It’s a truism in business that the CFO’s mandate only moves in one direction: It expands over time. A CFO’s responsibilities rarely recede; they simply continue to grow. That is partly a reflection of the fact that financial services has become a larger component of the U.S. economy, but it also reflects the growing influence CFOs have on organizations’ payment strategies.
Hugh Thomas, Lead Analyst of Commercial and Enterprise at Javelin Strategy & Research, explains how these shifts have changed the way CFOs approach treasury services and commercial payments solutions in The Mandate Is the Message: How the CFO’s Expanding Remit Shaped Payments Provider Strategy. The report examines how seismic events—most notably the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic—have expanded the CFO’s role.
“At one time the CFO was a sort of ops person,” Thomas said. “Now it’s a seat at the big table.”
New Roles for the CFO
The financial component of any business’s performance has always been a key focus for shareholders. Today, however, those financial decisions have broader implications for operational performance, including how effectively organizations manage working capital and launch new initiatives. As a result, CFOs are increasingly being judged not only on financial results but also how they communicate their company’s performance to the markets.
At the same time, new responsibilities continue to emerge for CFOs around the world. In Europe, for example, a CFO’s payments platform may need to provide provenance information. Concerns such as forced labor in manufacturing—including issues tied to recent tariff policies—mean companies must monitor and document their supply chains.
“If you want to ensure you can’t get hit with those tariffs, you need to understand the provenance of everything that you buy—who manufactured it and how fair were their labor practices,” Thomas said. “In Europe, tracing provenance is already a pretty big business for the transaction banking types. And we expect that that will be even more so. This is now an exigency on the CFO.”
When public confidence was shaken by the dot-com bust, CFOs took on the responsibility of explaining why investors could trust their company’s numbers. They also needed to communicate their confidence to the financial services provider managing their transaction banking and payments operations. Ideally, CFOs should share their teams’ priorities and objectives with their payments partners, allowing those providers to deliver solutions that align with the company’s needs.
“Don’t take your suite of payment solutions out and be the guy with a hammer looking for nails,” said Thomas. “Understand that what the CFO is being asked to do will give you the message about whether you need a hammer or a saw.”
What COVID Changed—and Didn’t Change
Six years later, it’s clear that the pandemic had a lasting impact on the CFO’s role. During the early stages of the pandemic, when the future was uncertain, CFOs had to ensure their companies had sufficient cash reserves and balance sheet resilience to withstand a prolonged disruption.
The other major impact was operational. Companies had to move many critical processes onto employees’ remote systems and home networks.
“We’d rather have as few portals as possible working on something that’s effectively our ledger,” said Thomas. “The CFO had to give everyone the confidence that they were going to be able to do it remotely and effectively.”
Over time, it became clear that many aspects of business could continue operating this way. Aside from security considerations, there was little reason that accounts payable teams couldn’t perform much of their work remotely. It also became clear that many employees wanted to maintain some degree of flexibility.
Now there is renewed interest in collaboration and in working together in shared spaces, meaning some short-term fixes adopted during the pandemic were not sustained. One example was the rapid adoption of virtual cards.
“You saw a ton of spend with digital giants move on to virtual cards early in the pandemic, because it was difficult to onboard new suppliers,” said Thomas. “It was difficult to get them sorted up to initiate payments. Your spend with digital giants went through the roof because people were buying online, so you want to make sure you’re spending more time online. But it didn’t get sustained because it was no longer meeting an exigency of people being out of office. They just figured out the way to get these digital giants paid by ACH and so forth.”
Setting the Tone for AI
One of the most significant roles for CFOs today is establishing how AI will be deployed within finance functions. They’re being asked to justify substantial, historic investments in AI while closely monitoring the return on those investments. This reflects the increasingly strategic roles CFOs play within their organizations.
“Going forward, CFOs are going to be more about saying, these are our 10 things we want to achieve this quarter in terms of our cash position,” said Thomas. “This is where we want to see receivables coming in at this time, going out at that time. This is where we’re going to spend our money, and this is what we’re going to look to push back to shareholders. Set the AI agentic stuff to wherever appropriate, and then this is going to be our monitoring regime, and this is our course correction.”
CFOs have moved far beyond a role that was once closely associated with accounting. In many companies, they are now viewed as the CEO’s second-in-command, with the ability and responsibility to shape how the corporation is financed during periods of need, recommend investments in key business areas, determine appropriate AI spending, and track the resulting returns.
“If you’re not spending as much time making the donuts every day, if your donut making machine is running on its own, you can spend a lot more time thinking about the donuts you could make,” said Thomas. “That moves the CFO even further away from that initial accountant’s role toward thinking more strategically, using AI to do more scenario planning, and looking more into the future.”
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