We’ve all heard it: “No one is indispensable.” In corporate finance, especially in treasury, the phrase gets tossed around as both a comfort and a warning. But as the function evolves — becoming more strategic, more tech-enabled, more integral — the truth gets murkier. Are treasurers truly replaceable?
The answer is yes. And no. Let’s unpack it.
The Case For Replaceability
Systems Don’t Need Heroes
In a well-run treasury, excellence doesn’t hinge on individual memory. It’s embedded in systems, processes, and shared knowledge. If the function collapses when one person leaves, that’s not loyalty — it’s a design flaw.
Knowledge Hoarding Isn’t Power — It’s Risk
We sometimes confuse being the only person who knows how things work with being valuable. But monopolising institutional knowledge increases operational risk and discourages team growth. A truly resilient function thrives on transparency, not dependency.
The Market Has Moved On
The rise of fractional CFOs, interim treasurers, and on-demand expertise has shifted the power dynamic. Treasurers are no longer the sole guardians of cash and risk. Expertise is mobile. Insight is portable. If someone leaves, someone else can step in — often faster than we’d like to admit.
Boards Expect Replaceable Structures
Good governance demands succession planning, bench strength, and process documentation. The question isn’t if a key person might leave — it’s when. Replaceability isn’t a threat; it’s a requirement for continuity.
The Case Against Replaceability
You Can Replace a Role — Not a Mindset
While a new hire can fill the org chart slot, replicating a treasurer’s judgment, risk appetite, or strategic instincts is another matter entirely. Some decisions — when to hold your nerve in a funding negotiation, how to pivot a hedging strategy mid-crisis — come from hard-won, situational intuition. That doesn’t live in a playbook.
Trust Is Earned, Not Transferred
Bankers, auditors, execs — they trust individuals, not job titles. When a treasurer with deep institutional and external relationships exits, it doesn’t just leave a gap in process — it leaves a vacuum in influence. That’s not something interim cover can immediately fill.
Culture Is Carried by People
The best treasurers don’t just execute — they shape the ethos of their teams. They model curiosity, rigour, pragmatism, and calm under fire. That cultural imprint is hard to replicate. You can replace a function; it’s harder to replace a standard.
Leadership Isn’t Modular
You can outsource processes. You can document controls. But you can’t modularise leadership. The ability to lead through ambiguity, drive transformation, and push finance into new territory isn’t mass-produced. It’s grown over time — and it sticks with the person who grew it.
The Paradox: Replaceability as a Sign of Strength
Here’s the irony: the best treasurers actively make themselves operationally replaceable. They invest in automation, delegate meaningfully, and document the hell out of their workflows. But that’s precisely why they’re so valuable. They’ve built something bigger than themselves.
Being “replaceable” in day-to-day execution isn’t a weakness — it’s a strength. But being irreplaceable in strategic influence, judgment, and trust? That’s leadership. And the two can — and should — coexist.
So What Should Treasury Leaders Do?
- Design for resilience, not dependency.
- Cultivate leadership, not just execution.
- Build succession, but don’t flatten identity.
- Share knowledge, but don’t erase contribution.
Being replaceable doesn’t mean being irrelevant. It means you’ve done the hard work of building a function that will outlast you — and earned the credibility that means people hope you’ll stay anyway.
What Do You Think?
Is treasury truly plug-and-play — or are we undervaluing the irreplaceable qualities great leaders bring?
We’re featuring views from across the profession. If you’ve built a treasury team that balances system resilience with human leadership, we’d love to hear your story.
COMMENTS
Lee-Ann Perkins, Treasury Masterminds Board Member, comments:
Every worker is replaceable – some just take longer and are more expensive to replace.
In theory, any treasurer is replaceable; in practice, it’s an uncomfortable truth that those who translate strategy into fit-for-purpose structures and cultivate deep stakeholder trust are anything but interchangeable. For boards and CFOs, the lesson is clear: if you’re lucky enough to have a strategic treasurer, invest in retention, because replacing that caliber of leadership can be costly and time-consuming.
- Strategy-First Mindset
Elite treasurers align every funding, risk, and capital-allocation decision with the company’s evolving strategy, often pivoting before the rest of the organization senses the need.
