Blog – 2 Column

The key to cash flow visibility across multiple banks

This article is written by Nomentia What is cash flow visibility across banks? Cash flow visibility is the ability to see, in real time, how much liquidity a company has across all banks and entities. Many finance and treasury teams still rely on fragmented bank portals, spreadsheets, and disconnected ERPs. This creates delays, errors, and risks. Modern cash management solutions integrate with banks via APIs, SWIFT, or host-to-host connections, consolidating balances into a multi-bank dashboard. With real-time liquidity data, treasurers and finance managers can optimize working capital, reduce financing costs, and give CFOs reliable answers on cash positions. Gaining complete cash visibility across multiple banks sounds simple in theory, but in practice, it remains one of treasury’s toughest challenges. What is the difficulty in gaining complete cash flow visibility? For many organizations, answering the CFO’s most straightforward question—“How much cash do we have right now?”— is rarely simple. Liquidity is scattered across dozens of accounts, sometimes in multiple countries, often tied to different ERPs or legacy systems. Each bank has its own login, file formats, and reporting cycles. Finance teams spend hours logging into portals, downloading statements, and consolidating them manually in Excel. By the time a group-level report is ready, it is already outdated. This is more than an administrative headache. Treasurers and finance managers are expected to provide clarity and certainty, yet many operate with yesterday’s numbers. The stress is constant: CFOs and controllers demand reliable answers about available liquidity, short-term obligations, and funding options. Without consolidated visibility, treasury professionals are left in reactive mode.  Consider a typical treasurer in this position: on a normal day, they manage to keep things running—balances are tracked, payments are executed, and forecasts are stitched together. But then the unexpected hits: tariffs rise overnight, interest rates change suddenly, or geopolitical events disrupt supply chains. Suddenly, cash needs to be redeployed quickly, liquidity buffers must be reassessed, and the CFO wants immediate answers. Without complete, real-time visibility, the treasurer struggles to react. Cash sits idle in one market while another unit faces a shortfall. Decisions become guesswork, and the gap between operational firefighting and strategic leadership grows wider.  The risks of fragmented bank data A lack of visibility is not just inconvenient—it creates measurable financial and reputational risks: These risks compound in organizations with international subsidiaries, where currency exposures, regulatory requirements, and local practices add further complexity.  The impact of limited visibility into bank balances and cash positions quickly becomes clear in daily operations. A subsidiary might be sitting on millions in idle cash while another entity is forced to borrow at high interest, creating unnecessary financing costs. Without a consolidated view, treasury misses the chance to redeploy liquidity efficiently or invest surplus funds. At the same time, staff hours are wasted collecting data from multiple bank portals, leaving little time for actual analysis. Oversight weakens too, as every bank applies its own approval processes and access rights, making consistent control almost impossible. For the CFO, the consequences are visible when liquidity reports arrive late or contain errors. And when a company operates internationally, these risks multiply — foreign currency exposures, regional compliance rules, and local banking practices all add layers of complexity that fragmented visibility cannot handle. Multi-bank cash visibility: Common barriers The obstacles to visibility are technical, structural, and organizational. Each bank communicates in its own “language,” using CSVs, MT940s, CAMT files, or even PDFs. Without harmonization, treasury teams are left to normalize formats manually. Integration between ERPs, bank portals, and treasury tools is often limited or nonexistent. In the lower maturity stages, many firms rely almost entirely on spreadsheets and online banking portals. Even companies that automate some feeds still struggle with partial visibility across only a subset of banks. Regional differences make matters worse. In the DACH region, EBICS remains widely used, but not all banks implement it consistently. In the Nordics, organizations maintain an agile and forward-looking perspective on the possibilities of APIs, yet many corporates lack the IT bandwidth to establish direct API links with every bank. In other markets, legacy host-to-host connections or SWIFT remain common but expensive to maintain. A mid-sized treasury team may find itself forced to juggle all these connectivity types at once. Organizational barriers add to the challenge. Local subsidiaries often control their own accounts, meaning group treasury cannot always access balances directly. Some companies even lack a consolidated inventory of bank accounts and authorized users. Without centralized oversight, it is impossible to guarantee that all accounts are monitored or that all data is captured in reports. The result is predictable: liquidity data is fragmented, reporting is delayed, and treasury is left one step behind. The value of a centralized multi-bank dashboard Treasury gains a real-time multi-bank dashboard that displays balances across all banks, currencies, and entities. Access rights and approvals are managed centrally, ensuring consistency and audit readiness. Automated statement retrieval means balances refresh throughout the day, providing up-to-date insight instead of yesterday’s snapshot. Comparison: Fragmented vs Centralized Visibility   Fragmented Bank Portals  Centralized Multi-Bank Dashboard  Cash Visibility  Manual, time-consuming Real-time, consolidated Productivity Time spent on logins & spreadsheets Automated, focus on analysis Controls Differ across banks Centralized, audited, secure Decision-Making Numbers might be outdated Confident, real-time insights From visibility to better decisions Real-time visibility changes how finance teams manage liquidity. When every account is visible at once, surplus cash can be redeployed immediately instead of sitting idle. Shortfalls can be anticipated and addressed before they trigger costly borrowing. Better visibility strengthens forecasting. Forecasts built on outdated or incomplete balances are unreliable. With accurate, consolidated starting points, short-term cash forecasts gain credibility and can be used to inform decisions on funding, investments, and risk hedging. Compliance and risk management also improve. A central dashboard enforces consistent oversight: all accounts are monitored, approvals are logged, and sanctions screening can be standardized. This reduces the likelihood of errors, fraud, or missed compliance requirements. In practice, this means treasurers shouldn’t settle for being tied to a single bank’s portal or processes. If one bank faces an outage or pushes up fees, visibility and payments shouldn’t collapse. With a…