The Treasury Talent Gap: Why Hiring is Getting Harder, and What It Means for your Operating Model
September 15, 2026
Every treasury leader has felt it over the past two years. A vacancy opens, the job specification goes out, and the pipeline that would once have produced a shortlist in a fortnight now produces silence, or a handful of candidates who can do two thirds of the role. The reflex is to assume the market has simply become more expensive, and that a higher offer will close the gap. Sometimes it does. More often, the higher offer buys a candidate who leaves within eighteen months for the next bidder, and the underlying problem returns.
The treasury talent gap is real, and it is not going away. But the way most organisations frame it, as a hiring problem to be solved with a better package, misreads what is actually happening. The harder question is not how to fill the next vacancy. It is whether your operating model can withstand the vacancies you have not yet had.
The shortage is real, but it is not the shortage most people assume
The headline is well documented. Despite generally strong employment levels, treasury continues to report difficulty securing qualified people, and industry commentary through 2026 suggests the difficulty is persisting rather than easing. The 2023 AFP Compensation Report, based on a survey of more than 1,400 US treasury and finance professionals, found that close to 60% agreed their organisations face a talent shortage within the function, with respondents citing the competitive job market as the main reason. In North America in particular, employers describe demand for capable treasury staff running ahead of supply.
What that headline hides is a picture that is uneven by seniority. At the most senior level, the constraint can look less like a shortage of people than a shortage of roles, because the number of large multinationals with genuinely international treasury mandates is finite, and experienced treasurers can find it hard to take the next step up. Recruitment pressure appears particularly acute one and two levels down, in the operational and technical roles that keep a treasury running day to day. It is the treasury analyst who can manage a multi-currency cash position under volatile rates, the specialist who understands both the accounting and the mechanics of a hedge, the operations lead who can run a payment process without creating a control weakness. These are the people who are hardest to find, and they are the people whose absence does the most operational damage.
Three forces are making these roles harder to fill
The first is demographic. As a generation of practitioners who learned treasury before automation retires, organisations risk losing the institutional knowledge and practical judgement those people carry, including a feel for how the company’s cash actually moves. Many of those entering the profession bring strong digital instincts, but the hands-on judgement treasury work relies on tends to develop over years in the role, and transferring it takes time that is not always available.
The second is scope. Treasury has expanded far beyond cash positioning and payments. The function is now expected to interpret central bank signals, model the cash-flow impact of tariffs and shifting trade policy, govern financial risk, select and run technology, and satisfy a widening compliance burden. Each addition raises the bar for what a competent hire must know, and narrows the pool of people who clear it. Treasury is also competing with banks and the wider financial services sector for anyone fluent in capital markets and financial risk, which draws on the same limited pool.
The third is expectation. Talented candidates, particularly younger ones, expect to work with modern systems and meaningful automation. A treasury still running on spreadsheets and manual reconciliations struggles not only to attract those people but to keep them. The technology gap and the talent gap are therefore the same gap viewed from two angles. An organisation that has underinvested in its systems will often find it harder to attract and retain the people it needs, and to make the most of the scarce treasury expertise it already has.
The real cost sits in the operating model, not the vacancy
A single unfilled role is a manageable inconvenience. The serious risk is structural, and it is easy to miss until the day it materialises. In many mid-market and even large multinational treasuries, critical daily processes depend on one or two named individuals rather than on documented, repeatable procedures. The daily cash position, the payment run, the covenant calculation, the hedge documentation, all of it lives in a small number of heads. Segregation of duties, the control that is supposed to prevent error and fraud, quietly depends on those same people being present.
When one of them resigns, the organisation does not simply lose a set of hands. It loses the only person who knows how a process works, and it discovers that its controls were never really controls at all, but conventions held in place by continuity. Recruitment then runs for three, four, or six months, and throughout that period the treasury is exposed, the remaining staff are overstretched, and the temptation to relax controls in the name of getting things done grows by the week. This is how key-person risk turns a hiring difficulty into an operational and control failure.
From the field
A multinational group we worked with had built a capable in-house treasury around two long-serving staff. When one of them left at short notice, the group found that the daily liquidity report, the intercompany settlement process, and the month-end treasury close all ran through that single individual, with no written procedures behind them. Cover was improvised for four months while recruitment ran. During that window a payment control that had always depended on the departed staffer’s oversight was informally set aside, and a duplicate settlement went out before it was caught. Nothing catastrophic occurred, but the episode made plain that the risk had never been the vacancy. The risk was a model that assumed the vacancy would never happen.
