Going deeper

The U.S. economy remains strong, but rising energy prices and persistent inflation could keep the Federal Reserve on alert, according to Jeremy Siegel, Wharton emeritus professor of finance, on the latest episode of “This Week in Business.”

Siegel breaks down the Fed’s latest rate move, plus what bond markets are signaling about the path ahead for monetary policy. He also weighs in on U.S.-China trade talks, the market fallout of a potential reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and why continued AI investment could keep shaping corporate earnings and market performance.

Overheard

“The more capable agents become, the more they’ll depend on connected enterprise applications. But their greatest impact comes when organizations redesign workflows around this new way of working.”

—Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of business applications and agents at Microsoft, writes in a Fortune opinion piece.