How Finance Leaders Are Rewriting the Performance Agenda

Finance leaders face more exacting demands today than at any point in recent memory. Boards and CEOs expect quicker insight into how market shifts, cost pressures, and customer behavior are shaping day-to-day performance. Leadership teams rely on finance to interpret disruption, frame the choices that follow, and keep the business oriented toward the strategic priorities that matter most.

Most teams try to meet that bar with systems built for a slower world. Reporting cycles are heavy, forecasts rely on manual work and scattered data, and regulatory demands continue to grow. The cumulative effect is a function pulled toward backward-looking tasks at a time when the business needs more forward-looking guidance.

This moment calls for a different kind of finance leadership. (See Exhibit 1.) The role is shifting away from stewardship and toward performance leadership, with greater emphasis on foresight, commercial judgment, and real-time decision support. To understand what this evolution requires, we spoke with ten senior finance leaders who are already moving in that direction. Their experiences show how the function can reset its mandate and build the capabilities that it will need for the next phase.

Leading Finance Through Uncertainty

The operating environment has become exponentially more volatile in recent years. Shifts in trade policy, energy prices, and regulations alter outlooks overnight. Large moves in markets, supply chains, and currencies make it hard to plan even a quarter ahead. Digitization and the rise of AI add new layers of possibility and complexity. These pressures are redefining what the function must deliver and require leaders to play a more strategic “chief performance” role.

To meet that bar, finance needs sharper ways of gauging exposure, shaping choices, and preparing the organization for what may come next. Three priorities stand out: defining acceptable risk, determining the optimum path, and building decision-ready data.

Define What Risk the Company Can Carry

A core component of performance leadership involves helping the organization form a clear view of its risk tolerance. Finance brings the perspective needed to gauge how much uncertainty the business can absorb and where the real limits sit. The goal of finance should be to support the business in taking appropriate calculated risks. Instead of asking, “What can we lose,” ask “Where can we create value, and where do we need to protect it?” Applying that lens will help teams quantify what the business can absorb, distinguish acceptable risk from unacceptable exposure, and translate those choices into day-to-day guidance.

In practice, maturing a company’s risk appetite means giving leaders a common basis for making decisions in ambiguous circumstances. Finance surfaces the stakes, frames the alternatives, and shows how different levels of risk shape commercial and financial outcomes. The question becomes not just how much volatility exists, but how much the organization is prepared to carry—and why. That clarity keeps decisions steady when conditions shift.

Fride Seljevold Methi, senior vice president of performance management and risk at Equinor, captured the discipline behind this work. “We have worked on maturing the concept of risk appetite. It is helpful in framing conversations where we are confronted with high volatility and low predictability. Aligning on our appetite for changes in identified key risks is a way to balance opportunity and protection across commercial, technical, financial, and regulatory dimensions.”

Determine the Best Risk-Adjusted Path

Once the company’s risk appetite is clear, finance must translate it into choices that the business can act on. This requires forecasting that updates rapidly and scenario modeling that shows how different conditions are likely to affect the P&L, balance sheet, and cash. The goals are to narrow decisions to the variables that matter most and to refresh the outlook as new information arrives. Modern tools make achieving these goals practical. A process that BCG calls “dynamic steering” uses AI- and machine learning–based algorithms, automated data flows, and driver-based models to assess multiple futures in real time. Companies using this approach have improved their forecast accuracy by up to 40%, freeing teams to focus on insight generation rather than rote reporting.

Antonio Portaluri, group chief accounting and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance officer at Ferrari, explained, “Upon the announcement of new tariffs in the United States, the finance team immediately conducted an overnight ‘what-if’ scenario analysis to determine potential profit losses and formulate a response strategy. Within 24 hours, we publicly announced how Ferrari would face the new tariffs, reaffirming our commitment to prioritizing maximum client attention and protection.” 

Tradeoffs are the hard part. Choosing the optimal risk-adjusted path means engaging in ruthless prioritization and consciously deciding what not to do. Finance leaders need to help their colleagues evaluate investments and hold the line on value creation.

Build Decision-Ready Data

Leaders need information that the function can use for forming real-time judgments. That starts with structure. Finance requires data that ties cleanly to products, customers, and parts of the value chain so teams can model outcomes with confidence and see where different options create or lose value. This requires richer classification, consistent tagging, and systems that can link attributes instantly rather than in overnight batches.

