Crunch time for CFOs: The CFO role isn’t just changing. It’s expanding. has been saved
Perspectives
Crunch time for CFOs: The CFO role isn’t just changing. It’s expanding.
CFOs, are you ready to be exponential?
Crunch time for CFOs:
The CFO role isn’t just changing.
It’s expanding.
CFOs, are you ready to be exponential?
“Change in the CFO role” is a familiar topic. But this change? At this pace? It’s exponential—and today’s Finance leaders will likely need to be exponential to meet it head-on. As macro dynamics and business implications interact to shape strategy, the enterprise of 2030 will likely expect more from the CFO. Are you ready?
The pressure to reinvent, rethink, and reshape is intensifying—and boards, CEOs, and other executives will look to the CFO and the Finance team to help plan for the future.
To answer this call, we are likely to see an exponential CFO take center stage—an executive who can lead the organization by accelerating value creation, driving enterprise-wide operational excellence, and shaping talent experience and culture.
Look ahead to 2030. While no one can predict a certain future, what could doing business look like?
Value creation
The ways companies create shareholder and stakeholder value in the future will be complex with avenues for new business models, products, services, and value levers that transcend traditional business boundaries.
Operations
How companies balance efficiency and resilience—and seek to optimize both—is likely not only a factor of corporate hygiene, but also a critical success factor in the ability to pivot to new value creation opportunities.
Talent and culture
How companies integrate the human agenda into their corporate agenda may need to be profoundly different with human-technology collaboration, new work and worker expectations, and growing prevalence of multi-generational work teams.
Macro dynamics and business implications
As macro market forces shape the shifts in how businesses operate and create value, what is needed and expected of the CFO and the finance team is likely to not only evolve but expand. Change at this pace involves a constant interplay among macro forces bringing unique business implications.
Technology
Technological innovation and user adoption, overall, are accelerating at an extraordinary pace.
Demographics
Aging populations and generational differences tend to be driving new dynamics in the workforce and consumer behaviors.
Environment
Growing environmental instability appears to be driving behavior change across companies, investors, governments, and consumers.
Geopolitics
Rising economic nationalism and trade protectionism pose potential challenges to future international economic cooperation.
Capital markets
Shifting fiscal policy and quantitative tightening measures seem to have ended the era of zero-rate capital.
Business model disruption
Industry competition intensifies, forcing companies to innovate within and beyond industry boundaries, leading to new ways to grow and new business risks to manage.
Growing performance expectations
Rising pressure to deliver on a broad spectrum of performance beyond just financial measures.
Tougher capital decisions
Increasingly more complex and uncertain trade-offs between investments in short-term performance and long-term growth across M&A, IPO, and infrastructure.
Evolving regulatory requirements
Growing needs for greater transparency and frequency of reporting—often beyond financials—from regulatory bodies. Shifting stakeholder needs.
Shifting stakeholder needs
Customers, employees, network partners, and regulators have more influence over business decisions than ever before.
It's Crunch time.
Let’s sum it up: As a CFO, you may feel like you are operating in a different world. Everyone else might be feeling this way too, and a lot of them may want you to help them understand and manage it. We’re likely past the point of “the same but more.” Defining something as “exponential” invites comparisons with math. Not just growing, but growing at increased scale. Our use of that term here is no accident.
To become an exponential CFO is two challenges in one: to recognize that the demands on you are already expanding that way, and to evolve your own approach and innovate your capabilities to keep pace. When you accomplish that, your dual roles as both business and functional leader all merge into a single approach that can match the velocity of the moment and accelerates out ahead of it. There’s a new inflection point coming into focus. This could be the time to find out what you have under the hood.
Deloitte can help
Our Finance Labs explore the “art of the possible” and define your Finance Transformation strategy, bringing to life potential use cases, road map priorities, and future-state benefits. Contact us to learn more.
Explore other reports and guides in our Crunch time series, along with inspirational Finance Transformation case studies.
Get in touch
Principal, Consulting,
Finance & Enterprise
Performance
Deloitte Consulting LLP
+1 206 716 6948
Principal, Consulting,
Finance & Enterprise
Performance
Deloitte Consulting LLP
+1 215 405 7765
Principal, Consulting,
Finance & Enterprise
Performance
Deloitte Consulting LLP
+1 312 486 3698
Partner, Risk and
Financial Advisory,
Controllership
Deloitte & Touche LLP
+1 206 716 7082
Senior Manager
Consulting, Finance &
Enterprise Performance
Deloitte Consulting LLP
+1 212 618 4056
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