Top 5 Finance Trends and Priorities for CFOs in 2024

Our 2024 Finance Executive Priorities Survey asked 185 CFOs to rank their top priorities and the difficulty of key tasks related to those priorities. Leading transformation and improving the finance function emerge as major themes in the top 5 CFO priorities for 2024.

CFOs report an increasing focus on improving personal effectiveness as they take on more enterprise responsibilities while facing disruptions in the form of emerging technologies and a challenging talent market. Balancing these responsibilities with finding space and time to be a strategic resource to the organization is a key CFO priority. 

Improving the effectiveness of resource allocation and optimizing costs are two traditional tasks that CFOs still consider critical to success — but the way they approach these initiatives is evolving. CFOs are increasingly evaluating cost and investment decisions through an enterprise-first lens of profitable growth and digital transition. 

In addition to the CFOs surveyed, our research includes input from 232 non-CFO finance leaders, including controllers, heads of FP&A, and finance transformation leaders. Specific themes emerging from these leaders include the following:

• Controllers are increasingly focused on the use of technology to automate processes as a strategy to improve the speed, efficiency and accuracy of the close. Accordingly, they rate controllership strategy and org design, and the use of technology to optimize accounting and transactional finance processes, much higher than CFOs do.

Ongoing economic turbulence has created challenges that make traditional approaches to finance ineffective. As you continue to focus on digital transformation and improving the finance function in 2024, expect to encounter obstacles in these and other areas: 

• Capacity. CFOs have far fewer staff dedicated to technology work than the most successful digital leadership models require. Burnout among finance staff is a concern as companies invest in digital transformation activities that demand increased finance support. As your finance function continues to evolve, finding additional team capacity to address multiple transformation initiatives will be a key challenge. 

• Capabilities. Only finance leaders who take direct responsibility for the delivery of digital capabilities have better-than-even odds of realizing the expected benefits from their digital initiatives. Digital transformation brings a range of new capability requirements across the organization that will require you to:

  • Rethink finance operating models and find new ways to organize, govern and evaluate talent 

  • Find an effective balance between leveraging human capital and AI/machine learning tools to create a more agile organization

  • Ensure your leadership team can effectively execute on enterprise strategy and accurately inform decision making