Beyond cash management: Reviewing the expanding role of treasury in corporate strategy

Corporate treasury functions have undergone a profound transformation, evolving beyond their traditional remit of cash management into central contributors to corporate strategy, financial resilience, and long-term value creation. This review synthesizes contemporary evidence from peer-reviewed research and practitioner studies published between 2015 and 2025 to examine how treasury activities now influence capital structure design, funding strategy, risk governance, working-capital optimization, and digital transformation. The findings demonstrate that treasury plays a pivotal role in enhancing financial flexibility, improving crisis performance, and enabling firms to allocate capital more effectively in dynamic market environments. Emerging capabilities, particularly digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and integrated data platforms, further elevate treasury’s strategic influence by enabling predictive liquidity management and real-time decision support. The review also highlights treasury’s expanding involvement in ESG-aligned financing and stakeholder-oriented value creation. Despite this evolution, academic research on treasury remains fragmented, highlighting the need for more rigorous empirical studies. Collectively, the evidence positions treasury as a strategic nexus between financial markets, operational decisions, and corporate strategy, with growing implications for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars. Keywords: Treasury Management, Strategic Treasury, Corporate Strategy, Resilience, Capital Structure, Risk Management, Digital Transformation.