Pleo’s latest research found that the majority of UK businesses (56%) expect 2025 to be tougher than 2024. Despite this, the study of 3,250 finance leaders across Europe reported that two in five (37%) UK leaders lack confidence in their business’s current level of financial agility. This reveals a worrying trend that many companies are unprepared to face the economic difficulties they anticipate will impact business performance in 2025.

In response to this growing need for better financial visibility and control, Pleo is expanding into the treasury space with the upcoming launch of its cash management solution. The suite of treasury tools 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. New and existing customers will be invited to gain early access to these tools during the first half of 2025.

Manual tasks holding businesses back from mission-critical work

The UK’s economic outlook remains uncertain in 2025, and three in four (76%) 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 the majority (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. Over half (51%) 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, highlighting just how necessary cash management solutions have become.

Current treasury tech stacks are not fit for purpose

The majority (73%) of UK finance leaders 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 one in three UK (37%) businesses say they are not confident that they have enough visibility to make informed decisions and remain reactive to key financial events.

Despite this, business optimism is high in 2025 and, in addition to better control and insights, leaders want to get more from their money – 72% say that making excess cash work harder for their business is a key priority in the next 12 months. For the finance team's output to match business goals, increased importance needs to be placed on the treasury tech stack.

Amit Kahana, Head of Credit, Treasury and Cash Management at Pleo, commented: “In recent years, the role of the finance team has rapidly evolved to meet the challenges of a complex economic climate. However, the tech in use hasn’t, and visibility over cash flow and finance has suffered. The time to change this is now.

“The core of Pleo today is making the life of the finance function easier for our customers. 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. We see how many areas in finance have progressed with great tools out there, but the treasury function is still behind, using spreadsheets and time consuming processes. New products have made this role even more complex so we see this as a great opportunity to solve this problem.”

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