Written by Leke Onanuga
One product leader’s framework is being adopted inside companies that want fewer surprises in liquidity, fewer weak links in approvals, and faster visibility into where money is stuck.
Cash rarely disappears in a single dramatic moment. More often, it slips. A delayed customer payment here. A supplier that tightens terms there. A reconciliation break that sits unresolved long enough to become a dispute. A payment approval process that is “good enough” until it isn’t.
Finance teams have lived with that slow-motion risk for years, but the past few cycles of inflation, supply chain stress and rising fraud pressure have made it harder to ignore. In response, some organisations have started adopting a framework called the Cashflow Resilience, Security and Optimisation Framework, or CARSOF, developed by Oluwatoyin Aromokeye, a product leader whose work has focused on transaction-heavy digital platforms.
The promise is straightforward: treat cash not as a spreadsheet event, but as an operating system. CARSOF is designed to bring forecasting, controls, operational levers and governance into one repeatable process that can be run across teams that usually work in parallel. “I wanted teams to stop discovering cash risk after the fact,” Ms. Aromokeye said. “The goal is to make cash behavior visible early enough that you can change it.”
CARSOF is built around six categories that finance executives already recognise, though it tries to force them into the same room. They include liquidity management, forecasting and scenario planning, cost and expense optimisation, revenue resilience, risk and security controls, and governance with technology enablement. Rather than leaving those ideas as headings in a slide deck, the framework pushes teams through a recurring cadence: assess current cash behavior, model scenarios, protect high-risk pathways, optimise interventions, monitor outcomes and govern the process so it survives leadership turnover.
Several organisations that have used the framework in pilots described the same starting point: visibility came late and action came later. In many companies, consolidated cash insights show up weekly or monthly, after operational decisions have already been made. CARSOF, by design, tries to pull the timeline forward.
In internal pilot documentation reviewed by this publication, CARSOF implementations began with a diagnostic questionnaire and a compact set of operational metrics intended to function as a basic early-warning dashboard. Organisations tracked cash visibility frequency, collections behavior, the drivers of receivables aging, and common sources of “cash traps” such as disputed invoices, fragmented approvals and delayed reconciliations. The purpose was not to measure everything, but to measure the few things that typically explain why cash is stuck.
Where the framework departs from many traditional treasury playbooks is in how explicitly it treats security and operational integrity as cash variables. CARSOF embeds controls such as approval workflow design, segregation of duties, anomaly monitoring and reconciliation discipline alongside liquidity tools. It is an approach that reflects a reality in modern commerce: cash leakage is not only an economic problem. It can also be a systems problem.
In pilots, the most visible early changes were procedural rather than technological. Teams standardised who owned exceptions, how quickly they had to be reviewed, and what evidence was required to close them. They mapped approval routes that had grown organically and introduced tighter thresholds and handoffs. They also formalised how “pending” outcomes were handled so unresolved states did not quietly accumulate.
Finance leaders involved in early implementations said the value was not in a single insight but in the discipline of repetition. One finance executive at an adopting organisation, who asked not to be named because the company has not publicly discussed its internal controls, said CARSOF “forced agreement on what ‘good’ looks like in cash operations, not just what the numbers were at month-end.”
The framework also encourages companies to rank interventions using a simple cost-to-cash lens, asking leaders to estimate the cash return expected per dollar of effort. It is a management idea that appeals to boards and CFOs who are under pressure to justify automation spend, renegotiate supplier terms or tighten credit controls without creating operational bottlenecks.
That practicality may be part of the reason CARSOF has found interest beyond a single industry. The framework is described as modular, meaning it can be applied to subscription businesses tracking churn and renewals, manufacturers focused on inventory turns, or service organisations managing reimbursement cycles. Ms. Aromokeye argues that the structure matters most when timing and trust matter most, particularly in organisations that operate with thin margins or high transaction volume.
Still, frameworks do not implement themselves. Even the best-designed operating model can fail if an organisation treats it as a one-time exercise rather than a habit. CARSOF tries to anticipate that weakness by placing governance at the end of the loop, explicitly requiring ownership, review cadence and escalation pathways.
In a business environment where volatility has become routine and fraud pressure has become a cost line, the appeal of “cash under control” is easy to understand. CARSOF’s bet is that cash stability is not only a finance function. It is a cross-functional design problem, and it can be run with the same rigor that high-performing organisations apply to product delivery and operational reliability.
If the framework continues to spread, its real test will be whether it becomes a working cadence inside organisations or remains a well-structured artifact. For companies that have lived through the moment when cash stops behaving, that distinction is not academic. It is survival.
