Today’s CFOs are serving as “cross functional” leaders in an age where businesses are asking for more data analysis and quicker scenario planning to keep pace with rapid change — a shift that’s having a ripple effect throughout the whole of the finance function, said Chad Hesters, CEO of executive search firm Boyden.

As finance chiefs are being brought “into a lot more strategic decision-making, risk management, digital transformation” or other activities, the rest of the finance function has seen their own roles evolve to ensure they can offer the necessary support to strategically-minded CFOs, Hesters said in an interview.

With financial leaders being asked to provide their CEOs, boards and fellow C-suite members with key insights for decision-making, that “means that their teams, F&PA, controller systems, they have to be proficient in data analytics, automation tools and financial forecasting and scenario planning,” Hesters said.

The shrinking of financial siloes

CFOs have seen their list of responsibilities grow over the past few years; in a 2024 survey by Egon Zehnder, 82% of finance chiefs said they had taken on new responsibilities such as mergers and acquisitions and corporate development. Finance chiefs are also still responsible for the traditional financial processes businesses need to operate successfully, however — and without the support of other financial leaders, they can quickly find themselves overwhelmed.

“I think, CFOs, as a result…they probably feel a little bit overloaded,” Hesters said. “If they have a good team, they can maintain a good work life balance.”

To meet these broadening expectations, the finance function is evolving as well, Hesters said, including the traditional roles of the controller, the head of financial planning & analysis, and the chief accounting officer. Only one-fifth of CFOs said their work-life balance was “poor,” Egon Zehnder’s survey found, with 51% classifying it as “okay” and 29% classing it as “good.”

With CFOs becoming “cross-functional leaders,” areas that were previously siloed — such as the accounting and finance functions — are now becoming more collaborative, for example, with the CFO acting as a nexus point.

“Gone are the days when the controller’s organization can sit and just close the books…and the treasurer can just manage cash flow,” Hesters said. “But again, that means that CFOs, by default, have to have a good understanding and connect all the dots in those areas and deal with a rate of change that can be dizzying.”

Preparing for the next wave

Hesters has served as CEO for the Tarrytown, New York-based Boyden since February 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to joining Boyden, he held a variety of roles for fellow executive search and advisory firm Korn Ferry, and started his career as an intelligence officer for the U.S. Navy. Previous experience also includes stints at Heidrick & Struggles, Hunt Oil Company, and Shell.

Over the course of his career, Hesters has seen several trends influence the evolution of the CFO’s role, he said. The first “wave of change” he saw in his career was the aftermath of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which created “this new external pressure, both coming and going into the CFO function” as businesses aimed to reduce operation risks and comply with new requirements, he said.

“That wave generated the need for CFOs and their controllers in particular, to have better systems, control processes and accounting systems that could validate the requirements they had to report on,” he said.

The second major “wave” is still ongoing, Hesters said — the finance function is currently right in the middle of changes being driven by emerging technologies like automation and artificial intelligence, which are impacting how they approach both day-to-day and strategic processes. The amount of data the finance function is being asked to collect and assess is growing exponentially, changing not just how the finance team needs to execute certain functions, but the skills they need to do so.

“What's happening is you're finding CFOs putting a price on agility, on their team's ability to be agile and be continuous learners,” Hesters said.

Failing to have access to enough data in the present world is a bygone issue, he said — now, they need to be able to control and to act upon that data flow. That’s “requiring people to have different skill sets, a different view of the world, a different understanding of technology integration,” he said.