Corporate treasurers have been logging into multiple bank portals every morning for decades. They download statements in half a dozen different formats, paste everything into Excel, and spend the first hour of the day figuring out where the company's cash actually is. It works, more or less, but it does not scale. As companies add banking relationships, the manual overhead compounds until the whole process breaks.

That frustration is what the treasury technology market is trying to fix. The $6.9 billion treasury management software market is going through a significant shift as Open Banking regulations, ISO 20022 migration, and cloud-native architectures change how companies connect to their banks. Implementations that used to take 12 to 18 months now happen in weeks, and end-of-day batch statements are being replaced by balances refreshed in real time.

Key takeaways

• Bank connectivity is only half the treasury integration problem — the ERP and accounting layer is equally fragmented and largely unsolved
• Open Banking created a framework for standardizing bank-to-system data flows; Open Accounting is doing the same for the accounting and ERP layer
• Modern TMS vendors that integrate once with an accounting API platform can reach every major ERP without rebuilding each connection

What is a TMS? A Treasury Management System (TMS) is software that centralizes and automates an organization's core financial operations: cash positioning, payment processing, bank connectivity, FX and interest rate risk, debt and investment tracking, and financial reporting. Rather than juggling bank portals, spreadsheets, and disconnected ERP exports, treasury teams use a TMS as a single system of record for where their money is, what it's doing, and what it will do next. The term covers everything from full-suite enterprise platforms like Kyriba and SAP Treasury to lighter, API-first tools built for mid-market or startup use cases.

This piece looks at the integration strategies reshaping treasury management, the providers worth knowing, and where Open Banking genuinely helps corporate finance teams and where it still falls short.

The multi-bank problem

The core issue is straightforward: companies bank with multiple institutions, and each bank uses different systems, protocols, file formats, and security standards. A mid-market firm with 50 accounts across five banks might have five portal logins, statements in formats ranging from MT940 to BAI2 to CAMT.053, and a reconciliation process that lives entirely in spreadsheets. Fewer than 50% of corporations report satisfaction with the integration between their financial systems and their banks, according to OpenText.

Traditional connectivity options like SWIFT, host-to-host file transfers, and regional standards like EBICS are still heavily used, but they come with real overhead. SWIFT provides global reach (around 800 corporations connect directly), but setup and maintenance costs are too high for most mid-market companies. Host-to-host connections via SFTP are reliable for bulk payments but operate in batch mode with at least 15 to 30 minutes of data lag, and each new bank relationship requires a separate implementation project. EBICS is the standard in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France but useless everywhere else.

The result is what analysts call "connectivity fragmentation." Each new banking relationship becomes its own project, with its own format library and its own security protocol. A full treasury management implementation with bank connectivity takes up to 18 months on average, according to Deloitte. That timeline is what the newer platforms are trying to compress.

Open Banking: real progress, real gaps

Open Banking regulations have created a framework that requires banks to share account data and enable payment initiation through standardized Open Banking APIs. The global open banking market reached roughly $28 to $32 billion in 2024 and is growing at 19 to 28% annually. In the UK, 13.3 million people actively use open banking services and payment volumes jumped 67% year-over-year in early 2025.

For corporate treasury, the appeal is real. Open Banking APIs allow companies to aggregate account data across multiple banks without bilateral agreements, initiate payments from within their own systems, and move toward same-day reconciliation instead of waiting for D+1 statements. U.S. Bank reports clients pulling account information via API once per second, around the clock, to power real-time dashboards.

However, there is a meaningful gap between what Open Banking was designed for and what corporate treasurers actually need. These regulatory frameworks were built for consumer accounts. Business accounts and non-transactional accounts are often excluded from mandated API access. PSD2's Strong Customer Authentication requirement creates friction that can push step-up authorization requests to 30 to 50% of transactions in corporate payment flows. API quality varies widely across banks.

