The wave is the same. The wall is not: why treasury complexity hits harder in Latin America

Every CFO and treasury leader today is navigating the same global current: more cash moving through the system, more debt maturing in a high-rate environment, and more payment volume running across infrastructure that wasn’t built for this scale.

But in Latin America, that current doesn’t just create pressure. It hits a wall.

The cash that appears on a balance sheet is not the same as the cash a treasurer can move across a border, a bank, or a legal entity. And that distinction, between the cash that exists and the cash that works, is the defining challenge for every treasury team operating in the region today.

Three global forces. One regional multiplier.

At Kyriba, we’ve identified three forces driving complexity in global treasury: a surge in short-term liquidity, a peak in corporate debt maturities, and an explosion in payment volume. These forces are real and are compounding. But in LATAM, each one applies globally and is amplified locally, because the region’s structural conditions turn every global pressure into a tougher, costlier, and more urgent version of itself. The result is LATAM treasury complexity that global benchmarks and global tools were never built to solve.

Force 1: The liquidity surge becomes trapped cash

Global short-term liquidity has surpassed $13.47 trillion and continues to grow in 2026. For most treasury teams, that’s a visibility and capital deployment challenge. For LATAM treasurers, it’s something harder: FX controls, repatriation requirements, and intercompany lending restrictions mean the liquidity that appears on the consolidated balance sheet often isn’t liquidity the treasurer can deploy where it’s truly needed.

The LATAM face of “more activity, less visibility” runs deeper than a data problem. It’s structural. Without real-time, entity-level visibility across every subsidiary and every account, the gap between the balance sheet and the boardroom shows up as missed deployment opportunities and real financing costs. The result is trapped cash in a subsidiary made visible at scale, and it compounds with every entity added.

Force 2: The debt wall arrives on top of already expensive capital

The global peak in corporate debt maturities, $2.95 trillion coming due in 2028 alone, lands unevenly: it’s sharper where refinancing is already costly. Local benchmark rates in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina remain structurally higher than in the U.S. or Europe, and the spread widens with each quarter that visibility lags.

For LATAM treasurers, the risk isn’t an abstract macro concern. Every day of delay in knowing the cash position carries a compounding cost, including higher financing rates, less favorable intercompany loan terms, and capital that sits idle in subsidiaries when it could be working elsewhere in the network.

Force 3: Payment complexity collides with banking fragmentation, and LATAM breaks

This force is the one that makes everything else harder.

Kyriba platform data shows a 74% increase in average payment volume per client since 2019, with more formats, more counterparties, greater throughput, across every workflow. Globally, that’s a scalability challenge. In LATAM, it’s a collision with infrastructure that was never designed to absorb it.

Treasury teams in the region routinely manage dozens of banking relationships per country. The situation reflects a decade in which international banks reduced their regional presence, leaving a patchwork of global banks with limited local reach and a long tail of local institutions without cross-border coverage. Bank fragmentation is the default operating environment in LATAM, not an occasional complication. There is no harmonized regulatory framework. Payment terms of 60, 90, or even 120 days are common. And each country runs on its own rules for payments, reporting, and FX.

More volume on top of that infrastructure doesn’t just add complexity. It multiplies the visibility gap. And the cost of that gap is no longer hypothetical.

According to Kyriba's CFO Risk Radar, 60% of CFOs globally say a disruption in payment infrastructure would directly damage financial performance, and in Mexico that figure rises to 68%. In LATAM, where the infrastructure is fragmented by design, disruption is the default operating condition.

The cost, in concrete terms

Risk Radar global data also highlights the impact of insufficient visibility across industries and geographies:

• 79% of finance leaders have experienced a financial impact due to insufficient risk visibility

• 83% still cannot quantify the financial impact of a risk in real time

In a market where capital is expensive, repatriation is complex, and banking infrastructure is fragmented, those statistics carry an even higher price. The cost of not seeing your cash clearly doesn’t show up as a single line item. It shows up in financing costs you couldn’t avoid, in FX exposure you didn’t hedge in time, and in liquidity you couldn’t deploy because you didn’t know it was available.

From fragmented data to confident decisions

Imagine a regional treasury team managing twelve countries, nine currencies, and forty-plus bank accounts spread across local and global institutions that don’t talk to each other. That scenario is the ordinary starting point for almost any multinational operating in Latin America at scale.

At the start of each week, the team spends hours manually consolidating cash positions. Data arrives one, two, or three days late. Reconciliations live in spreadsheets no one wants to inherit. FX exposure exists; everyone knows it, but no one can quantify it accurately until after something has already happened. And when liquidity needs to move from one subsidiary to another to cover an urgent need, the process takes days the market won’t wait for.

The limiting factor for this team is architecture, not talent. Connected infrastructure raises what any team, however skilled, can actually accomplish. Give this team that infrastructure, and the picture changes, not because the people changed, but because what they had to work with did.

Arcos Dorados offers a real-world example of what that shift can achieve. The largest independent McDonald’s franchisee, with more than 2,400 restaurants across Latin America and the Caribbean, operates across more than 20 countries and 16 currencies. By centralizing treasury operations with Kyriba, the company gained real-time cash visibility, automated reconciliations and monthly closings, unlocked 25% of its liquidity, and reduced operational treasury costs by 40%.

When teams unify cash, payments, forecasting, and risk on a single connected platform in real time across every entity, ERP, and bank, visibility that once took days appears in minutes. Time once spent consolidating data is redirected to decisions. Exposure that was opaque becomes manageable before it turns into loss. And liquidity that was trapped in subsidiaries starts to work for the network.

The most important change doesn’t show up in any treasury KPI. It shows up in the nature of the conversations the team has with the CFO: they stop being reports of what already happened and become analyses of what can still be optimized.

That change, more than any operational efficiency metric, is what it means to turn treasury into a competitive asset in the most fragmented region in the world.

One place. Total visibility. Complete control, even here.

The answer to LATAM complexity isn’t accepting fragmentation. It’s building a connected, unified layer above it.

Kyriba’s Liquidity Performance Platform unifies cash, payments, forecasting, and risk across every entity, ERP, bank, and payment rail. Connectivity extends to more than 9,900 banks worldwide, including virtually every institution operating in the region. A library of 66,000+ payment and bank reporting formats covers both global standards (ISO 20022, SWIFT MT/MX) and the country-specific configurations LATAM demands.

When a payment moves, Kyriba sees it. When liquidity changes, the position updates. When FX exposure accumulates, it surfaces before it’s too late to act.

The global wave of complexity is real. In LATAM, the teams who surf it are the ones who stop managing treasury country by country, bank by bank, spreadsheet by spreadsheet and instead start operating from a single governed view of everything that touches money.

One place. Total visibility. Complete control. Even in the region’s most fragmented markets. That starts with unifying payments across every ERP, entity, bank, and payment rail.

Liquidity, the 2028 debt maturity wall, and payments complexity are converging on treasury teams everywhere. See the full picture at Ride the Waves.