Many businesses keep their money across several banks and tools. A typical setup is a neobank for daily spending and a high-street bank for reserves, with invoices, payroll and cash moves handled by hand in between. This costs finance teams time and exposes them to risk. It also means excess cash often sits idle in operating accounts earning nothing. As AI moves into finance operations, treasury automation gives CFOs and finance leaders a way to see all their accounts in one place, reduce manual work and earn a return on idle cash, all without adding headcount or specialist treasury expertise.
In this session, Pac O’Shea, Co-Founder & CEO of Round Treasury, showed how the platform combines treasury management, accounts payable and payroll in one system. He described Round as a “Fisher Price treasury management system built for non-treasurers.” It links all of a business’s bank accounts through open banking, across entities in the UK, EU and North America. From one onboarding, companies can access money market funds and savings accounts at tier-one providers such as BlackRock, J.P. Morgan and Barclays. Rules-based automation then handles top-ups, withdrawals and sweeps, so cash is in the right account when it is needed.
The live demo followed invoices from start to finish: AI agents took them in, checked them for fraud, coded them to the ledger and routed them for approval. Payments were then scheduled, funded and reconciled automatically. O’Shea also showed how finance teams can connect Claude or other AI tools to Round’s MCP server to query live financial data and generate a daily finance brief. He stressed that Round deliberately keeps customer support human, and that the company holds CFO hackathons with Anthropic to help finance leaders build their own AI agents.
Highlights:
- Round Treasury brings bank visibility across multiple entities, treasury management, accounts payable and payroll together in one platform. It targets the problem of disconnected tools, which 36% of session attendees named as their biggest day-to-day headache.
- One onboarding gives businesses access to AAA-rated money market funds with same-day liquidity (about 3.8% on sterling) and to hundreds of savings accounts. Deposits can be spread across banks to maximise FSCS protection.
- Rules can keep operating accounts topped up, schedule recurring withdrawals for payroll and rent, and sweep Stripe revenue automatically. Businesses no longer need to keep months of cash idle in current accounts.
- AI agents take invoices in by email, WhatsApp or upload. They detect fraud and anomalies using an LLM, confirm the payee, and code line items to the ERP’s chart of accounts, getting more accurate with each correction.
- A payments agent and a treasury agent work together to fund and send approved payments on schedule. Round has two-way sync and direct bank feeds with Xero, NetSuite and QuickBooks, so transactions reconcile automatically.
- Finance teams can connect Claude, Gemini or other AI tools to Round’s MCP server to query live data and set up automated daily briefs. The brief covers cash movements, overdue invoices, unusual transactions and low balances.
