The financial landscape in which you work is ever-evolving, presenting CFOs like you with new CFO challenges and CFO trends that will shape roles and responsibilities into the future. Learning more about these changing dynamics is vital as you seek to deliver effective leadership in 2025 and beyond.
You probably expect us to talk about “AI” or “automation” around now, so we will not disappoint you. However, the truth is those are yesterday’s rising stars. It’s time to go beyond communicating generalizations about hypothetical applications for financial trends and technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a trend. It’s a tool and part of more significant CFO trends you need to be aware of, use, and master as a CFO as we reach the mid-20s. This guide will not simply share the trends you need to focus on but explore how you can apply these trends in various industries.
Top 3 Trends for CFOs in 2025
In 2025, forward-thinking CFOs will focus on these three trends: transforming finance functions with the latest technology, adapting to remote and global teams, and honing in on data-driven decisions to meet diverse needs.
1. Transforming Finance Functions with the Latest Technology
This doesn’t sound like a new trend, but the game has changed. The speed at which you are expected to adapt can be measured in milliseconds, and the potential costs of the technologies you need to keep up are in billions. You could never justify it in the annual budget. Fortunately, some emerging technologies help CFOs adapt faster and more cost-efficiently. These are the technologies (tools) with which you transform your finance functions.
AI and Machine Learning
We didn’t get very far without mentioning it. CFOs will increasingly use these tools to learn, streamline, and improve financial procedures and operations. If you are not already, focus on using AI to enhance data analysis, risk management, and strategic financial planning to improve your organization’s decision-making.
This will eliminate budget waste, freeing up funds for smart investments throughout the organization.
Cloud-Based Solutions and Cybersecurity
As financial functions continue a swift march onto the cloud, CFOs are tasked with ensuring data security. This is not the responsibility of your IT or cybersecurity department or vendor. The buck stops with you, the CFO.
You must commit to learning what modern cybersecurity looks like, how to identify the risks, and where you need to improve security measures to get the most out of the safest cloud accounting technologies and procedures.
Blockchain Integration
In 2025, we expect CFOs to continue to explore how blockchain technology can streamline transactions, enhance transparency, and reduce fraud. You can no longer get by with a limited understanding of this technology. This peer-to-peer network is going to become critical to your future financial strategies.
Industry Examples
In the restaurant industry, AI can streamline supply chain management and optimize inventory levels by predicting customer demand based on historical data combined with market trends. In food services, these technologies can help companies optimize pricing strategies and lean into customer preferences.
2. Adapting to Work From Home & Global Teams
This trend seeks to enhance organizational flexibility, expand talent acquisition pools, and ensure business continuity. However, it requires effective management strategies and the shedding of some outdated ways of measuring performance, evaluating for promotions, and collaborating with teams.
Once again, as the CFO, you must maintain productivity, compliance, and company culture within this more diverse and often distant workforce. Here, we suggest you focus your efforts on the below areas while embracing this CFO trend.
Managing Distributed Teams
Actively build your leadership’s distributed team skills. Managing remote teams is different. Those managing in-person teams for a decade or more will find that their most effective strategies no longer apply. The transition to effective distributed team management is not automatic.
Like any skill, it’s taught, measured, and evaluated for improvement. You cannot afford to allow remote teams to remain under ineffectual management.
Talent Acquisition and Retention
Hiring across the country and around the world presents unique challenges and opportunities. You must understand what constitutes an economic nexus in the regions where your employees live and work. You must ensure you understand SALT (State and Local Tax) requirements.
Automation for Efficiency
Employ automation to manage remote teams more effectively. In 2025, these can, for example, allow for more efficient asynchronous communication across time zones or keep teams up-to-date on project status, responsibilities, and bottlenecks. These keep teams’ products, reduce manual tasks, and eliminate the need for someone to send (or forget to send) updates regularly.
Industry Examples
Manufacturers can use virtual reality for remote equipment inspections and training.
Healthcare organizations employ telehealth platforms to better leverage a flexible work-at-home environment and deploy HIPAA-compliant security measures to safeguard patient data.
3. Honing in on Data-Driven Decisions to Meet Various Needs
Applying this CFO trend allows you and all organizational leadership to make more informed decisions, optimize resources, and align financial strategies with business goals. Here are the areas we recommend you focus on to dominate this CFO trend.
Advanced Data Analytics
When you leverage data analytics (especially those driven by machine learning), you gain insights into trends that might fly under the radar of human perception. Despite their near invisibility, these trends can define market positioning and help you more accurately forecast to drive strategic growth. Discover how strategic financial planning can empower your business with our insights on strategic financial planning.
Personalization and Customer Insights
Build tailored customer experiences through data. Then, align your financial strategies with market demands, driving growth and customer loyalty.
Compliance with Data Regulations
As you expand globally, you must consider regional and international privacy and data management standards and develop strategies to maintain that compliance. This will require CFOs to invest in robust data governance frameworks and put the right security protocols and oversights in place.
Industry Examples
Construction firms can use data to accurately forecast project costs and timelines, reducing wasted resources and enhancing overall profitability.
