CFO Leadership

Somewhere in the world, there’s a finance team that’s a little ahead of you. They don’t necessarily have a data engineer or an AI strategist, and their stack looks basically the same as yours. They’re ahead because their head of FP&A spent an afternoon trying something new with AI. They asked a lot of questions of a tool they didn’t fully understand yet. What they got back wasn’t perfect, but it was useful enough to share with the team. Then the team started trying it too.

AI is making finance work quicker and easier, says Ian Goodkind, CFO of Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh. But it is also raising important questions about how data is used, where it originates and how it is protected. In a conversation with CFO Leadership, Goodkind notes that “addressing those governance questions around issues like data lineage or exposure ensures that AI-enabled insights are aligned with compliance expectations.

For Dan Barzily, his leadership advantage comes from a varied career—from engineering to consulting, chief of staff and chief strategy officer positions. Now he serves as the CFO of payables automation company Tipalti. “My career experience shapes my view of finance as a strategic function,” he says.

Too many CFOs treat the supply chain as something to monitor—not something to influence. Andrew Rader thinks that posture is costing enterprises far more than they realize. Rader is a managing director at Maine Pointe, a global supply chain and operations consulting firm based in Boston. In an interview with CFO Leadership, he shares how CFOs can find the warning signs buried in operational data, allowing leaders to stop chasing variance and start handling it before the impact strikes.

The AI boom. Tariff shocks. Two ongoing wars. When new geopolitical issues or disruptions arrive on the scene, it’s an understandable assumption to silo the potential impact within the market or supply chain operations. But Omar Choucair, CFO of financial software company Trintech, makes the argument that it’s finance leaders that need to be on guard for crises like these. “I think CFOs are even on higher alert than they would’ve been before because the risk has increased a lot.

Last year, 76 percent of U.S. organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud, according to a survey from the Association for Financial Professionals. The losses can be substantial; an October 2025 report from TransUnion found that businesses globally estimate losing an average of 7.7 percent of annual revenue to fraud, or roughly $534 billion across surveyed businesses, with U.S. companies reporting higher losses on average.

Editor’s note: CFO Leadership is hosting a webinar, “Stop Accepting Double-Digit Health Plan Increases,” August 5 on how to interpret what is driving your renewal, what data to request and when, and how to assess whether your current plan remains competitive. Register here. Healthcare costs have become one of the most reliable line items on the American CFO’s budget—reliably rising, reliably outpacing revenue and, for most finance leaders, reliably outside their control.

If an organization doesn’t input customer and vendor data in a consistent way across the enterprise, a whole host of finance-related issues can arise—including the risk of inaccurately recognizing revenue or even making duplicate payments.

The landscape of finance is undergoing a radical shift as blockchain capital markets begin to redefine how lending and capital infrastructure operate. Macrina Kgil is at the forefront as CFO of Figure Technology Solutions, a company using blockchain technology to provide a capital marketplace for businesses and also for loan buyers on the other side.

CFOs are feeling better about business than they have in more than a year. In CFO Leadership’s Q3 CFO Confidence Index, finance chiefs rate current business conditions a 6.0 out of 10, up 8 percent from 5.5 in the second quarter and back to where confidence stood at the end of 2025. That is the highest level recorded since the first quarter of 2025 (6.7) and back into “Good” territory, according to our 10-point scale.