For years, numbers defined the CFO’s role—balancing budgets, managing risk, and ensuring compliance. But finance leaders are increasingly stepping beyond the finance function and driving business strategy alongside their C-suite peers. The growing number of CFOs rising to CEO positions across Europe (up nearly 50% since 2019) is proof that financial expertise is more than just a support function—it’s a critical leadership asset.
The ability to interpret financial data and navigate economic uncertainty is critical as businesses face increasing pressure to be agile, data-driven, and resilient. Those traits become even more valuable as economic volatility rises globally. What’s separating the agile from the sluggish is, more and more, the openness to leveraging AI. CFOs who embrace technology are best positioned to guide their companies into the future.
However, getting business leaders to increase enterprise-wide agility is more difficult. CFOs who bring fast, accurate, and trusted insights and a team-sport mentality can take a more proactive role in guiding the business forward. Across the business, CFOs can serve as strategic teammates and partners to leaders and decision-makers in every department.
The CFO Shift: From Back-Office to Business Leader
The role of the CFO has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. They were once seen mainly as financial stewards responsible for budgeting, compliance, and reporting. Today, CFOs are expected to shape business strategy, drive digital transformation, and guide corporate growth initiatives. This shift is fueled by increasing economic volatility, the rapid advancement of AI-driven financial tools, and a greater demand for data-led decision-making.
A Gartner survey reinforces what many already recognise: The CFO’s role is expanding. More than 70% of CFOs now oversee responsibilities beyond finance, including digital initiatives like AI, IT, and cybersecurity. Additionally, over 75% say they are responsible for enterprise-wide data and analytics, highlighting their growing influence in not only shaping business strategy and technology adoption, but also giving decision-makers easy access to crucial insights.
As businesses grapple with growing internal and market complexity, the ability to turn financial insights into strategic actions has made CFOs indispensable partners to CEOs. In some cases, they are also the logical successor to the top job. As mentioned, CFOs becoming CEOs increased from 21% in 2019 to 30% in 2023. Recent CFO-to-CEO transitions at European companies like Unilever, Schroders, and Aberdeen reflect this evolution, underscoring the growing recognition of finance leaders as key business visionaries.
But, to be seen as a company-wide leader, CFOs must build a finance-first culture across the entire business.
Why Finance Needs To Be a Team Sport
Finance can’t operate in a silo. When financial data stays locked within the finance team, businesses miss opportunities to make smarter, faster decisions. The most successful organisations bring finance into every conversation, from sales and marketing to operations and HR, ensuring financial insights guide companywide decisions.
Consider workforce planning, which typically manages an organisation’s most significant single expense. Empowering Human Resources with accurate, up-to-date financial information helps them better collaborate with business leaders on workforce, training, and recruitment needs while aligning budgets with overall financial goals and constraints.
Marketing, too, is a domain that benefits from strong ties to finance. Marketing has a unique language of conversions and clicks, so providing the tools to translate Marketing efforts into financial terms keeps CFOs and CMOs on the same page.
This enterprise-wide collaboration unlocks financial agility because teams work together toward shared goals, plan more effectively as an organisation, and respond quickly to market changes in unison.
The best companies don’t treat finance as an afterthought. Instead, they put finance at the centre of decision-making, ensuring that real numbers back every move, not just gut feelings. CFOs have the obvious role to take the lead on this.
Building a Finance-first Culture
CFOs who embed financial insights into daily operations give decision-makers the confidence to act decisively and quickly. A finance-first culture isn’t just about control—it’s about creating a smarter, more agile organisation that’s always ahead of what’s next and ready to shift when things change.
Here are three strategies CFOs can use to help teams think finance-first:
- Be a business storyteller: The best finance professionals always look for the story behind the numbers. Those who can translate financial data into compelling, easy-to-comprehend narratives to guide and inform other teams can quickly turn data into action. Don’t assume that everyone speaks the language of finance, however. Instead, embrace the opportunity to raise the financial IQ of the entire organisation during every interaction. Explain the impact, show the tradeoffs, and illustrate which levers make the most difference.
- Champion technology adoption: Finance should embrace digital transformation—especially AI—to gain efficiency, increase productivity, and focus effort on what’s most important. Today, the entire business needs automation, modern cloud software, and easy collaboration tools to improve competitiveness and agility. CFOs are increasingly taking on the role of digital leader, so they work with IT internally and trusted vendors externally to find ways to incorporate AI and automation into daily tasks with maximum return on investment and minimal risk.
- Foster cross-functional partnerships: Engage with colleagues in operations, HR, marketing, and IT to align financial strategies with business goals. Make financial data the foundation of every conversation and every decision by making it centralised, easy to access, and trusted. Give teams the customised dashboards, automated reports, and self-service analytics that today’s tech-savvy leaders demand. Winning is easy when each player has the same information and knows the goals.
The best CFOs don’t just report the numbers—they help drive the business forward. By looking beyond the numbers and bringing financial performance into every aspect of the business, finance leaders can better shape the future of their companies.
This shift is already happening. Businesses that position finance-first thinking as a strategic strength will move faster and stay ahead of the competition. The question isn’t whether finance-first matters—it’s whether businesses can remain competitive if they’re not finance-first.
Planful is the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform, which helps businesses drive peak financial performance, is used around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Planful empowers finance, accounting, and business users to plan confidently, close faster, and report accurately. More than 1,500 customers, including Bose, Boston Red Sox, Five Guys, Grafton Plc, Gousto, Specialized and Zappos rely on Planful to accelerate cycle times, increase productivity, and improve accuracy. Planful is a private company backed by Vector Capital, a leading global private equity firm. Learn more at planful.com.