In Information technology, data analytics with machine learning capabilities can enhance software development processes. It could also predict user needs and potential user experience barriers to correct them before launch, saving time and reducing costly back-end fixes.
Top 3 Challenges for CFOs in 2025
Alongside emerging CFO trends, you’ll face significant CFO challenges, including managing financial risk and uncertainty, balancing strategic planning and growth, and driving digital transformation within your organization. Again, focusing your efforts on making the greatest impact is critical. We recommend you leverage your resources in these challenges and areas.
1. Managing Financial Risk and Uncertainty
By anticipating the ups and downs and changes inherent in any marketplace, you can develop strategies to mitigate risk and protect your company’s financial health.
Economic Fluctuations
Volatility can impact revenues and profitability—for the better or the worse. As a CFO, you must develop an agile approach to your financial strategies. This allows you to “take advantage” of volatilities when they can work in their favor, such as a drop in the cost of raw materials in manufacturing or construction.
It also helps you mitigate the risks associated with downturns, shoring up resources and consolidating efforts to weather the storm. Fractional CFO services can help you stay informed of global trends and adjust your financial plans.
Regulatory Changes
CFO challenges like this one remind us of the necessity for constant vigilance. There is no time to let your guard down or to stop adapting to changing realities on the ground. CFOs must stay ahead of upcoming changes in tax codes, reporting standards, and compliance requirements to avoid penalties, unnecessary doubling back to redo incorrectly completed forms or to fix bad data.
Industry Examples
For franchises, economic fluctuations impact customer spending and revenue streams both seasonally and from year to year. Franchise CFOs can develop risk mitigation strategies, such as diversifying product offerings and implementing flexible pricing models to weather these ups and downs.
In the trucking industry, fuel price volatility and regulatory changes, in particular, can add significant risk. CFOs can create adaptable financial plans that anticipate and manage costs effectively to ensure adequate cash flow and profitability even as costs rise.
2. Strategic Planning and Growth
This involves balancing short-term needs and long-term goals. As a CFO, you need to establish priorities and align your resources and efforts with them. This is the path to sustainable growth.
Balancing Short-term Needs with Long-Term Goals
This requires careful planning and an understanding of your available resources, both realized and through accurate projections. This allows you to pursue stretch goals to grow the organization without sacrificing short-term stability and predictability for your employees. Learn more about how DHJJ’s fractional CFO services can support your strategic planning efforts.
Talent Management
Regarding employees, attracting and retaining top talent should remain a priority in 2025 and is essential to managing the strategic planning and growth challenge. We recommend you continue to invest in employee development and building a positive work culture. We recognize this effort can feel wasted when turnover remains high. However, this investment is essential to reach that turning point at which this begins to pay off.
Of course, competitive compensation packages are critical to keeping top talent in competitive markets. It’s vital to recognize that paying top talent competitively is not an expense. It’s an investment. When you find them, these individuals are roughly 8X more productive than their less engaged peers.
Yet, you don’t have to pay them 8X more. It’s important to evaluate your pay package. Make sure it’s appealing to those who plan to come into your organization and give it their all. Then, put the screening and hiring processes in place that get the right people into those high-value positions.
Industry Examples
Dental practices might want to focus on patient acquisition and retention through marketing while expanding services or locations. A Dental CFO would work to align financial resources with these goals to ensure the practice can continue to care for existing patients, employees, and other stakeholders.
3. Driving Digital Transformation
The digital transformation is clearly a CFO trend on which to capitalize and a CFO challenge to overcome. Again, we recommend you prioritize these areas to knock this CFO challenge out of Wrigley Field.
Technology Integration
It’s not easy to connect new systems to legacy ones. However, completely revamping your tech stack is unrealistic for an existing company that must maintain business operations. Ineffective integration efforts lead to workarounds and inefficiencies that not only destroy productivity. They can increase financial data error rates to concerning levels and diminish employee morale.
While more technology companies are working together to make cross-platform and third-party integration easier, we don’t expect this challenge to go away soon.
CFOs must become masters of the smooth transition, aligning technology investments with organizational goals and understanding their team’s needs during and after the integration. This requires developing change management skills, leading by example, and strategic planning for future needs.
Data Management
Companies today rely on data more than ever and must improve at managing data quality, security, and accessibility. As CFO, you must implement robust data management strategies to both safeguard and get the most out of data collected and managed through cloud accounting.
Industry Examples
In dental practices, this might include allocating funds to implement a new digital patient record management system to enhance patient scheduling capabilities. The CFO would oversee the transition between platforms while ensuring data security measures are in place to comply with industry regulations.
Ensure Financial Health with DHJJ
Making your way through the complexities of financial trends and challenges requires a commitment to continued learning and strategic planning for the new opportunities and risks that 2025 brings our way. At DHJJ, our team of experienced CPAs can help you navigate these changes effectively with fractional CFO, accounting services, and other business advisory services.
Are you ready to take on the trends and challenges of the upcoming year? Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve your goals.