The regional picture is uneven. Apideck's Open Banking Tracker maps open banking API availability across 50,000+ financial institutions globally — and the coverage gap between regions is stark. Europe has PSD2, with PSD3 in progress. The UK is the most advanced single market, with 95% of banks participating in national open banking. The US is moving toward standardization through Section 1033 but still relies largely on market-driven adoption, with 52% of US banks offering data-sharing APIs by 2025. India and Singapore are growing fast, Brazil has 9.8 million open banking users and 102 billion API calls in 2024, and Indonesia's SNAP standards have standardized 85% of interbank API traffic.

The honest take from Fides Treasury Services is worth quoting: "While APIs are changing the game for treasury, rollout and adoption have been slower than initial projections. In five years, bank connectivity via API will still not be a given." Most corporate treasury teams end up with a hybrid setup: API connections where available, host-to-host for reliability and scale, regional standards where they dominate, and SWIFT for global reach.

Four ways companies are connecting to their banks

Modern treasury connectivity has settled into four distinct approaches, each with clear trade-offs.

Direct bank APIs offer the highest-fidelity data. Deutsche Bank's CB Connect covers 34 countries with 5,000+ developers. J.P. Morgan and Citi both offer dedicated corporate API platforms purpose-built for large enterprise customers, with implementations taking weeks rather than months. The limitation is that each bank's API is proprietary, so a company with ten banking relationships still needs ten separate integrations.

Unified API aggregation solves the one-to-many problem by adding a normalization layer between corporate systems and banks. Providers like Necto, Fides (connected to 13,000 banks across 200+ countries), and Salt Edge (5,000+ institutions) offer a single API that translates data from disparate banks into one standardized format. According to Necto, building even one bank API integration "can take years" and require "hundreds of pages of instructions." Aggregators absorb that complexity and spread it across their customer base.

Payment and connectivity hubs go beyond data aggregation to handle full payment orchestration, format transformation, and compliance screening. TIS manages $80 billion in daily cash through 11,000+ banking options. Cobase, originally incubated within ING Bank and now part of Corpay, combines SWIFT, H2H, EBICS, and API connectivity with a modular treasury platform. These hubs standardize workflows and approval structures across all connectivity types, regardless of whether the underlying connection is a real-time API or a batch file transfer.

Cloud-native platforms take the most aggressive approach, building from scratch without legacy file-based protocols. Trovata, backed by $80 million from investors including J.P. Morgan and State Street, claims to be the only true cloud-native treasury platform at scale. Embat, a Madrid-based fintech founded by ex-J.P. Morgan executives, connects to 13,000+ institutions and uses AI for automated reconciliation across 3 million+ bank transactions. These platforms can get customers live in days to weeks, though their bank coverage is sometimes thinner outside major markets.

The table below summarizes the trade-offs across all major connectivity methods, including the often-overlooked unified API aggregation layer:

Method	What it does	Trade-offs	Best for
Direct bank API	Proprietary corporate API per bank	Highest fidelity, but one integration per bank	Companies with 1–3 primary banking relationships
Unified API aggregation	Single API normalizes data from thousands of banks	Slightly less control, but massive coverage	TMS vendors and mid-market companies with multi-bank complexity
Payment / connectivity hub	Full payment orchestration across all protocol types	Most complete, highest cost and complexity	Enterprises running $1B+ in daily cash
Host-to-host (H2H)	Secure batch file transfers	Reliable, high-volume, but not real-time	Large AP/AR workflows where latency is acceptable
Regional standards (EBICS, SWIFT)	Compliance-driven standards	Global/local reach, high setup overhead	Cross-border enterprise and DACH-region companies

The integration stack a TMS actually needs

Bank connectivity gets most of the attention, but a TMS sits between two sets of systems simultaneously: the banking layer on one side and the finance stack on the other. Getting data in from banks is only half the job. The other half is pushing that data into the systems that run the business.

