Posted by Mary Milorrie Campos
Aug 10, 2026
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For many organisations, the roles and responsibilities of a CFO are no longer confined in finance alone. While their traditional duties still matter, they’re now expected to handle cross-functional priorities. In turn, this elevates their status as strategic partners for transformational change.
But while this role upgrade increases their value, chief financial officers (CFO) are also increasingly stretched by mounting workloads and greater pressure. Regulatory changes, technology disruptions, market demands, and growth opportunities, among others, are moving all at once.
With so much happening at once, how can they maximise available resources to push forward growth initiatives without compromising financial management and exposing the organisation to financial risks?
What has changed?
Historically, a CFO’s roles and responsibilities centred on protecting an organisation’s financial health. As the most senior role in the finance function, this job entails providing strategic direction and leadership.
Among their key responsibilities include:
- leading and mentoring the finance team;
- identifying risks and risk mitigation strategies;
- maintaining strong financial controls through budgeting,
- cash flow forecasting, and financial planning;
- ensuring compliance with financial regulations, standards, and internal policies; and
- reporting to the board of directors.
They’re also responsible for managing an organisation’s investment strategies. This includes those that could lead to capital investments, mergers and acquisitions, or divestitures.
For many organisations, these responsibilities remain fundamental.
Over time, however, the business environment surrounding these duties has become more complex. Organisations, particularly those in the European Union, now operate amid evolving regulations, economic uncertainty, sustainability expectations, technology developments, and changing investment priorities.
These developments have gradually pushed CFOs beyond their traditional role toward the centre of wider organisational decisions.
This expanded mandate can be grouped into four key areas:
- Digital transformation
- Carbon management
- Capital management
- Risk management
The next section discusses each of these areas in detail.
The expanded roles and responsibilities of European CFOs
A. Digital transformation
Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, reported that 20% of EU enterprises with at least 10 employees used artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in 2025, up from 13.5% in 2024.
Despite this growth, many organisations still struggle to connect their technology investments with their wider business priorities. In a Grant Thornton survey of nearly 100 CFOs across industries, only 14% of CFOs said their technology was fully aligned with their business strategy.
This survey highlights a wider concern: technology investments can deliver limited returns when technology and business strategies are developed in separate silos.
CFOs have a good understanding of business value creation. As such, they’re ideal to be one of the key players in governing the use of technology across the board. Their deep financial background and experience in managing complex enterprise-wide initiatives are critical in assessing whether a digital investment can deliver measurable business value.
At the same time, their strengths in process standardization, internal controls, performance measurement, and accountability position them as effective stewards of transformation. This is especially important when organizations need to connect operational systems with budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and board-level decision-making.
However, technology transformation shouldn’t rest on the CFO alone. Effective governance requires finance to work closely with technology, operations, risk, and other functions to balance innovation with cost, control, security, and long-term business value.
Read also: What is a CFO's Role in Digital Transformation?
B. Carbon management
Carbon now affects compliance, cost, capital allocation, product pricing, supply chain decisions, and competitive positioning. Because of this, carbon management has become an increasingly important CFO responsibility
In an article, McKinsey argues that finance is where carbon must be translated into numbers, especially when companies “have multiple, inconsistent, and ineffective carbon data and analyses across their organizations — or lack meaningful emissions data entirely.” Finance teams can apply established practices in accounting, budgeting, controls, and data management to improve the quality of carbon information and support business decisions.
This is particularly relevant in the EU, where companies within the scope of Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) must report sustainability information under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. Sustainability statements are also subject to assurance, which places greater importance on reliable data, consistent processes, and supporting documentation.
For CFOs, carbon management therefore goes beyond meeting reporting and regulatory requirements. Their role is also to assess how carbon costs may affect budgets, investments, suppliers, margins, and pricing, then use these insights to guide capital allocation and wider business strategy.
C. Capital management
Most major growth decisions carry capital implications. For CFOs, this means assessing whether the organisation has enough financial capacity to invest, where its resources can create the most value, and how much risk its balance sheet can absorb.
This places CFOs at the centre of capital management. Their role covers liquidity, working capital, financing, investments, and shareholder returns where applicable. While these have long been part of finance, economic uncertainty and borrowing costs that remain above pre-2022 levels have increased the importance of disciplined capital decisions.
