From 16 to 18 September, the 35th EuroFinance International Treasury Management conference (this year themed “Strategic Treasury in the AI Era”) brought more than 2,600 finance decision makers from over 60 countries to the CCIB in Barcelona, across 180+ speakers on eight stages.
Most attendees run finance for large multinationals. But the questions on the agenda reach much further: how do you forecast cash, see liquidity across entities, move payments faster and bring AI into finance work? Growing companies, groups with a handful of legal entities and accounting teams at distributors or manufacturers are asking the same things, usually with a fraction of the budget and headcount.
The themes that mattered
- AI and automation. The discussion has moved past whether to use AI to what it needs in order to be useful: consistent, trustworthy data.
- Cash and liquidity. Forecasting, cash pooling and visibility across entities and banks stayed front and centre.
- Payments. Real-time and cross-border payments, and automating accounts payable and receivable end to end.
- Risk and capital. FX exposure, fraud prevention and funding decisions in a volatile geopolitical environment.
- Technology transformation. Many sessions came back to one problem: the finance system, the ERP and the spreadsheets between them rarely agree.
The value behind the headlines
Strip away the stage lighting and one message runs through all five themes: you can't automate, forecast or apply AI to numbers you don't trust. A cash forecast is only as good as the receivables and payables behind it. A liquidity view is only as good as the reconciliation of each bank account. Any AI model inherits every inconsistency in the data it's given.
For large corporates, the answer is a multi-year programme linking a dedicated finance system to an ERP. For most growing businesses, the better starting point is simpler. Keep the general ledger, payables, receivables, inventory and tax in one connected system, so every figure has one source and one audit trail.
Where Ledgestra fits
That's the problem Ledgestra is built around. Invoices post to the general ledger with their VAT on its own line. Payment and receipt vouchers settle the specific invoice they belong to. Stock movements, receipts and deliveries update the same inventory positions that finance reports on. The result is a ledger that's ready for the forecasting and automation EuroFinance was talking about, because it's already consistent.
The next edition moves to Amsterdam from 6 to 8 October 2027. By then, the teams getting the most from AI and real-time finance will be the ones that fixed their ledger first.