On the banking side, a complete TMS needs: direct bank APIs (proprietary corporate APIs from tier-one banks), Open Banking / PSD2 connections for broader European coverage, SWIFT for cross-border enterprise payments, EBICS for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France, host-to-host SFTP for high-volume batch processing, and BAI2 / MT940 / CAMT.053 file format parsing for legacy statement ingestion.

On the finance stack side, a TMS needs integrations with ERPs (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics), accounting platforms (QuickBooks, Xero, Sage 50), payroll systems for cash timing visibility, AP/AR platforms for invoice matching and reconciliation, FX and derivatives platforms for hedging, and business intelligence tools for reporting.

This is where a structural problem emerges that rarely gets named directly. Open Banking regulation created a mandate — banks must expose standardized APIs. The accounting and ERP layer has no equivalent mandate, which is why connecting a TMS to SAP, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and QuickBooks still means four separate integration projects, four different data models, and four maintenance relationships. This is precisely the problem Open Accounting addresses: a standardized API layer that normalizes financial data across accounting platforms, so a TMS can read ledger entries, sync journal postings, and match transactions without caring whether the underlying system is a $300,000 SAP deployment or a QuickBooks subscription.

What is Open Accounting? Open Accounting applies the same principle as Open Banking to the accounting and ERP layer. Just as Open Banking mandates that banks expose standardized APIs for account data and payment initiation, Open Accounting advocates for standardized API access to accounting records — invoices, journal entries, transactions, balances — across platforms like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, NetSuite, and SAP. Unlike Open Banking, there is no regulatory mandate driving this; it's a market-driven push toward interoperability. For TMS vendors, it closes the gap between bank data (increasingly standardized through regulation) and accounting data (still fragmented). The result is that treasury teams can finally see the same real-time picture on both sides of the equation.

Apideck's Accounting API and ERP API are built on this principle. A TMS vendor integrates once against a unified schema and gets normalized access to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, and others — without building or maintaining each connector individually. The same logic that makes Fides valuable on the banking side (connect once, reach 13,000 banks) applies here on the accounting side. Platforms like Arpari explicitly list SAP, NetSuite, Sage, Yardi, and AppFolio as integrations — which reflects the real-estate and private equity segments they serve. The broader enterprise tier needs deeper coverage across Oracle, Workday, and industry-specific ERPs, and that depth is where a unified accounting API layer pays for itself.

Arpari and the middle market opportunity

One interesting entrant in the API-first space is Arpari, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in New York that describes itself as "The OS for multi-bank finance teams." Alexandra Zwiener, a former Goldman Sachs quantitative developer with a background in automated trading, founded the company and raised $4.2 million in seed funding in June 2024 from Pioneer Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Arpari is targeting a specific gap: companies with dozens to hundreds of bank accounts across 10+ institutions that find enterprise TMS solutions overengineered and overpriced, while simpler tools cannot handle their multi-entity complexity. Zwiener has described the positioning directly: "I built Arpari specifically for the middle market, businesses juggling dozens of accounts who deserve better than Fortune 500 hand-me-downs." The platform claims connectivity to 100% of US-based banks through a combination of API and file-transfer connections, with a one-week implementation timeline.

The product covers bank reporting and analytics, AP/AR management with approval workflows, multi-entity hierarchies with entity-level reporting, and multi-bank payment execution including ACH across all connected US bank accounts. The approval logic is flexible, for example requiring two approvals including at least one VP-level signoff for any wire over $100,000. It integrates with SAP, NetSuite, Sage, Yardi, and AppFolio.

Arpari started in commercial real estate, where complex fund structures and property-level cash management create exactly the kind of multi-bank headache the platform is designed for, and has since expanded into financial services, private equity, manufacturing, SaaS, and hospitality. Published case studies include NewFed Mortgage automating daily cash reporting across 20+ accounts and Hempel Real Estate consolidating 10+ bank portals, saving "hundreds of hours per year." The company reports managing over $1 billion in cash daily with a team of roughly six people.

