Visa Says AI Cuts CFO Cash Flow Uncertainty From 68% to 17%

Picture a manufacturing company with $4 million sitting in accounts receivable, another $2 million tied up in supplier invoices, and a growth opportunity on the table that requires capital within 30 days.

The question facing that company’s leadership isn’t whether the money exists. It’s whether anyone knows exactly where it is in the flow and how quickly it can move.

For most middle-market firms, that question does not have a clean answer. The ambiguity is expensive.

It is the central problem Ben Ellis, senior vice president and global head of Large and Middle Markets at Visa Commercial Solutions, brought to a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

Working capital, the money flowing through a business via receivables, payables and inventory, has long been treated as a back-office discipline. It’s important, but not a boardroom conversation.

The 2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index (WCI), a comprehensive benchmark tracking how efficiently middle-market firms manage their liquidity, documents a departure from that tradition. The 2026 WCI conducted a series of double-blind phone interviews with nearly 1,500 chief financial officers and treasurers in five global regions across 10 industry sectors.

“Working capital has shifted from being maybe a back-office concern to actually a front-line lever focused on growth,” Ellis said.

What Getting It Right Actually Looks Like

The WCI scores how effectively these firms, spanning $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenue, convert business activity into usable cash. The index measures everything from how quickly they collect on invoices to how strategically they time supplier payments. Top performers score high not because they are larger or better capitalized, but because they have built deliberate systems. They have faster collections, smarter payment strategies and real-time visibility into their cash position.

What makes the 2026 findings particularly notable is that efficiency scores have risen for three consecutive years, not just among top performers, but across all tiers, Ellis said. Low-performing firms are closing the gap, driven less by cost-cutting than by the use of better tools and better information.

The financial payoff is substantial.

Four in five companies using structured working capital solutions reported meaningful annual savings, with some capturing nearly $20 million. That is not incremental improvement, Ellis said. At that scale, working capital efficiency becomes a strategic input, shaping what a firm can afford to do next.

The Shift From Defensive to Offensive

That marks a departure from the traditional approach to working capital management, which is essentially defensive, Ellis said. Maintain adequate reserves, pay suppliers on time, collect from customers as quickly as possible and avoid running short. Working capital, in that framing, is about preventing problems rather than creating opportunities.

Firms rising in the WCI rankings are operating from a different playbook, he said.

CFOs and treasurers are now more likely than they were in 2023 to deploy liquidity opportunistically, according to the WCI data. That means paying suppliers early to capture discounts, using available cash as a negotiating lever on pricing, and moving quickly on acquisitions or bulk inventory purchases without scrambling for external financing.

“[They] treat these choices as a tool that can be used to fund growth, to fund resilience,” Ellis said.

That kind of deliberate deployment requires knowing, with precision and in real time, what the working capital position actually is. The WCI gives firms the benchmark to assess that position against peers and identify where value is being left on the table, Ellis said.

Why AI Is the Game-Changer Nobody Expected

If there is one finding from the 2026 WCI that should recalibrate how finance leaders think about their operations, Ellis said it is this: Among low-performing firms that adopted artificial intelligence for working capital management, cash flow unpredictability dropped from 68% to 17%.

Firms that previously could not predict their own cash flow with any reliability now get it right more than 4 out of 5 times. That is not a marginal gain but a fundamental shift in how those businesses operate day to day, he said.

Six in 10 CFOs and treasurers now use AI for working capital efficiency, a figure that has climbed in recent years, Ellis said. The appeal is practical. AI can process transaction data, payment histories and market signals faster than any team, surfacing patterns and predictions that would otherwise remain invisible until it is too late to act on them.

“AI is an amplifier,” Ellis said. “But you still have to provide and feed information into the model.”

Although AI makes the rest of the working capital stack more effective, it is only as powerful as the data beneath it. Companies still operating on fragmented systems and disconnected spreadsheets will find that AI surfaces their data problems before it solves their cash flow problems, he said.

Cards Do More Than Most Companies Realize

Commercial cards have become one of the most versatile instruments in the working capital toolkit. The study found that more than half of CFOs and treasurers now cite card acceptance as a primary strategy for reducing days sales outstanding, the time elapsed between a completed sale and collected payment, Ellis said. An additional 15% use corporate cards specifically to manage days payable outstanding, using card float to smooth gaps in cash flow timing.

Virtual cards have grown in appeal precisely because of their programmability, he said. A virtual card can be issued for a specific vendor, capped at a specific amount, and set to expire after a single transaction. That level of control transforms what was once a payment convenience into a cash management instrument that integrates with ERP systems and reduces the manual reconciliation work that consumes finance team capacity.

The Friction Problem Is Bigger Than Technology

There are broad gains across the WCI, but not every firm is capturing them. Loan rejection rates have risen in some middle-market categories, and product mismatches between what finance teams need and what solutions offer remain a genuine barrier, Ellis said, resisting the instinct to frame all of this as a technology problem.

“Some of these gaps can be human as much as technical,” he said.

A treasurer new to a company may lack the institutional standing to champion a shift in payment strategy. A CFO unfamiliar with supply chain finance may not know which questions to ask.

Differences in experience, sector knowledge and organizational confidence shape adoption velocity just as much as product availability does.

Opportunistic capital deployment only works if the tools can move fast enough to match the opportunity, which means addressing friction in both technical and human barriers, Webster said.

The Benchmark That Changes the Conversation

What makes the WCI valuable is not only the data it produces. It is the conversation it forces, Ellis said. When a CFO can see exactly where the firm ranks against peers, and precisely which dimensions of working capital management are dragging the score down, the discussion shifts from whether to improve to how fast.

Three consecutive years of rising scores suggest that these growth corporate middle-market firms have already started answering that question. The firms moving fastest are treating working capital not as a balance sheet line item to be managed conservatively, but as an operational capability to be built deliberately.

The cash is already there. The question facing CFOs and treasurers is whether they have the visibility, tools and strategy to put it to work, Ellis said.

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