Center for CFO Excellence

Corporate Finance and Strategy

Chief financial officers have to juggle two primary tasks: driving transformation within the finance group and orchestrating the function’s everyday activities. We partner with CFOs to help them master both challenges for long term success.

BCG’s Center for CFO Excellence draws on the firm’s extensive experience in finance strategy consulting across diverse industries to help CFOs and their teams achieve the highest standard of performance and efficiency—something we call finance excellence. Our CFO consulting approach, which has been the basis for in-depth collaborations with finance leaders around the challenges of a CFO across six core topics.

How We Help CFO Clients

Structure for Excellence. The role of the CFO should include building and overseeing a framework that aligns finance with the company’s overall strategy through clearly assigned mandates, roles, and skills. In our finance strategy consulting work, we partner with CFOs to design well-defined operating models that provides structure for functions, carving out distinct processes and establishing clear rules, guidelines, and procedures for finance interactions.
Steer Performance Effectively. BCG’s Center for CFO Excellence helps finance leaders develop a clear understanding of the company’s business models—both conventional and new—as a means of actively steering performance. We also work with CFOs to find ways to translate steering models into value-adding actions, such as by choosing the right incentive scheme.
Maximize Value Through Effective Capital Allocation. Effective capital allocation, aligned with a company’s strategic priorities, forms the basis for long-term value creation. Our CFO consulting services help finance leaders carefully select investment categories and guide major business decisions by efficiently allocating resources beyond the classic decisions about capex, such as marketing expenditures.
Create World-Class Digital-Finance Processes. Digitization allows a company to systematically counter weaknesses and capitalize on unique opportunities, such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence. BCG’s CFO consultants have the expertise to help finance leaders integrate digital into their businesses, complementing new processes with updated and agile ways of working.
Improve Capital Market Perceptions. In addition to creating tailored strategies, the CFO must proactively and continuously monitor all internal activities that could potentially diminish shareholder returns. Effective communication of large-scale transformations is also key.
Lead a Successful Finance Transformation. BCG’s Center for CFO Excellence helps finance leaders navigate the challenges of a CFO, as well as three phases of transformation: quick wins in the near term that generate reliable and steady funding; a transparent roadmap for the medium term, with meaningful milestones; and, for the long term, the integration of a flexible culture centered on performance and continuous improvement.

Our CFO Client Work

Our work in finance strategy consulting has helped CFOs across a wide range of industries succeed, including:

BCG engaged with a global investment bank to accelerate its finance transformation and address key operating model questions. Our work with the CFO and the team to redefine the operating model for higher efficiency and greater effectiveness resulted in cost savings of up to 20% in several areas.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we helped an international airport operator analyze and refine its capital allocation decision process. This swift pivot on a key CFO strategy led to a capex cost savings of €1 billion.

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Our Center for CFO Excellence team helps help finance leaders transform their finance function operating models to achieve higher efficiency and effectiveness, unleash the power of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, orchestrate companywide transformations to drive the corporate value agenda, and more.