- Structure Follows Strategy—Continuously
They redesign bank panels, cash-pooling rules, KPIs, and talent pipelines so that treasury infrastructure keeps pace with acquisitions, technology changes, or any other strategic shift.
- Relationship Equity Outweighs Spreadsheets
Seasoned treasurers build crisis-tested rapport with banks, rating agencies, and boards, securing tighter spreads, faster approvals, and looser covenants. When they leave, that goodwill departs with them, raising the true cost of capital.
- Human Architects of FinTech
Even with AI automating reconciliations and dashboards, only a treasurer who can select, integrate, and govern those tools ensures they reinforce, not derail, strategic goals.
- Action Plan for Leadership
- Invest early in strategic training: Expose rising treasury talent to corporate strategy and cross-functional decision making.
- Document the “why,” not just the “how,” behind treasury structures so successors inherit rationale as well as process.
- Measure and reward trust-building with external stakeholders and crisis agility.
Patrick Kunz, Treasury Masterminds Founder/Board Member, comments:
Can you imagine doing the same job for 40 years?
I can’t. And if you can, you might be at risk of becoming obsolete.
Not just because it sounds incredibly boring (in my humble opinion), but because there’s zero challenge in doing the same tasks over and over again—especially in treasury, where things evolve fast.
My longest tenure? Four years. That was my first job. The second? One year. Then I became a freelancer and never looked back.
One of the best things I can offer my clients isn’t just experience or knowledge—it’s that I aim to make myself obsolete.
Why?
Because if I’m no longer needed, it means we’ve really improved their treasury setup.
It’s leaner. Smarter. Automated. Scalable.
And let’s be clear: making yourself (or a permanent team member) “obsolete” doesn’t mean pushing someone out.
It means creating space—space for new projects, new ideas, new roles.
Most teams are so caught up in day-to-day operations, they never get time to step back and innovate. But innovation needs time and mental bandwidth.
The best treasurers I know?
They reinvent. They try new things.
They don’t cling to the same job title or process for decades—they evolve. That’s where growth happens.
In 2025, with tech evolving faster than ever, the “same job for life” mindset is not just outdated. It’s risky.
What do you think—comfort or change?
Alexander Ilkun, Treasury Masterminds Board Member, comments:
It will probably be one of the worst career moves to try to establish a fiefdom for oneself within a company, where the processes depend on you. While, of course, there is a lot of organizational knowledge that one accrues over time, as well as some functional expertise or a combination of knowledge in different areas that may uniquely position you – the reality is that everyone is replaceable. The replacement may look different, or some things may not be performed at all, but everyone can be removed.
If one doesn’t realize this, steps may be taken to establish oneself as irreplaceable in some areas to achieve some job security — but it will most likely backfire, as you will be seen as a key person risk and, therefore, a problem from a business continuity perspective. What’s more, you may end up burning some of the personal relationship bridges along the way, which are very difficult — or even nearly impossible — to restore once that trust is breached.
On the other hand, embracing the idea of replaceability can be quite empowering, because it will lead to setting up processes that may survive you as their creator. If you accept this paradigm, then you will make sure that (within reason):
- The processes are transferrable and as repeatable as possible
- They are well-documented
- The outputs of the processes are well-defined, so that whoever performs the process knows what success looks like and how to tell that story to stakeholders
What you ultimately achieve is business continuity of the process that doesn’t require you to be a crucial part of it, but can run without your involvement.
What you achieve with this is a personal brand of a professional that is able to craft solutions that are lasting and, while you’re still replaceable, the people around you and the organizations you work with buy into the value that you bring over and over again. Thus, while you do not achieve irreplaceability, you increase the weight of reasons to keep you in the system longer.
Also Read
- Treasury Contrarian View: FX Policy — Too Rigid, Too Static?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Inflation Hedging — Should Treasury Even Try?
- Treasury Contrarian View: APIs in Treasury — Game-Changer or Just Another Integration Headache?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Should Treasury Really Own Working Capital Optimisation?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Do We Focus Too Much on Finance Backgrounds in Treasury Hiring?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Real-Time Payments — Do We Really Need Them in Treasury?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Treasury Dashboards — Are We Tracking the Wrong Metrics?
- Treasury Contrarian View: Are Treasurers Too Conservative with Cash?
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