Liquidity is often the starting point. PwC’s Working Capital Study 25/26 estimated that €1.84 trillion in excess working capital could be released globally. The study also found that longer collection periods and elevated inventory levels continue to tie up cash, with days inventory outstanding in the EU increasing by 19.3% since 2015.
Related: Understanding the Importance of Company Treasury Management
CFOs must therefore oversee receivables, payables, inventory, and the wider cash conversion cycle. They must also use cash flow forecasts and scenario analysis to assess whether the organisation can fund its operations, meet its financial obligations, and continue investing when business conditions change.
Their role also involves guiding decisions on where available capital can create the most value. This may include investing in technology, expanding operations, reducing debt, returning capital to shareholders, or retaining cash to strengthen the organisation’s financial position. Although these decisions are commonly shared with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the board, it’s the CFO who provides the financial analysis needed to compare the available options.
D. Risk management
Financial risk management has long been one of the CFO’s core responsibilities. Traditionally, this involved understanding the organisation’s financial risk profile and assessing the risks attached to major investments, financing decisions, and business strategies.
However, CFOs are increasingly involved in a much wider risk environment, recent surveys found. For instance, Deloitte’s Spring/Summer 2025 Report, which involves 1,542 CFOs across 14 European countries, identified economic conditions, geopolitical risk, and cyber threats as main concerns.
The Autumn 2024 Report, meanwhile, has earlier found that a decline in skilled labour was the leading risk in 11 out of 18 countries, while geopolitical risks and weaker domestic demand were significant concerns in nine out of 18 countries.
Keeping these results into consideration, CFOs must proactively assess how these external threats could affect liquidity, business continuity, forecast accuracy, compliance, and the organisation’s ability to deliver its strategic priorities.
The core objective remains protecting organisational value, but their involvement should extend beyond traditional financial-risk oversight to helping the organisation decide how it should respond.
What remains the same
Despite all these new demands, the CFO’s long-standing core responsibilities remain critical.
The position still stands on two foundations: finance governance and financial strategic guidance.
A. Finance governance
Before taking on wider responsibilities, CFOs must first focus on establishing strong finance governance. After all, every initiative, be it small- or large-scale, depends on the quality of the finance function.
Digital transformation can’t succeed when controls are weak. Sustainability disclosures can’t be defended when reporting processes are inconsistent. Capital decisions also become less reliable when reconciliations, ownership, and financial data are unclear.
As such, a CFO’s role is to give the organisation confidence that the information used for planning, forecasting, and decision-making is accurate and properly supported.
All of these wouldn’t be possible without the right finance team.
Finance chiefs must bring in capable professionals — whether in-house or outsourced — who can help them adapt to changes in systems, regulations, and responsibilities. With the right capabilities in place, CFOs can maintain financial discipline while allowing the organisation to respond to change with greater confidence.
Read next: A CFO's Guide to Finance and Accounting Outsourcing Services
B. Financial strategic guidance
CFOs have long been expected to support business planning, develop financial strategies, prepare forecasts, guide budgeting, and assess long-term investments. These responsibilities remain central to the role because organisations still rely on finance leaders to interpret performance and identify the financial implications of major decisions.
The strongest CFOs maintain this traditional role while broadening the areas where they provide advice. They continue to govern the numbers and guide strategy, but their insights now extend further into operations, technology, sustainability, and resilience.
Moving forward without losing control
CFOs can’t take on every expanded responsibility alone.
To move growth initiatives forward without weakening financial management, they need to be clear about which responsibilities require their direct involvement and which ones can be supported by the wider finance team, other functions, or external specialists.
As mentioned, strong finance governance must remain the starting point. Reliable reporting, clear controls, disciplined processes, and accurate financial data give CFOs the confidence to make decisions while keeping risks visible and manageable.
They must also focus their time on areas where their judgment creates the most value. This includes guiding strategy, assessing investments, challenging assumptions, allocating capital, and helping the organisation respond to financial and non-financial risks.
Outsourcing can help create this capacity without requiring finance chiefs to expand their internal team immediately. Recurring finance tasks, reporting support, reconciliations, and selected controller-level responsibilities can be handled by an external team while the CFO retains oversight.
With clear roles, controls, and communication in place, outsourcing can strengthen the finance function.
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This post was first published on 6 April 2017 and has been updated on 10 August 2026 for relevancy and comprehensiveness.
Edited and updated by Mary Milorrie Campos