The competitive angle Arpari pushes hardest is pricing and speed. No per-bank implementation fees, no surprise professional services invoices, and implementation handled end-to-end by the company. In a market where GTreasury markets 90-day implementation as a selling point, a one-week claim stands out. The current limitation is geographic scope: the platform is US-focused, and all of its showcased bank integrations are with US institutions.

The broader competitive landscape

The treasury technology market breaks into distinct tiers, each serving different segments of the $6.9 billion total addressable market.

At the enterprise end, Kyriba handles $15 trillion in annual payments across 9,900+ pre-built bank connectors and has repositioned around AI agents for autonomous treasury management. ION Group holds the top global market share at roughly 8.5%, with particular depth in derivatives and risk management. SAP Treasury remains the most commonly selected primary treasury provider in industry surveys, largely because companies already running S/4HANA default to it. FIS and GTreasury round out the enterprise tier, with GTreasury claiming 90-day cash visibility implementation and recognition from IDC MarketScape for its AI features.

In the specialist connectivity tier, TIS positions explicitly not as a TMS but as a payment and connectivity specialist, processing $2.7 trillion annually across 140+ countries. Fides runs one of the largest global bank networks at 13,000 banks in 200+ countries. Nomentia focuses on mid-market European firms with modular pricing and connections to 2,500+ banks. Bottomline Technologies, a 35-year-old company now owned by Thoma Bravo, moves $16 trillion in payments annually and is launching an AI agent in 2026.

Among fintech challengers, Embat raised $16 million in Series A funding in 2024 and claims to save 75% of the time spent on treasury tasks through API-first connectivity and AI-powered reconciliation. Round Treasury, a London-based startup founded in 2023 by Pac O'Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad, targets European startups and scale-ups that need an AI-native alternative to both spreadsheets and overengineered enterprise platforms. Round connects to over 2,000 banks, automates cash sweeps and yield optimization through money market funds, and handles reconciliation in the background without manual setup. The platform has raised $4.67 million and partners with Plaid for bank connectivity and WealthKernel for regulated investment infrastructure. Where Arpari focuses on the US middle market, Round is carving out the European startup-to-growth-stage segment with a similar philosophy: full treasury control without the enterprise overhead. Atlar handles the entire bank implementation for customers rather than leaving it to the client, and has become one of the clearest examples of what AI looks like when it's built on top of real-time treasury connectivity. In early 2026, Atlar launched a suite of specialized agents: a cash positioning agent that pulls balances from every connected bank and wallet and breaks them down by entity and currency on a configurable schedule; a payments briefing agent for daily payment intelligence; a reconciliation agent that combines rule-based logic with AI trained on a customer's own transaction history to clear partial matches and one-to-many scenarios; and a forecasting agent that updates cash projections as conditions change and flags liquidity gaps early. The foundation matters: Atlar spent years building direct connectivity to financial providers across 100+ countries and every major ERP before layering agents on top, which means those agents operate on complete, current data rather than the stale or fragmented inputs that make most finance AI unreliable. Customers at Lovable, Mangopay, Tide, Trustly, and Zilch run on this foundation today. Modern Treasury has powered $400 billion+ in total payments, targeting fintechs and platforms that are embedding payment functionality. Treasury4 raised $20 million in Series A funding in 2024 for its open-data-architecture approach. Finmo, a Singapore-headquartered Treasury Operating System founded in 2021, raised $18.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Quona Capital and PayPal Ventures, with participation from Citi Ventures. Finmo is built on real-time payments rails and covers collections in 30+ currencies, payouts to 180+ countries, cash and liquidity management, FX hedging, and compliance — all in one platform. The company is licensed in six jurisdictions (Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK) and recently launched MO AI, a conversational assistant that lets CFOs query balances, initiate FX conversions, and generate reports through natural language prompts. Where platforms like Arpari focus on the US middle market and Round targets European scale-ups, Finmo is carving out the Asia-Pacific-to-global corridor for mid-market companies with cross-border complexity

For teams researching vendors and building shortlists, TreasuryPath is a useful independent resource — it catalogs treasury technology providers and helps finance teams evaluate and compare platforms across the full stack.

