Tackling your board's next big question

Over-excitable commentators have been declaring the era of the “super CFO” for years as the remit has gotten bigger than ever. But with a rapid boom in tech advances in recent years - not just AI - major organizations are now stripping out digital responsibilities from CFOs. But there’s a lot more going on backstage, say finance leaders. Did it all get too much, and can CFOs keep up? 

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While some CFOs have spent years buried under an ever-growing pile of governance, ESG, and HR, the era of tucking IT and digital transformation into finance might be coming to an end.

Some big organizations have recently started slimming down the CFO’s responsibilities. In particular, companies are splitting AI, digital transformation, and tech oversight away from the CFO and making them separate roles with new C-suite positions.

In December, tire manufacturer Titan International moved its CFO to a new chief transformation officer role and promoted its chief accounting officer to be CFO to lead global financial reporting and controls. The aim is to increase bandwidth and accelerate AI adoption, said the tire giant. 

Then in January, Coca-Cola removed tech strategy from the CFO’s mandate and created a new chief digital officer role to speed technology adoption.

This is part of a wider trend towards expansion and elevation of tech leaders within the C-suite. For example, nearly half of FTSE 100 companies now have chief AI officers (CAIOs), according to search firm pltfrm.

Connor Augustyn, director at consulting firm West Munroe, said if the CFO has to execute digital transformation, it can clash with their core duties.

“Many organizations are recognizing that the CFO’s wider remit doesn’t allow them to be as effective as they could because they’re pulled in way too many directions,” he said. 

Finance leaders at private and smaller and mid-sized companies are facing similar challenges. 

Blaz Korosec, CFO at real estate investing platform Investorade, operates at the crossroads of finance, operations, and technology daily. The CFO role can become too big when it includes finance, HR, legal, IT, procurement, data, security and “whatever strategic thing we need this month”, he said.

“I’ve seen the seat ballooning from financial steward to technology gatekeeper,” said Korosec. “That made sense in the first innings of digital spend as [CFOs could] impose ROI discipline. But throwing AI into the mix can stretch risk factors well beyond cost into uptime, system reliability, and operational agility.” That can drastically slow execution and make operations brittle.

Augustyn sees the CFO role as now occupying three key areas:

Modern CFOs have the right skills for all those three, he said. But as IT continues to be rolled into their remit, they need support from a tactical executor.

The harsh truth is that most CFOs are not solo heroes. They can’t drive both profitability and tech transformation single-handedly.

In fact, no role can do this alone, according to a recent Deloitte analysis. CFOs’ financial and strategic disciplines are crucial to realize full value from tech investments, but only when they collaborate with technology and strategy heads.

“In some larger organizations, parts of execution like building data platforms and technology ownership may or should sit with a chief technology officer. But the CFO has to be a critical partner. They are uniquely positioned to connect those investments to financial outcomes,” said Rohini Jain, CFO at financial operations platform BILL.

Saul Mateos is a former CFO of marketing at Coca-Cola, and currently CFO and head of marketing, technology, and HR at healthcare service platform Gain. 

He added, “It’s about deciding whether you need an AI transformation individual in the C-suite,” he said. “If so, who's the right person for it, and how do you enable them to drive that change? The right CFO can take that role and be more equipped than the traditional technology professional. It's rare to see CTOs who have the same business expertise as CFOs.”

However, not every CFO is equipped to handle digital transformation, and that's okay.

If you don’t want to lead digitization, “great, but be careful AI doesn't automate your job,” Mateos warned. “At least make sure you understand what this technology can change.”

Mateos and Augustyn both believe an extra layer of leadership can work at mitigating some scope creep, provided it’s designed effectively with clear communication and reporting lines.

Mateos said covering multiple departments is the reality of the modern CFO-operator. “We're not financial reporters anymore,” he said. “We build the operational engine that powers growth.”

If the CFO must do four different jobs, of course, it’s too big, Mateos added. But not if you have separate heads for each function reporting to you. He argued this structure actually cuts layers, in a way, and speeds things up.

But Augustyn sees that speed as adding additional stress on the CFO. And coming at the expense of operational efficiency.  

“It's not necessarily that the CFO role is getting too big. It's almost like it's starting to get a little bit too wide,” Augustyn said.  “And a lot of organizations are recognizing that the wide remit… doesn't allow them to be as effective as they could be because they're being pulled in way too many directions."

And that can create tension in a CFO’s core responsibilities, according to Augustyn. To keep up with the quick pulse of business execution while maintaining fiduciary duty, the CFO is forced to oscillate between two very different speeds, which ultimately stretches them too thin, he said. 

“You're asking them to be a fiduciary responsible party for the organization that's focused on enterprise value... but then you're also having them try and focus their time on technology decisions and digital decisions and the speed of both of those," he added.  

For Korosec, the core issue at stake isn’t the size of the technology portfolio itself, but a fundamental mismatch between financial governance and operational velocity where "minute-by-minute" demands are bottlenecked by a review process designed for a much slower era. 

By forcing high-speed AI and system-reliability decisions through a traditional CFO lens, the organization inadvertently trades "decision velocity" for administrative oversight, turning 48-hour agility into 14-day stagnation, he said. 

Korosec added, ultimately, the existence of "brittle operations" proves that while the CFO may have the capacity to manage the data, they can’t quite keep up with the pace, resulting in CFOs who are technically accurate on paper but could end up dangerously out of sync with real-time business needs.

With such hectic operations, can a CFO really be effective across the day-to-day finance operation, overseeing non-finance functions and leading a digital transformation?

That’s not an indictment of CFO skills. Instead, CFOs often inherit functions that can benefit from generalist oversight and proximity to finance like HR, procurement, or IT, simply because they lack a natural home. But alongside a specialist domain like digital transformation?

Ultimately, a CFO might not be able to be both wide and deep at the same time.

Tackling your board’s questions BEFORE they ask:

Want more? Check out the Secret CFO’s deep dive into the mechanics of storytelling in our most recent Playbook, and find out what to do when the CEO plays fast and loose with expenses in last week’s Mailbag.

And don’t miss the next Boardroom Brief on March 19th, where we’ll wrestle with the sticky question: AI tools, build or buy?

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