What a resilient operating model looks like
Once the problem is framed as resilience rather than recruitment, the range of responses widens considerably. Hiring your way to greater resilience is one option, but it can be slow, expensive, and constrained by the same talent shortage the organisation is trying to address. Two other approaches deserve equal weight, and most durable treasuries end up using some blend of all three.
The first is to industrialise what you already have. Document core processes into tested runbooks, so that knowledge lives in the organisation rather than in individuals. Build genuine segregation of duties into roles rather than personalities. Invest in the systems that reduce the manual work only a specialist can currently do. None of this removes the need for good people, but it lowers the number you need and the damage any single departure can cause.
The second is to change where the work sits. Outsourcing selected daily treasury processes, or adopting a hybrid model in which the organisation retains strategy and oversight while a specialist partner runs execution, converts a fixed and fragile headcount into a resilient service. A specialist provider can spread key-person risk across a broader team, maintain documented procedures, embed segregation of duties into the delivery model, and scale up or down as the business grows or restructures. For a mid-market multinational that cannot justify, or cannot find, a full in-house bench, this is frequently the difference between a treasury that is one resignation away from trouble and one that is not.
| Operating model | Key-person risk | Time to cover an absence | Scales with growth or M&A | Control over strategy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full in-house build | Depends on team depth, documentation and cross-training | Depends on internal cover and the hiring market | Limited by headcount and recruitment | Full |
| Hybrid: retain strategy, outsource execution | Reduced through broader staffing and documented processes | Cover can be built into the service model | Capacity can flex with need | Retained, oversight stays in-house |
| Outsource daily processes | Spread across the provider’s team, with documented procedures | Managed within the provider’s continuity arrangements | Capacity can flex with need | Retained through governance and reporting |
The point of the comparison is not that outsourcing is always the answer. It is that the answer is an operating model decision, taken deliberately, rather than a series of hiring decisions taken under pressure. A treasury that has never asked which of its processes must sit in-house and which could safely sit elsewhere has, in effect, already answered the question by default, and usually in the most fragile way.
A diagnostic: is your treasury one resignation away from a problem?
The following checklist is a quick way to surface hidden key-person risk. Each box you would have to tick is a point of exposure that a talent shortage will eventually test.
☐ A single individual is the only person who can run the daily cash position or release payments.
☐ Segregation of duties depends on specific people rather than defined roles, and would break if one of them left.
☐ Month-end close, bank reconciliations, or covenant reporting would slip materially if one key staffer were absent for a month.
☐ Core treasury processes are not written down in tested, current procedures.
☐ Critical treasury system knowledge lives in one person’s head rather than in documented runbooks.
☐ A systems upgrade or a new market entry has been delayed because the team lacks capacity to execute it.
☐ Your most recent treasury vacancy took longer than three months to fill, or is still open.
A small number of ticks may point to isolated weaknesses. If several apply, particularly those involving payments, segregation of duties or undocumented processes, the issue is likely to be structural rather than simply a staffing problem, and the operating model is the thing that needs attention.
Frequently asked questions
Why is treasury talent so hard to hire in 2026?
Three forces are compounding. Experienced practitioners are retiring faster than their judgement can be transferred, the scope of the treasury role has widened to include technology, risk governance, and macro interpretation, and treasury now competes with banks and the wider financial services sector for the same capital-markets skills. The scarcity is sharpest in operational and technical roles rather than at the most senior level.
Is the treasury talent gap simply a pay problem?
Rarely. A higher offer can win an individual candidate, but it does not address the structural issue, which is that many treasuries depend on a small number of people and have no resilient way to cover their absence. Pay competes for scarce talent without reducing the organisation’s exposure to losing it.
How does the talent gap create operational risk?
When critical processes and controls depend on named individuals rather than documented procedures, a single resignation can remove both the capability and the control at once. During the months it takes to recruit a replacement, the remaining team is stretched, and the pressure to relax controls to keep operations moving rises steadily.
Can outsourcing solve a treasury talent shortage?
Outsourcing or a hybrid model directly addresses execution capacity and key-person risk, because a specialist partner carries the staffing, the procedures, and the segregation of duties across a larger team. It does not replace treasury strategy, which should remain in-house. Used well, it lets an organisation keep control of direction while removing the fragility from delivery.
If your treasury is struggling to recruit specialist resources, or relies too heavily on a small number of key people, the issue may be broader than headcount. FTI Treasury helps multinational organisations assess and build resilient treasury operating models through Treasury Outsourcing, Back Office Services and In-House Banking. To discuss where key-person risk sits in your treasury, contact our team.