The middleware layer deserves mention too. AccessPay, a Manchester-based fintech, connects ERPs and TMS platforms to banks without trying to be a treasury system itself. Its partnership with Finastra, which serves 8,600 financial institutions including 90 of the top 100 banks globally, lets banks offer corporate-to-bank connectivity directly through Finastra's platform.

Where the market is heading

The most significant shift happening right now is AI meeting real-time APIs. Every major vendor is embedding AI agents that monitor cash positions, surface anomalies, and execute workflows. The EACT Treasury Survey 2025 ranks real-time reporting and dashboarding as treasurers' top priority, with real-time liquidity management and real-time payments close behind. When you combine those priorities with APIs that refresh balances every second, treasury management starts looking genuinely proactive rather than reactive.

What early deployments are making clear is that the quality of AI in treasury is almost entirely a function of the connectivity underneath it. Each agent needs to be scoped to a specific task and grounded in real-time data, not operating as a general assistant on top of a spreadsheet export. The platforms that are getting this right built connectivity first and agents second. That distinction is becoming the defining competitive divide: Kyriba has repositioned around autonomous treasury, Bottomline is launching an AI agent in 2026, and GTreasury has drawn IDC recognition for its AI features. Vendors embedding agents into connected platforms will pull further ahead of those adding AI as a reporting layer on top of legacy infrastructure.

ISO 20022 migration is the quiet enabler behind much of this. From 2025 onward, all SWIFT messages are migrating to ISO 20022's richer structured data format. This matters because the new format carries enough contextual information to match payments to invoices automatically, without manual intervention. Ninety percent of businesses have adopted or plan to adopt ISO 20022, according to industry surveys.

The best-of-breed versus all-in-one debate has largely resolved toward modularity. Over 40% of treasurers now use multiple treasury tools, and 58% of businesses surveyed by Datos Insights already use a fintech for core cash management. The architecture that keeps winning looks like an ERP core connected through a connectivity hub to multiple banks, with specialized modules layered on for forecasting, payments, or reporting.

Geographic expansion of Open Banking regulation will gradually ease the corporate connectivity challenge. Nearly 100 jurisdictions have adopted or are implementing open banking frameworks. PSD3 in Europe specifically aims to address corporate use cases that PSD2 largely missed.

Digital assets and tokenization are moving from experimental to operational for treasury teams. Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam and partnership with Paxos enables unified APIs for both fiat and USDC payments. IMF pilot programs have shown a 40% reduction in settlement costs using digital assets for certain transactions. Finmo's practical guide on tokenized treasury modernization frames this shift from the CFO's perspective — how tokenized assets, programmable payments, and on-chain settlement are becoming real options for cash management and liquidity optimization, not just crypto-native novelties. Mainstream corporate adoption is still early, but the infrastructure is being built now.

The bottom line

No single connectivity approach wins everywhere, and the most effective treasury architecture is hybrid by design: direct APIs where banks offer them, aggregation APIs where they do not, host-to-host for bulk payments, and SWIFT or regional standards where global and local compliance requires it.

What has changed is the orchestration layer above these connections. Platforms have matured to the point where the underlying complexity is largely invisible to the treasurer. Legacy infrastructure still does the heavy lifting for global reach and high-volume processing, but the direction is clear. API-first architectures, real-time data, and AI automation are becoming table stakes.

The conversation in treasury technology has been almost entirely about bank connectivity — which side of the equation had the most pain, the most regulatory pressure, and the most vendor attention. But the accounting layer is the quiet bottleneck. A TMS can know a company's real-time bank balance while the CFO is still waiting for the ERP to reconcile. Solving both sides of that equation — bank connectivity through Open Banking infrastructure and accounting connectivity through Open Accounting APIs — is what moves treasury from reactive to genuinely autonomous. As The Global Treasurer put it, the question "is no longer if treasury will be API-driven, but how quickly and how effectively organizations will make this transition."