The tariff shock that turned treasury from backroom to boardroom

A tariff schedule that moved weekly and a court ruling on US$175 billion in refunds made treasury strategic inside a year.

Twelve months ago, filing a lawsuit against the United States government sat outside any treasurer's job description. This year, it became a decision with a deadline attached, and treasury became the function that had to answer whether it was worth doing.

For most of the past decade, treasury meant liquidity, cash, and FX. It now also means supplier strategy, trade routes, market entry, and pricing. Every fast-moving decision now needs a live view of cash and exposure that treasury is expected to produce fast enough to matter.

The average effective US tariff rate climbed from 2.5% to 10% within 12 months, the highest in decades, on the back of US$260 billion collected at the border. Roughly two-thirds of that came from tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the Supreme Court struck down in February 2026, putting up to US$175 billion in refunds in play with no settled process yet for who gets paid or when.

Most finance teams reading this never paid a customs duty, and their forecasts broke anyway. External events now reshape how a business operates faster than the planning cycle built to track them, and treasury is the function that translates that volatility into business action. The tariff year is the clearest recent proof. The next disruption will land on treasury the same way, whether it comes from trade, currency markets, or the AI agents starting to move money on their own.

The year external events started pricing volatility

When tariffs held still, choosing a supplier was a purchasing decision about price and delivery. Once the rate on a country's goods could climb overnight, the price agreed in January stopped being the price paid in June, and someone had to work out what each supplier cost that week. Treasury became the function that prices volatility, not the one that pays for it after the fact.

US imports from China fell by about 30% over the year as buyers rushed to move production elsewhere, and Vietnam and Mexico picked up much of that trade. Chinese goods now make up less than 10% of US imports, down from more than 20% in 2016. Little of that reverses, since qualifying a new factory takes months of testing, tooling, and trust, and few finance teams will write off that work to go back where they started.

Software companies felt the same year through their customers rather than their suppliers. Server and networking hardware got more expensive, which moved infrastructure budgets modelled on a flat cost curve. Customers with goods exposure trimmed spending and stretched payment terms, so the tariff bill arrived as slower renewals and longer DSO rather than as a customs entry.

A finance team in Sydney or Berlin selling into US manufacturers absorbed a policy decision it had no part in. Working out how much of the pipeline sat behind tariff-exposed customers became a treasury question, because the answer set how much cash the business held, and where.

None of that fits a monthly close. Goldman Sachs put the share of new tariff costs passed to consumers at roughly 55%, and business margins absorbed the rest. A business running payroll, vendor payments, and card spend across three currencies, with no shared view of any of it, learns about a margin problem only when the close surfaces it. By then, the decision that would have fixed it has passed.

When a policy decision becomes a treasury deadline

Every one of these shocks turns up as a decision with a deadline attached, and each one reaches treasury before it reaches anyone else. The tariff refund is the sharpest example on record.

When the Supreme Court ruled that the IEEPA never handed the president the power to impose tariffs, the ruling settled the law and stranded the money. Getting any of it back now depends on paperwork filed against deadlines that started closing almost immediately.

That turned a legal outcome into a treasury problem with a clock on it. Deciding whether to file, and working out what a claim is worth against what it costs to pursue, needs a live view of cash, exposure, and entity structure. Businesses that had one moved in days. Businesses that did not, waited for the next reporting cycle to tell them what they were sitting on, and some of them found the window had narrowed while they were assembling the numbers.

What separated the two groups was answer speed. A team of three with live data moved faster than a team of 30 waiting on a consolidation.

Scenario modelling used to mean updating a spreadsheet once a quarter. Now, it means stress-testing cash flow against a tariff rate that could move again, a court deadline that could shift, and three sourcing scenarios at once, updated as the facts change rather than at the next board meeting.

The shape repeats without the tariffs. The same thing arrives as a transfer pricing change, a data localisation rule, or a licensing shift in a market you sell into. Each one turns up as a decision with a deadline attached, and treasury is the function that has to quantify what the decision means for cash, margin, and exposure.

What connected infrastructure changes

Treasury has good reasons for moving slowly. The function gets judged on not losing money, which rewards familiar systems over better ones, and keeps teams on infrastructure they have outgrown. The habit is understandable, because for years the cost of moving slowly stayed hidden.

Volatility is what dragged that cost into the light. A close that lands three weeks after the quarter turned is fine until a duty moves in week two, and then the delay has a price. Closing that delay takes better systems rather than more people, systems that shrink the gap between something happening and treasury being able to act on it.

That gap shrinks when cash shows up across every entity as money moves, so a margin question gets an answer today instead of at month-end. It shrinks when a business already holds accounts in the currencies and countries it trades in. A multi-currency account that lets you receive, hold, and send funds turns entering a market into an afternoon's work rather than a quarter's project. The gap closes further when conversion happens inside the payment rather than as a step behind it, and when the model a treasurer stress-tests runs on this week's numbers instead of last quarter's.

&you, a Manila-based telehealth platform under Singapore's RX Ventures, spent three to four months opening a local account through its bank, which set the pace at which it could enter a new market. Investor funding arrived in one currency while operating costs ran in another, and 30 days of cash sat in a buffer against payments that took days to clear. Bringing accounts, FX, and payments onto one platform cut account opening to 48 hours and international transaction costs by 80%. The buffer went, and that capital went back into the business.

Connected infrastructure has limits. It does nothing about export controls on rare earth minerals, and it will not unwind capital repatriation rules in markets that restrict them. Those stay as constraints to plan around.

Volatility is the operating condition

Tariffs, inflation, and interest rates are symptoms of the same condition. External events now reshape how businesses operate faster than traditional planning cycles can track them, and treasury has become the function that turns those events into decisions about cash, payments, funding, and risk. It is the connective tissue between finance and strategy, and its remit keeps widening as each new complexity surfaces.

Currency makes the argument with different numbers. EUR/USD moved 14% through 2025. Nearly 90% of mid-sized companies now hedge their FX exposure and 62% of them still booked losses from currency volatility.

The next thing that’ll pull treasury into a decision it has not made before is already taking shape. Visa and Mastercard both shipped protocols this year for payments initiated by autonomous agents, transactions that fire continuously in the background, some worth fractions of a cent. Mastercard's own example is an agent told to launch a shop. It buys the domain, the hosting, the images, and the checkout pages across separate providers inside a set budget, one instruction turning into a chain of payments no person signs off on.

Picture that chain with the budget rule set a digit wrong, or the agent looping on a retry it reads as a failure. It clears a thousand microtransactions before anyone opens the dashboard, every one settles with no invoice to query because the agent paid on acceptance. Treasury never initiated that spend and cannot approve it in flight, yet it owns the wallet permissions, the limits, and the liability when the reconciliation lands. This is where treasury is heading, governing decisions it never made and answering for money it never moved by hand.

As volatility settles in as the operating condition, the finance teams that come through the next shock in good shape will be the ones whose infrastructure enables treasury to move at the speed the business now runs. The next shock will not always announce itself the way a tariff or a court ruling did. Some of it will surface only once an agent has already spent the money, and treasury will still have to answer for it.