Strategic Approach to Boost Business in 2026

Publish Date: December 10, 2025

Businesses looking to grow in the new year have a powerful, often overlooked lever in their back office: treasury management.

By working closely with their financial institution to implement enhancements in this area, leaders can improve cash flow, reduce risk, and create more efficient systems that allow their finance teams to focus on core activities and strategy.

“There are many things we do each and every day to help business owners, CFOs, controllers and accounting directors,” said Jim Mele, Executive Vice President and Director of Specialty Deposits, Payments and Treasury Services for Community Bank.

Community Bank’s strategy begins with a dedicated treasury management team that has been growing rapidly, most recently adding a national specialty deposit sales and exclusively focused operational team members to the bank’s nearly 125-year legacy. Their goal is to simplify treasury management for mid-sized businesses, municipalities, nonprofits and other organizations that are involved with specialized payments.

New Payment Technology Brings Many Benefits

One of the biggest opportunities mid-sized businesses have when it comes to treasury management is to embrace modern payment technology, Mele said. It starts with evaluating their existing processes - especially the use of checks.

According to the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2025 Digital Payments Survey, one in four business-to-business payments still happen via check. While that is down from one in three in 2022, it still means a significant number of payments are made via a method that can be cumbersome and is at high risk of fraud. In another AFP survey, 63% of organizations reported experiencing check fraud in 2024.

Businesses can improve efficiency and reduce check fraud risk by transitioning more payments to ACH and wire transfers and implementing security technology for remaining checks, Mele said.

Community Bank’s Check Positive Pay service, for example, verifies the legitimacy of each check presented for payment.

Clients provide the check number, amount and date for each check they write. When a check is presented to the bank for payment, the bank confirms that all details match before issuing payment. An enhanced version of this service includes verifying the payee’s name, and a similar service does the same for ACH transactions.

“We want to educate and be proactive with our clients,” Mele said. “We want to understand their business, analyze trends and offer solutions that they haven’t thought of while their business evolves and grows.”

Payment technology has evolved far beyond checks, ACH and wire transfers, with consumers pushing businesses to look and adopt real-time payments, digital payments (i.e. Venmo and Zelle), stablecoins and cryptocurrency.

Mele and his team collaborate with clients to identify how these payment methods would work to improve cash flow administration, including more efficient ways to receive funds and mitigate risk.

“The technology in the payment space is ever-changing,” he said. “It is important to understand how your customers want to interact with you. We start with analyzing our clients’ current processes and making sure they are maximizing payment channels such as traditional checks, ACH and wire transfers. Our goal is to provide ideas and solutions to take them to the next level.”

Treasury Services Improve Efficiency, Reduce Risk

Business leaders typically realize multiple benefits by introducing more technology into their payment processes, Mele said.

One recent client, for example, added several automated tools to their daily liquidity funding process that reduced the time it takes the finance team to complete tasks while also increasing security.

Community Bank customers find that electronic systems have significantly lower error rates than manual processes for initiating, receiving and reconciling payments. Cash flow is also improved by accelerating incoming payments and providing greater control over accounts payable.

“Many clients are skeptical about going from manual processes to electronic processes to reconcile payments,” Mele said. "We provide information to clients so they can create processes that make their daily treasury administration faster and easier."

In addition to efficiency gains, technology helps businesses reduce errors and protect against fraud.

Mele and his team work alongside clients to review their internal controls, including permissions related to sending and approving payments, and to understand usage trends for the customer’s clients.

Community Bank recommends features such as debit blocks on accounts that never need these services, reducing the need to monitor the accounts for fraud.

“We build processes in our operations to make sure there is verification of specific payments and transactions,” he said. “If we see something that is an anomaly, we call the client to make sure it is correct.”

It’s all part of a consultative, customized approach, Mele said.

“Our goal is to make our clients’ banking experience easy,” he said. “Every client’s back office is unique, and their integrations with their customers are different. We need to be agile to address an array of client needs while making it simple, predictable and efficient for our client.”

Community Bank is a Pennsylvania-chartered commercial bank that operates a branch network in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It offers a broad array of treasury management, retail and commercial lending and deposit services. MEMBER FDIC

For more information about Community Bank, visit www.cb.bank or contact Jim Mele at [email protected].