Treasury Contrarian View: APIs in Treasury — Game-Changer or Just Another Integration Headache?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have been hailed as the future of bank connectivity, real-time data exchange, and seamless treasury operations. Banks, TMS vendors, and fintechs are pushing APIs hard. But here’s the contrarian take: Are APIs truly revolutionizing treasury, or are they just another complex, costly integration layer with more hype than help?

The Case for APIs as a Game-Changer

1. Real-Time Data Access
   • APIs provide instant visibility into bank balances, transactions, and FX rates, giving treasury teams the power to make timely, informed decisions.
2. Improved Automation and Efficiency
   • By eliminating file-based processing (e.g., MT940s, BAI files), APIs can reduce manual work, cut reconciliation time, and support straight-through processing.
3. Flexible, Scalable Integrations
   • APIs allow for more modular and customizable integration between TMS, ERPs, banks, and fintech tools, avoiding the rigidity of legacy interfaces.
4. Faster Implementation of New Services
   • Treasury teams can adopt new services—like real-time payments or virtual accounts—without waiting for long development cycles or file format updates.

The Case for APIs as Overhyped

1. Implementation Complexity
   • Despite the promise of plug-and-play, API integration often involves significant IT effort, vendor coordination, testing, and ongoing maintenance.
2. Inconsistent Standards Across Banks
   • Each bank may offer APIs with different formats, authentication methods, and capabilities—creating fragmentation and a new layer of integration work.
3. Security and Compliance Risks
   • APIs increase exposure points. Ensuring secure access, audit trails, and regulatory compliance requires careful setup and governance.
4. Limited Treasury Use Cases (So Far)
   • While APIs shine for balance visibility and payments, broader use across forecasting, cash pooling, or credit facilities remains underdeveloped.

A Balanced Strategy: Use APIs Where They Add Real Value

Instead of rushing to adopt every new API available, treasury teams can:

• Prioritize use cases with clear ROI—e.g., real-time cash visibility or payment status tracking.
• Work with aggregators or middleware providers to simplify API integration across multiple banks.
• Focus on interoperability between treasury systems and banking APIs, not just on speed.

Let’s Discuss

• Is your treasury team actively using APIs? What’s been the experience so far—smooth or painful?
• Do APIs genuinely improve your treasury processes, or are they just replacing one kind of complexity with another?
• What are the most valuable or overrated API use cases you’ve seen in treasury?

We’ll be gathering opinions from treasurers, TMS vendors, and banking partners—share your view and be part of the conversation!

COMMENTS

Jan-Willem Attevelt, Co-founder of Automation Boutique — the company behind the newly launched API Boutique — comments:

APIs offer exciting opportunities for corporate treasury. In theory, they provide on-demand access to financial data, as well as the ability to initiate actions. This can significantly reduce manual work and offer greater flexibility in how companies connect with banks and systems. However, while the potential is significant, we’ve seen that for many companies, implementation is still far from straightforward. To fully realize the value of APIs in treasury, we need to focus on making them easily usable within the tools and systems companies already depend on.

Today, most APIs are built with software developers in mind. If you’re building an accounting platform or a treasury management system, having access to real-time balances or transactions via API is powerful. But the reality is that most companies don’t have the technical resources to make use of these APIs for their own reporting or treasury operations.

In treasury, APIs have been discussed for years as if they’re a ready-made solution. But an API isn’t an app that a company can simply install and start using. To get value from it, you need a developer to handle authentication, establish the connection, maintain its reliability, and integrate the data into the tools your treasury team already works with. This process is often costly, time-consuming, and overwhelming. For many companies, it’s not even clear where to begin.

Even for companies with technical expertise, there are still barriers to using banking APIs effectively. Take Open Banking APIs as an example. While all European banks are required to offer them, these APIs were primarily designed for consumer use and not well suited to corporate treasury needs. Accessing them requires a special PSD2 license as a regulated third-party provider (TPP), which most companies do not have. On top of that, the user must reauthorize access every 90 days, making the setup fragile and difficult to automate reliably. There are also limitations on how frequently the data can be refreshed, often restricted to just a few times per day. All of this makes Open Banking APIs a poor fit for companies that need stable, high-frequency access to financial data for reporting or operational purposes.

