The following partner insight was authored by Santiago Alcaraz Sanchez, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Integrations for Open Banking at J.P. Morgan Payments.

For most of its history, a corporate treasurer’s view of cash was a prior-day picture, assembled by hand from statements that arrived overnight. Accessing the money required a separate portal for every bank, so a company working with 10 or 20 banks logged into as many platforms to see its position. The model held up for years and still does in much of the market, even as it kept treasury a step behind the business it served.

The direction has reversed, and the bank now comes to the client. The principle behind our work with SAP at J.P. Morgan is simple: we meet clients where they operate, and for a finance team running SAP, that place is the ERP. Instead of pulling a treasurer out to reassemble a position across a dozen portals, we bring the bank into the system where the work happens.

That reversal only works because of what each side brings. SAP and J.P. Morgan both serve the full spectrum of the market, from up-and-coming companies to the largest and most complex corporations in the world. Of the top 100 companies globally, 98 run SAP in some form, and J.P. Morgan moves $12 trillion on a typical day. The scale is the headline, but the more useful point for a treasury team is that both organizations understand how its needs shift as it grows and can meet them at any stage.

The appetite is already there. In a 2026 ASUG and J.P. Morgan research report, 92% of respondents called embedded payments and banking valuable, yet only a third use those capabilities today. Respondents named bank connectivity and integration as the top area for outside help.

Treasury needs grow more complex as the business does. A regional company might start with one currency, payroll, and a few familiar vendors. New countries complicate that, bringing cross-currency flows and fresh choices, like whether to hold accounts in each market or centralize.

As volumes rise, a payment factory becomes the sensible solution. SAP supplies the infrastructure, which is worth more alongside a global bank’s services.

Building from the Foundation Up

One recurring problem is among the easier to solve, because it is organizational rather than technical. Treasury sits at the company’s center, yet teams often plan without the people they depend on, from receivables and payables to the market-facing managers, the ERP partner, and the banks.

Once the right people are aligned, the focus shifts to making the treasury run leaner. The work builds from the foundation up, and that foundation is a robust, secure connection between ERP and bank.

For years, that connection was file-based, and this form of integration still earns its place. But API connectivity between banks and ERP systems has matured and is reshaping the relationship, since a company gains real-time access to its data, a direct line to the bank, and true ownership of information that was always its own. A core aim of our partnership with SAP is to make that connection seamless, so connecting the bank to the ERP no longer stands between a treasury team and its tools.

The bank, the ERP, and the company all have to be in sync, and it is easy to underestimate what happens when they are not. A team can design a genuinely strong solution that pools its global accounts and brings every balance into one view, then discover that putting it into production is a two-year effort.

The rollout can touch several banks, more than one ERP instance, and sometimes a treasury management system or two — carrying real cost and risk along the way. Pre-integrating what the bank offers with the ERP removes that burden, and adoption no longer means committing to a multi-year project.

Solid connectivity makes treasury’s oldest problems far more manageable, beginning with cash visibility. A treasurer’s position used to lag a day behind reality. Real-time API connectivity ends that, making the position available on demand. With J.P. Morgan’s global reach, a company across 50 markets can see exactly where it stands in Singapore, Frankfurt, or New York through a single connection.

The Intelligence Layer

On top of that foundation sits the layer drawing all the attention now: AI. The building blocks beneath matter because the AI built into SAP delivers value only once connectivity and data are solid. Get that groundwork right, and a treasurer can work through SAP’s Joule in natural language and reach J.P. Morgan directly and in real time — all through the consumer-grade experience people expect in their personal lives, but with the guardrails a corporate environment requires.

The road ahead splits into two tracks. The first covers the work treasury has always done, since a treasurer still has to make payments, know the position, and invest, and none of that changes in substance; what changes is how it gets done, with the same tasks running faster and more autonomously, the right controls in place, and more of the decisions handled by the system itself.

The second track is the more interesting one, with far more still to explore. As agentic experiences mature, they create net-new openings for a bank and an ERP to offer services that were not possible before — the biggest such opening the industry has seen in at least 30 years — with the agentic experience becoming the front end of the relationship.

All of that autonomy raises an obvious governance question, though it is hardly a new one: who is allowed to do what. Deciding that has been part of these systems from the start, and the only new element is the tools we bring to it. Every enterprise already carries a worked-out view of its roles, capabilities, and functions shaped by its industry, which is why those controls belong inside the ecosystem rather than bolted on afterward.

When J.P. Morgan became the first bank to blend its API integration directly into Joule, the hard part was the entitlement question underneath. The bank knows who may touch which accounts, the ERP knows who may touch which functions, and the deployment succeeds or fails on how cleanly the two come together inside the client’s own landscape.

Two disciplines make governance practical. The first is simplification. Every treasury transformation should start by asking what can be removed. Do all 10 steps need to exist? Do 10 people need to touch this process? Answer honestly, and the roles and functions a task requires come into focus, ready to map onto the AI agents built to carry it out.

The second is less glamorous: the steady work of normalization, standardization, and centralization. A medium or large corporation often runs several versions of SAP or a blend of on-premises and cloud, and a treasury on a fragmented base is punishing to run, regardless of what sits on top.

A New Day in the Treasury

No treasurer wants to manage hundreds of thousands of accounts across time zones, currencies, and cost structures. Given the opportunity, most would consolidate into one account. Regulation rules that out, but an advanced ERP alongside a global bank brings a corporation far closer than it could get alone. 

Once the touch points are clear and the areas needing automation and control are identified, the agent layer goes on top — the final step toward the autonomous treasury SAP is building now.

A treasurer’s morning is the simplest place to see it. The day begins as it always has, with a check of the balance, except the figures the treasurer now sees are live, not a day behind. The next step is to initiate payments.

J.P. Morgan and SAP are testing embedded real-time payment capabilities inside the SAP ecosystem, so a client can move from a real-time position to a real-time payment without the long process that used to sit between. This draws on a global payment adapter supporting between more than 130 payment methods worldwide. Once the payment leaves, integrated tracking confirms that the funds reached the beneficiary.

The same logic extends to onboarding. Account validation services currently being assessed and might be coming to the partnership. These will let mutual clients mitigate risk the moment a new supplier is added, with a bank-supplied risk rating to help weigh what controls or approvals a new relationship calls for, which matters most on a first payment or a payment into an unfamiliar location.

None of this is years away. The building blocks exist today, several capabilities are already live, and the rest are close behind, all grounded in a cloud-and-AI foundation. Any team asking where its finance function is headed should look now at what an integrated, real-time, and increasingly autonomous link between bank and ERP can deliver.

To see how it comes together, the J.P. Morgan and SAP microsite illustrates the partnership’s capabilities and performance data, and offers an interactive demo of the end-to-end, invoice-to-pay experience first shown at SAP Sapphire.

Santiago Alcaraz Sanchez is Head of Strategic Partnerships and Integrations for Open Banking at J.P. Morgan Payments.