Getting decision-ready data right can be challenging, but it’s worth it. When properly organized, it provides finance with a clear view of what drives margin at the product level, how value builds or erodes over time, and where operational factors shape financial results. It also gives teams information that updates as the business moves, which makes decisions steadier and faster. Nikolas Wirtz, vice president and head of finance transformation at Lufthansa Group, said, “It’s brutally hard to argue that we should spend a lot of money to clean up the data basement when everyone wants immediate results. But if we don’t do it, we will never get the full benefits from AI. You cannot fix a complex data landscape in half a year, and certainly not on a small budget.”

Executing the Performance Agenda

Widening the mandate is one thing. Delivering on it is another. In their more strategic role, finance leaders create value by pairing the right tools with the right people, drawing on expertise across the business, and building operating models that enable human judgment and technology to reinforce one another in real time. The work centers on three areas: prioritizing appropriate tools, orchestrating expertise, and challenging the operating model.

Prioritize Tools That Lift Performance

Technology is central to the performance agenda, but only if it is applied with purpose. Many teams start with scattered pilots, which may seem low-risk but rarely change outcomes. Across industries, the median ROI from AI is just 10%, far below the 20% that many companies target. Broad experimentation spreads effort thin and limits impact.

A better approach is to focus on a small set of use cases that move real performance levers and build on one another. Design each solution around a measurable business outcome, and sequence them so each step becomes the basis for the next. For example, a forecasting upgrade can become the foundation for dynamic pricing or inventory optimization.

Working with a “digital twin” offers a way to deepen this approach. Instead of looking at isolated data points, the model creates a connected representation of key financial and selected nonfinancial drivers across products, customers, suppliers, and operations. Other functions already use similar constructs to gain real-time visibility into granular activity. As applied to finance, this kind of unified model sharpens scenario analysis, improves cross-functional comparisons, and raises the quality of enterprise decision making.

Some teams are already shifting in this direction. George Anderson-Brown, vice president of corporate and strategic finance at American Express Global Business Travel, explained how simple business intelligence dashboards created immediate value: “Our trading-volume dashboard has become essential to our executive decision-making process. We have a strong adoption rate, with leaders primarily using mobile devices. This demonstrates both the demand for actionable insights and the effectiveness of keeping solutions simple and accessible.”

When finance chooses use cases in this way, each investment compounds. Capabilities scale faster, teams spend less time re-creating workstreams, and insight improves with every iteration. As Lars List, senior vice president of business controlling digital at E.ON, put it, “Think big, don’t pilot randomly—start small where it moves the KPI, then scale.”

Orchestrate Expertise

Combining deep expertise in business drivers and strong technical execution can materially improve performance. Finance is the natural convenor for this work. Its position at the intersection of performance, risk, and operations gives the function a clear vantage point and makes it a natural choice to play a central role in shaping how decisions get made.

Leaders must bring together people who see different parts of the answer. Controllers who work closest to the financials, tax specialists who understand regulatory implications, data scientists who can manage complex information, supply-chain leads who know operational constraints, and colleagues fluent in advanced analytics and emerging tools can all contribute insights that sharpen choices. Finance connects these pieces and helps the organization see the full picture.

This demands experts with oversight—finance leaders who deeply understand their domain and see how their choices affect the rest of the business. They pressure-test assumptions and show how different options will play through the P&L, the value chain, and the customer. It’s a more collaborative role that more thoroughly integrates finance into the business’s decision-making process. Yana Medvedeva, head of finance transformation at Unilever, explained, “Finance has to be much closer to the business—almost becoming a business function. It’s no longer just about reporting numbers, but about being a challenging partner who can shape direction.”

Finance also needs this orchestration inside its own walls. The issues that shape performance cut across functions, and the work of finance depends on teams that effectively blend technical depth with broader commercial understanding.

SAP’s experience shows the impact. As part of its finance transformation, the company created a central forecasting group staffed equally with controllers and data scientists, replacing hundreds of separate forecasts with one shared view of performance. The result was greater accuracy, less bias, and a foundation for faster, more consistent decisions. Sebastian Behrendt, member of SAP’s extended board and head of global finance, said, “Before, with 500 controllers, everyone reinvented the wheel in their own way. Now we’ve eliminated bias and improved accuracy.”

Teams that operate this way deliver higher-quality decisions and build capabilities that compound over time.