What a lot of banks have done well is offer premium APIs that go beyond Open Banking. These are really useful for cash visibility, giving companies access to balances and transactions in real time. But even then, the experience is hit or miss. At some banks, we’ve run into bugs, sandbox environments that don’t behave like production, and documentation that assumes you already know everything. Sometimes we honestly wondered if we were the first ones to actually try using the API.

Beyond cash visibility, access to deeper financial data drops off quickly at most banks. If you want API access to get visibility on things like loans, overdrafts, FX trades, bank guarantees, or letters of credit, you’re probably out of luck. Most of that data has been traditionally locked away from real-time access. The good news is that this is

starting to improve and banks are gradually offering more data through APIs, but also allowing you to initiate a variety of actions (e.g. payments or FX trades). Despite the challenges, the opportunity is clear: APIs need to be directly usable by companies within the tools they already rely on, such as Excel, Power BI, or a TMS. At the end of the day, getting access to real-time financial data shouldn’t require a developer. It should be as simple as opening Excel.

Renea Mahadeo, Treasury Masterminds board member, comments:

Dismissing APIs as hype is like dismissing AI – ignore it and watch competitiveness tank. Sure, batch data works, just like fax machines still do. But is yesterday’s data really good enough in a world where markets move by the second?

A treasurer with a forward-looking vision must have a technology strategy. Understanding your goals before you begin the transformation, will serve as a guide to wise decisions throughout the process. That starts with asking: Which of your banks offer APIs – and for which use cases? If they don’t, will you push for it or consider alternatives? If building in-house isn’t feasible, which TMS or API aggregator best aligns with your needs? How can you structure a business case to get CFO buy-in? Having witnessed large MNCs and SMEs implement premium banking APIs globally, the most successful treasurers have a clear vision and strategy in place to future-proof and level-up their tech stack. Your vision will anchor every tech decision.

Change may not be easy, but avoiding it has a cost. Like skipping workouts, inaction may feel easier now – but the cost shows up later in lost agility, missed insights, and competitive drag.

Royston Da Costa, Treasury Masterminds board member, comments:

The introduction of APIs (Application Programming Interface) has made Real-time data a possibility that could be invaluable in Treasury because it enhances decision-making, improves risk management, and optimizes liquidity. Here are my thoughts on why:

1. Liquidity Optimization

Cash Positioning: Instant visibility of global cash balances enables more efficient cash pooling, sweeping, and funding decisions.

Intraday Liquidity Management: Banks charge based on intraday usage—real-time insights allow treasurers to optimize cash deployment.

2. Faster Decision-Making

Automated Hedging: With real-time data, treasury teams can automate FX and interest rate hedging to lock in optimal rates.

Dynamic Forecasting: Real-time cash flow and collections data improve the accuracy of short-term forecasts.

3. Bank Connectivity Innovation

Instead of relying on host-to-host or SWIFT, corporates are increasingly experimenting with direct bank APIs, especially in Europe with PSD2 (and evolving to PSD3).

4. Fraud Prevention & Compliance

• Payment Monitoring: Real-time tracking of payments helps detect anomalies and prevent fraud.
• Regulatory Compliance: Many jurisdictions require real-time transaction reporting for transparency.

5. Cost Efficiency

Optimized Borrowing & Investing: Real-time access to short-term borrowing rates or investment opportunities ensures the best return on idle cash.

Having outlined the benefits of APIs, here are some of the challenges with using APIs and receiving real time data:

1. Data Overload & Noise

• Too Much Information: Real-time data streams can create excessive noise, making it difficult to focus on critical risks.
• False Alarms: Frequent updates may lead to overreaction to minor fluctuations rather than strategic decision-making.

2. Integration & System Complexity

• Lack of Standardisation: Every bank has its own API structure, making multi-bank integration complex.
• Compatibility Issues: Legacy systems may not support real-time data processing, requiring costly upgrades.
• Multiple Data Sources: Consolidating real-time data from banks, trading platforms, and internal ERPs can be challenging.
• Market Maturity: While FinTechs and digital-native companies adopt APIs quickly, many traditional treasuries are still in the early stages.

3. Cost Considerations

• Infrastructure Costs: Maintaining real-time treasury requires investment in technology, connectivity, and cybersecurity.
• Transaction Fees: Some banks charge for real-time payment and liquidity updates, increasing costs.

