When markets shift and technology moves under them, most finance leaders reach for the same lever: add. Add headcount to cover the gaps, add systems to regain control, add process to contain the risk. It feels prudent. It is increasingly the wrong instinct.
In a recent IMA ‘CFO to CFO’ conversation, two finance chiefs - Jennifer Ryu of RGP and Omar Choucair of Trintech - make the opposite case. The finance function best equipped for disruption is not the largest or the most fully staffed. It is the most adaptable. And adaptability, it turns out, comes from deliberately owning less.
The pressure is quantifiable. According to research Ryu cites, large companies took on an average of 20 transformation initiatives worth $1 million or more in a single year. Every one of them lands on the finance function: systems to migrate, data to reconcile, new numbers the board wants explained. More than half of the 200-plus finance decision-makers surveyed expect to take on still more technology-migration work over the coming year. You cannot simply hire your way through that - particularly not now.
This is where Ryu's central idea bites: organisations no longer need to own every skill set. More than 40% of the finance leaders she surveyed report a skills gap in AI and automation, and nearly one in four report a broader finance-and-accounting gap. The traditional response - post a role, wait months, hope the market delivers - cannot keep pace with how quickly the required skills now change.
The flexible alternative is to decide, capability by capability, what to build in-house, what to automate, and what to bring in from outside only when it is needed. In practice that means reskilling the team you already have, and it means the CFO working far more closely with the rest of the C-suite than finance traditionally has. Over the past year, Ryu notes, 43% of finance decision-makers worked more closely with IT and 32% with HR - because talent strategy and technology strategy have become the same conversation.
“Automating the finance function should be the CFO's highest priority,” says Choucair, and his reasoning is operational rather than fashionable. Manual workflows such as data entry, invoicing and reconciliations are among the biggest hidden risks to a company's agility. They are slow, they wear people down, and burnout resurfaces as errors and late reporting. Automating them, in his framing, is a permanent and cost-effective way to protect both the numbers and the people producing them.
Note what this is not. It is not automation for its own sake, or AI because the board asked about AI. It is the removal of low-value work so that scarce, expensive finance talent can spend its hours on the judgement calls that actually require them.
Both CFOs see the same destination for the capital being freed up. When money loosens - Ryu points to a lower-rate environment - 58% of those surveyed say they would direct new investment into digital transformation and AI first. The CFO's own role is moving with it: away from producing the numbers and towards translating them. Ryu calls the ability to turn data into insight the core, still-evolving skill; Choucair casts the CFO as the company's principal storyteller, tying finance metrics to strategy for the board and investors. Both descriptions quietly assume the mechanical work is already handled - by automation, by outside specialists, by a team no longer buried in manual reconciliation.
The through-line is a change in what resilience means. It is no longer a large, self-sufficient finance department that owns every function behind its own walls. It is a lean core that knows precisely what to build, what to automate and what to borrow — and can reconfigure quickly when the next disruption arrives.
For a founder or a growing SME, that reframing is freeing. You do not need a full finance department, or a permanent CFO salary, to get board-ready numbers and sharper decisions. You need the right capability, at the right depth, at the right moment. That is the premise fractional CFO work is built on: the finance leadership a business needs, when it needs it, without carrying a full executive salary before it is ready to.
Disruption rewards the finance function that can bend. The heavy, fully owned version was never the safe choice. It was only ever the familiar one.
Source: CFO to CFO: Building a Flexible Finance Function in an Age of Disruption - featuring Jennifer Ryu (RGP) and Omar Choucair (Trintech), IMA (Institute of Management Accountants), 2024.
