The 9x Problem in Treasury Software

In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman gave people coffee mugs and asked how much they’d sell them for. The answer was consistently 2x what buyers would pay for the same mug.

We overvalue what we already have. Harvard professor John Gourville turned this into a framework for technology adoption.

Consumers overvalue their current tools by 3x. The spreadsheet they’ve used for years feels better than it is. And founders overvalue what they’ve built by 3x. The new thing feels more revolutionary than it actually is to the person being asked to switch.

Multiply those and you get a 9-to-1 gap. What you think is a 10x improvement, your customer experiences as barely worth the effort of learning a new login screen.

Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma, recently applied this framework to the $300M graveyard of presentation startups. Prezi, Beautiful.ai, Pitch, Tome. Massive raises, millions of users, then silence. They lost not because Microsoft was unbeatable, but because prettier slides don’t clear a 9x switching cost.

The same trap in treasury

Treasury management software has the same dynamic. A CFO at a Series B company has been using Excel, bank portals, and a shared Google Sheet for 5 years. It’s messy. It’s manual. It sort of works.

That’s their mug. They overvalue it by 3x.

Most treasury tech companies are building better dashboards. Nicer visualizations of the same data. Cleaner UIs for the same workflows. Incremental improvements against a 9x gap.

That’s the prettier PowerPoint.

The reframe

What killed the PowerPoint killers wasn’t Microsoft. It was the wrong question. They asked “how do we make better slides?” instead of “why are humans designing slides at all?”

The right question in treasury isn’t “how do we build a better cash dashboard?” It’s “why is a human checking 4 bank portals every morning?”

Cash forecasting is the clearest example. Instead of a better forecasting tool, imagine the forecast just updates itself from your bank data every day. Nobody runs it. Nobody remembers to update it. It runs.

FX conversion timing is another one. Instead of giving the CFO better charts, score the conversion opportunity automatically and schedule it. The CFO reviews a recommendation instead of building one from scratch in a spreadsheet.

Payment routing is the simplest case. The system picks the cheapest rail for each payment. You stop thinking about rails.

The CFO opens their laptop. The decisions are already made. The forecast is current. The conversions are scheduled. They review and approve. They don’t operate the system. They supervise it.

A better version of what exists doesn’t clear the 9x bar. The only thing that does is making the old workflow feel absurd in retrospect. “Wait, we used to check four bank portals manually every morning?”

What this means for finance teams

If you’re evaluating treasury software, here’s the filter: does this tool need me to work differently, or does it work for me?

A tool that requires you to log in daily, build reports, and make the same decisions you already make in Excel is a lateral move. It might look nicer. It won’t change your life. And in 18 months you’ll be back to the spreadsheet because the spreadsheet didn’t require onboarding.

A tool that sends you a morning summary of your cash positions, flags the two things that need your attention, and has already scheduled this week’s FX conversions based on your policy? That’s a different category.

The question to ask every vendor: “If I don’t log into your platform for a week, what happens?”

If the answer is “nothing, it needs you to drive it” you’re looking at a prettier spreadsheet.

If the answer is “it keeps running, here’s what it did while you were gone” you’re looking at something that might actually be worth switching for.

“What would you build if you stopped improving what already exists?” That’s the question every treasury tech company should be answering. The ones building better dashboards will join the $300M PowerPoint graveyard. The ones eliminating workflows will build the next generation of finance infrastructure.