Dare to Challenge the Operating Model

Finance cannot capture the value of new technology without rethinking how the company organizes work. AI and automation cut across old lines of responsibility, so the structure of the function must evolve with them. As technology takes on more routine activity, teams can shift their attention toward areas where human judgment matters most, including strategic thinking, workflow design, and the ability to optimize output from the tools they use. The pace of work changes, too. Tech-enabled teams can replace long, sequential processes with faster cycles of production, iteration, and oversight.

The shift requires formats that make continuous operating model adjustments possible. Standard processes need to be reviewed as new systems roll out, whether in the form of ERP upgrades or the introduction of agentic AI into day-to-day workflows. Once processes improve, finance must strive to keep them current. Leading teams build short review cycles after each change to understand what no longer fits and to redesign before friction builds. Over time, the rhythm of review cycles helps keeps the function aligned with the tools that support it.

Some companies are building this discipline into day-to-day work. For example, Siemens Healthineers encourages employees to surface small digital challenges and work with colleagues to develop practical solutions to them. Bernadette Rinderle, the company’s global head of accounting and controlling, explained, “We’re introducing peer-to-peer coaching. Someone with a small digital use case or problem statement is paired with another colleague, and they build the solution together—creating real networking effects and shared ownership.”

Building Capability That Lasts

The shifts described so far—in how finance steers risk, uses data, deploys tools, and organizes work—change what the function does. But whether those changes last depends on what leaders build inside the function. The finance leaders we spoke with were consistent on this point. (See Exhibit 2.) They talked about raising the level of judgment in the work, strengthening finance’s ability to influence decisions across the business, and establishing routines that make new ways of working the norm rather than the exception. BCG describes these objectives as leading with the head, the heart, and the hands. And BCG research has found that 96% of organizations that follow this model see sustained performance improvement.

Lead with the Head

As finance takes on a broader advisory role, teams need sharper technical judgment and stronger commercial understanding. Acquiring these capabilities starts with fundamentals that leaders told us they struggle to get right: clean, connected data and tools that actually change decisions. Teams today need be literate in predictive models, comfortable with data structures that cut across functions, and able to explain what analyses mean for business choices. Leaders put this in motion by raising expectations for analytical rigor, tightening decision framing, and using rotations to expose people to the way operations and markets work.

As E.ON’s Lars List noted, “Finance must own data in breadth, depth and quality to speed preparation and analysis, strengthen performance steering, and enable AI-readiness. To walk the talk, finance leaders need to push to harmonize the data landscape, combining financial and operational data.” Rotations can be a powerful way to build this exposure. Patric Somlo, senior vice president of corporate finance at Lonza said, “We rotate people every three years. It’s our baseline rule. The first year they learn, the second they perform, the third they have real impact — and then they move. It keeps talent growing and keeps the organization fresh.”

Lead with the Heart

People will accept the responsibilities that come with stepping into a stronger advisory role only if they feel trusted and equipped to do so. Leaders build that confidence through clarity on goals, patience with learning curves, and generosity with credit. They sketch the problem and let the team determine the specific path to take. They give individuals stretch roles that broaden commercial judgment. And they create win-win situations with partners by understanding what matters to them and by helping teams tailor their message accordingly.

Communication is central here. Teams need to speak clearly to nonfinancial audiences, avoid overloading them with information that lacks a crucial “so what,” and make tradeoffs legible. These skills take time to build. As Yana Medvedeva of Unilever explained, “Finance leaders underestimate how much communication shapes outcomes. You have to explain complex issues in simple language, land difficult messages, and influence people in tough situations. It’s becoming one of the most important capabilities in modern finance.”

Lead with the Hands

Transformation lasts when new expectations become routine. Finance needs to adopt habits that help teams apply new skills, refine them as systems evolve, and stay aligned with the business as it changes. Leaders support this process by creating structured forums for problem solving, encouraging team-driven design, and making sure that people understand why workflows are shifting. These practices build ownership and keep the function responsive.

Roche provides a clear example. Svenja Amrhein explained that the company’s R&D finance redesign worked because the teams themselves shaped the new structure. “When a large part of your organization signs up to be part of those design teams—that’s when you know you’ve done it right.” Leaders turn such moments into routines to ensure that the organization does not revert as responsibilities grow.

Finance has become the engine of foresight. Next-generation CFOs are not just stewards of control but architects of performance, helping the organization look ahead, act swiftly, and invest wisely. Leaders who build these capabilities now will shape how their organizations make choices and will set the bar for what finance can contribute in the years ahead.