The 2025 story of the office of the CFO was not one about finance becoming more powerful or automated, much less agentic.
What happened during 2025 was that the finance function’s core mandate around controllership and a steady hand on the balance sheet became more relevant and more deeply embedded across enterprise operations than ever before.
The department’s role was not without tension. In a year shaped by uncertainty, the chief financial officer proved less a gatekeeper of numbers than an orchestrator of decisions. Balancing speed with control, innovation with reliability and ambition with discipline remained difficult. But for many organizations, the expanding mandate of the CFO proved essential to navigating the year’s biggest decisions.
PYMNTS coverage and proprietary data from 2025 highlight that this evolution was enabled by real-time visibility into operations, modern cloud-based finance platforms and integrated planning tools that repositioned financial planning and analysis (FP&A) as a forward-looking, scenario-driven function. This helped CFOs accelerate decision-making and gain ground in an uncertain environment.
Read more: Uncertainty Is Complicated, but Working Capital Strategies Should Be Simple
CFOs Focused on Cash Flow and Working Capital
For much of the last two decades, working capital occupied an odd place in corporate finance. It was important, closely monitored and rigorously reported, yet rarely discussed as a source of competitive advantage.
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But what PYMNTS documented this year was a clear break from this legacy mindset. As 2025 comes to a close, CFOs are no longer managing liquidity defensively. They are deploying it offensively.
What’s changed is ownership. Receivables are no longer just AR’s problem; they influence pricing, customer onboarding, payment choice architecture and even product design, while at the same time, payables are being coordinated with procurement strategy, supplier health and ecosystem leverage — not just days-payable targets.
“The Growth Corporates Working Capital Index 2025-2026,” a Visa report published in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, found that working capital efficiency can unlock $19 million in average savings for middle-market companies.
Technology has played a crucial role, but the real breakthrough for CFOs wasn’t automation for its own sake but the visibility it generates.
Read also: Building Inside Legacy Systems Helps CFOs Capture New Payments Value
Data Was the Difference Maker for Financial Infrastructure
In an environment defined by persistent uncertainty, supply chain fragility, and rapid technological change, strategic planning for CFOs has become less about long-range forecasts and more about probabilistic thinking.
A PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Revising the Roadmap: How Tariffs Are Transforming CFOs’ Strategic Planning” found nearly 3 in 4 chief financial officers have changed their investment strategy this year.
That has made data fundamental to decision-making, enabling CFOs to rethink procurement as a lever for operational resilience, map out supply chains in real time and put corporate treasuries to work in new and innovative ways. Real-time data feeds and structured capabilities emerged as a competitive capability during 2025, and one whose absence inadvertently shone a light on the technical debt gaps accumulating within existing finance stacks.
This evolution has transformed FP&A from a backward-looking function into a forward-facing one. Rolling forecasts, scenario modeling and dynamic resource allocation allowed companies to respond faster to changes in demand, cost structures or competitive dynamics this yar.
It also means that modernization of the finance technology stack became a strategic priority, not a back-office upgrade in 2025. Cloud-based ERP systems, integrated planning tools, and data platforms are what now increasingly form the backbone of enterprise visibility.
See also: Why CFOs Who Prioritize Cash Flow Improvements Start With Receivables Innovation
AI Moved From Responsible Experiment to Cautious Enablement
No discussion of the year in finance would be complete without mention of artificial intelligence. In 2025, CFOs asked, “Where does AI actually belong in the business, and what should our ROI look like?”
The answer, increasingly, was not in flashy proofs of concept but embedded into existing workflows. AI investments in the CFO’s office during 2025 were more targeted, tied to specific outcomes like faster close cycles, improved forecast accuracy, stronger controls and better capital visibility.
A PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” published Oct. 24, introduced a new metric for agility: Time to Cash™. The report found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead, and 70% of firms surveyed already use at least one AI tool to manage cash flow.
The B2B PYMNTS 2025 event, “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement,” highlighted this shift of AI maturation. At the same time, as the expert panels made clear, artificial intelligence only performs as well as the data and controls around it.
Read more: How 16 Industry Leaders Are Putting AI to Work in B2B Payments
Risk, Compliance and Trust Took Center Stage
As finance functions became more digital and interconnected, the scope of risk overseen by CFOs expanded accordingly. In 2025, financial risk could no longer be separated from cyber risk, data privacy, regulatory exposure or third-party dependencies.
Data from PYMNTS Intelligence in the August edition of The 2025 Certainty Project report, “Vendors and Vulnerabilities: The Cyberattack Squeeze on Mid-Market Firms,” found that attackers frequently seek to compromise a vendor first, then use the trust relationship to infiltrate their target firm.
Technology played a central role. Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The AI MonitorEdge Report: COOs Leverage GenAI to Reduce Data Security Losses” shows that 55% of companies are employing AI-powered cybersecurity measures.
Continuous controls monitoring, automated reconciliations and real-time audit trails helped reduce CFO reliance on periodic, manual reviews. When controls are designed into workflows, compliance becomes less about checking boxes and more about ensuring resilience.
As a result, governance frameworks for artificial intelligence and data were a CFO priority for 2025 and will be one for 2026 as well. Clear ownership of models, documented assumptions, version control, and validation processes are now part of the finance playbook.
In many organizations, the CFO is emerging as a key partner to the CIO and chief risk officer in defining enterprise-wide standards for responsible technology use.
Read more: How Payments Automation Helps CFOs Keep Up With Their Own Data