4. Operational Challenges

• Resource Dependency: Continuous monitoring requires skilled personnel to interpret data and take swift action.
• System Downtime & Latency: Even a minor delay in data feeds can impact decision-making in volatile markets.

5. Behavioural & Strategic Risks

• Short-Term Focus: Real-time visibility might push treasurers toward short-term fixes rather than strategic risk mitigation.
• Security & Governance: Real-time connectivity raises the bar for cybersecurity, access controls, and compliance.

In conclusion, the question of APIs and whether they are hype or not invariably comes down to the following questions:

1. What are you trying to solve?
2. Do you need real time data e.g. balances, counterparty exposures, regulatory compliance?

APIs are not a silver bullet, but they are a foundational layer for future-proofing treasury operations. They complement, rather than replace, existing channels (like SWIFT), especially in multi-bank and cross-border scenarios.

Forward-looking treasuries are using APIs to:

• Reduce operational risk
• Gain agility in liquidity decisions
• Support real-time treasury and embedded finance models

Summary:

In my opinion, APIs in Treasury are a reality, not hype — but adoption is uneven. Leading treasuries are already leveraging APIs for real-time visibility, automation, and strategic advantage. For others, it’s a journey — and the time to start is now.

• Is your treasury team actively using APIs? No, however, we are considering it as we have just upgraded our TMS solution and have been promised access to a library of APIs. What’s been the experience so far—smooth or painful? N.A.
• Do APIs genuinely improve your treasury processes, or are they just replacing one kind of complexity with another? I believe they will improve our processes, especially in automating them where appropriate e.g. payment approval, regulatory reporting.

APIs could be quite powerful when used internally e.g. interacting with other internal systems/stakeholders e.g. cash flow forecasting.

• What are the most valuable or overrated API use cases you’ve seen in treasury?

Most valuable = real time balances, payment status tracking, bank account validation.

Overrated = Treasury Chatbots (Treasurers need control, granularity, and auditability — not Alexa for cash positions), Open Banking APIs for Multi-bank Connectivity (Works in certain regions (e.g. PSD2 in Europe), but isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for global treasury).

Macer Skeels, CTO at FinanceKey comments:

APIs in Treasury: Not If, But When

APIs are not new. While their adoption in Treasury and Corporate Banking may still be at an early stage, the technology itself has already proven transformative in countless domains. Developers turned to (web) APIs as early as the year 2000^[1] to improve efficiency, reduce development time, and enable scalable services. Today, 90% of developers use APIs^[2], and they reportedly account for over 50% of global web traffic^[3].

The issues raised against APIs in treasury—complexity, inconsistency, and limited current use cases—are typical of any emerging technology. We’ve seen this before. Prior to SWIFT SCORE and ISO 20022, the corporate-bank connectivity landscape was a patchwork of H2H SFTP connections, each with its own format. Only a concerted push from corporates drove the development of common standards. The same is now needed to drive API maturity.

So why move on from current messaging infrastructure and protocols? Because legacy messaging is costly, rigid, and hard to evolve. APIs address these pain points. They offer a proven framework to build agile, modular solutions that can iterate quickly—something Treasury operations increasingly need.

The question isn’t whether APIs will be adopted, but how quickly. Treasury, by nature, is risk-aware. But this shouldn’t translate to inertia. APIs can coexist with existing setups, allowing teams to trial new capabilities without wholesale change. Treasurers should champion APIs built on open standards—OAuth for security, ISO 20022 or SWIFT standards for payloads—and expect fair pricing that reflects shared value between banks and corporates.

Critically, APIs will also underpin the next wave of innovation: AI. Whether AI is embedded in a TMS or acts as an agnostic agent across systems, it will need APIs to retrieve data and execute actions. At FinanceKey, we’re already working on making our API catalogue AI-discoverable through Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), ensuring our platform is ready for the next frontier of automation. A balanced strategy makes sense—but let’s not lose momentum. APIs are not just another integration headache. They are a foundational layer for a smarter, faster, and more connected treasury future.

Citations

1. Intro to APIs: History of APIs
2. The Anatomy of an API in 2023: A Comprehensive Overview
3. Landscape of API Traffic

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