Understand the critical finance priorities for CFOs to address and discover key actions to make progress against them.
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Top 5 Finance Trends and Priorities for CFOs in 2025
Finance trends and priorities in 2025
Gartner surveyed over 250 CFOs to identify key trends, priorities and challenges for finance in 2025. This year’s top priorities centre around enterprise growth, metrics and analytics, and the expanding scope of the CFO role.
Download the full report to discover:
- Details on the 5 finance initiatives that CFOs are prioritising in 2025
- Trends driving each CFO priority and why action is imperative
- Recommended next steps to lead your finance function in the year ahead
Stay ahead of the top finance trends and CFO priorities in 2025
From expanding enterprise responsibilities and risks stemming from AI, global conflicts, and climate change, CFOs face a complex operating environment in 2025. Learn how the current climate is shaping finance priorities.
- CFO Priorities
- Finance Leader Priorities
- Key Barriers for CFOs
CFO priorities are evolving in 2025
Our 2025 Finance Executive Priorities Survey asked over 250 CFOs to rank their top priorities and the difficulty of key tasks related to those priorities. Data, metrics, and analytics emerged as the top CFO priority for 2025, followed by efficient growth.
Additionally, CFOs ranked time allocation and leadership capacity as a top concern. As boards and CEOs ask CFOs to take on growing enterprise responsibilities, CFOs must be disciplined in delegating day-to-day finance transformation activities to dedicated finance transformation leaders. Effective CFOs recognise that their time is best spent on the unsolved aspects of transformation, which in 2025 will centre more around AI use than traditional automation and finance technology.
Digital finance talent underpins the success of ongoing transformation initiatives and AI adoption. However, most CFOs report a talent gap, with digital talent underrepresented on finance teams by 50-75% optimal levels.
Address finance priorities in 2025 with a strong leadership bench
In addition to the CFOs surveyed, our research includes input from 288 non-CFO finance leaders, including controllers, heads of FP&A, and finance transformation leaders. Specific themes emerging from these leaders include the following:
Controllers must play a strategic leadership role in building a broader technology roadmap, understand the vendor landscape, and drive change management related to ERP upgrades. Accordingly, technology strategy is the second top priority of controllers in 2025.
Similar to the CFO, corporate controllers see data and analytics as a critical area for success in 2025. Controllers are increasingly exercising oversight of financial data systems, focusing on data integrity, risk mitigation and cross-functional collaboration to ensure secure and efficient data access.
Heads of FP&A: With slower growth, pressure on profitability, increasing complexity and uncertainty it is not surprising that planning, budgeting and forecasting processes is the top priority for FP&A leaders in 2025. FP&A leaders have an untapped opportunity to set the business on a profoundly better performance trajectory by enabling business decision makers to see around corners and giving them the confidence to act quicker. At its core, FP&A leaders need to rethink their use of metrics, analytics and reporting and they have placed that as the second priority for 2025.
Finance transformation leaders are no longer just charged with optimising finance workflows, they are now frequently called upon to co-lead strategy and execution for the function. As a result, finance transformation leaders share seven of the CFO’s top 10 priorities. To achieve success in 2025, finance transformation leaders are focused on building successful teams, driving change, running pilots with new technology and managing transformation vendors.
CFO priorities come with significant internal and external challenges
Ongoing economic and geopolitical 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 2025, 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 realising the expected benefits from their digital initiatives. Digital transformation brings a range of new capability requirements across the organisation that will require you to:
Rethink finance operating models and find new ways to organise, govern and evaluate talent
Find an effective balance between leveraging human capital and AI/machine learning tools to create a more agile organisation
Ensure your leadership team can effectively execute on enterprise strategy and accurately inform decision making
Change fatigue. In an environment of constant, rapid change, organisations have seen a 50% decline in employees’ ability to absorb changes before becoming fatigued. Two other key drivers of change fatigue include exertion resulting from the change and the level of disruption to employees’ day-to-day workflow.
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FAQ on top CFO trends
What are the current top trends in CFO leadership?
The top trends influencing CFO leadership align closely with organisational priorities:
- 62% of CEOs selected growth as their top business priority for 2024-2025 – the highest level since 2014.
- AI usage in finance almost doubled in the past year, helping teams automate work, detect errors and gain deeper insights from their data.
- The role of CFO is rapidly evolving, with over 70% of CFOs now shouldering responsibilities beyond finance.
Why is data, metrics, analytics a priority for CFOs?
Accurate data, metrics and analytics are central to finance’s ability to provide agile planning, budgeting and forecasting, as well as its ability to pilot AI solutions. However, a lack of clear ownership and accountability around D&A governance often leads to siloed approaches to governance across the enterprise, which can result in inconsistent data quality, duplication of effort and difficulties in data integration.
How can CFOs and finance executives achieve their priorities for 2025?
To fulfil their strategic priorities, CFOs should:
Embrace the role of executive champion in enterprisewide D&A governance.
Align the organization’s cost structure with differentiated capabilities.
Understand how skills, enabling technologies, data availability and staff acceptance impact the feasibility of different types of AI initiatives.