Managing cash should be a strategic function, but in practice it remains manual and fragmented. Even today, most finance teams still patch together spreadsheets, clunky banking portals, and disconnected approval flows. The result is not just wasted time, but wasted money. In 2023 business bank Allica estimated £150 billion sits in SME current accounts earning zero interest. At today’s rates, that equates to billions in lost potential yield every year.

This inefficiency comes with stress. Payroll cycles create anxiety for CFOs. Counterparty risk - highlighted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank - has made concentration in a single institution untenable. Meanwhile, finance leaders are asked to deliver not just operational oversight, but strategic clarity on cash runway, liquidity buffers, and capital deployment.

Three forces explain why treasurytech is gaining traction now:

1. Higher interest rates have made the opportunity cost of idle cash obvious. In the US, money market funds now manage more than $7.3 trillion according to ICI, which suggests cash being treated as an asset class in its own right.

2. Risk awareness post-SVB has pushed treasurers to diversify holdings and strengthen policies around counterparty exposure. Even now, we still hear stories of how startups, scaleups and VC firms still feel burned by the collapse of SVB in 2023. Diversification is front of mind for most finance leaders.

3. Technology maturity - from bank APIs to Open Banking in the UK to the rise of AI making fintech even more scalable and data-led - means mid-market companies now have access to real-time cash visibility and automated sweeps that were once the preserve of global corporates.

Treasurytech is not simply “better business banking.” It sits at the intersection of cash visibility, liquidity, yield, and payments. Leading platforms like Round (UK), Treasury Spring (UK) and Mercury Treasury (US) offer:

• Automated cash visibility and forecasting across multiple banks and currencies.

• Policy-driven liquidity management, automatically sweeping funds into money market funds or deposit marketplaces to diversify risk and capture yield.

• Multi-currency optimisation offering real-time visibility of FX exposures and automated hedging or conversion rules.
  

• AI-driven account opening agents that scale finance functions by leveraging automations across KYC.

This is more than digitising existing treasury systems; it is about making treasury a strategic lever for growth companies and unlocking meaningful capital for growth for firms of all shapes and sizes.

Early entrants often targeted venture-backed startups flush with post-funding cash - natural early adopters of fintech. Increasingly however - and always a sign of a “tech” entering the mainstream -  treasurytech firms are moving upmarket to mid-sized corporates and financial institutions, where treasury needs are larger and more complex. 

At the same time, lighter-weight tools are bringing treasury automation downmarket to SMEs. The fact that 20% of users of one firm that we’ve been following for a while are already non–venture-backed companies shows the category’s potential reach well beyond the startup ecosystem.

The UK market offers a unique proving ground, as it has done consistently across fintech innovation over the past decade. 

Open Banking adoption has now passed 15 million users, and variable recurring payments (VRPs) could soon enable automated cash sweeps between accounts. Regulators are also raising the bar: the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) limit is set to increase from £85,000 to £110,000 in December 2025, creating further incentive for SMEs to diversify cash holdings across banks.

Combine this with the £150 billion sat idle in current accounts, and the opportunity is clear: treasurytech can unlock yield, improve resilience, and give finance teams back time to focus on growth.

Treasurytech represents a natural maturation of fintech. Where neobanks won consumer trust by fixing UX, building spend management platforms and streamlining company cards, treasurytech is tackling the most valuable asset of all for businesses - cash. The companies that succeed will not only deliver better returns, but also embed themselves deeply into the financial infrastructure of high-growth businesses.

In doing so, they can transform treasury from a defensive back-office function into a forward-looking growth partner. For CFOs, that means less time reconciling accounts and more time deciding how capital should be deployed to win markets. For fintech as a sector, it signals a shift: from payments and lending into the orchestration of liquidity itself.

At Love Ventures, we see treasurytech as a vertical with both resilience and scale. Even as interest rates eventually fall, the structural drivers - automation, risk diversification, regulatory change - will remain. The long-term vision is powerful: a world where corporate cash is not static, but orchestrated; where policies, not manual processes, determine how liquidity moves; and where finance teams can treat cash not as an afterthought, but as a strategic engine for growth.