Key Takeaways
- Stronger financial health: High scores in treasury leadership correlate with better earnings growth, free cash flow yield, and net income margin growth.
- Resilience to market volatility: Effective treasury leadership helps shield companies from market volatility and enables faster recovery as turbulence subsides.
- Faster rebound: Top-performing companies rebound more quickly and robustly than their peers as market stress dissipates.
Corporate treasury departments have shown their worth during the global market volatility of recent months.
The Trump Administration’s major tariff announcements on April 2, 2025 unveiled a broad new tariff strategy, triggering a period of market volatility reminiscent in some ways of the 2020 pandemic. Markets went into a downward spiral, sparking flight-to-safety trades across the globe. Beyond sharp price reactions, earnings growth expectations also plummeted. Markets have since recovered, with the S&P 500 back to February levels.
A previous Citi GPS study (Treasury Leadership: Does it Matter?) written
for corporate CFOs and Treasurers, found that “top-performing companies have top-performing treasuries”. But did this hold true during the recent bout of market stress?
To find out, we investigated company growth, profitability, and financial health metrics before and after the tariffs were announced. We compared these metrics against treasury performance, as measured in our Citi Treasury Diagnostics (CTD) global company benchmarking survey.
Download the full Treasury Leadership - An Antidote to Market Stress report.
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