Top 5 Digital Priorities for CFOs

As we set resolutions, close out the previous year, finalize budgets, and kick off new transformational initiatives, the modern-day CFO naturally prioritizes tasks as a new year begins.

Some priorities remain constant for finance leaders: maximizing working capital, staying financially nimble to fund strategic growth, managing risk, ensuring compliance, optimizing the bottom line, and leveraging financial data to diagnose past and future issues. Instead of adding another item to the agenda, I suggest reframing the only panacea across all these priorities: digital. As technology decisions increasingly fall under the purview of finance leaders and finance technologies evolve at an unprecedented pace, organizations that fail to invest in digital will lag behind their competitors.

Without the right data, workflows, automations, integrations, analytics, or systems, addressing the evergreen agenda items mentioned above becomes daunting at best and impossible at worst. When applied with business-first, human-centered, and incremental methods, digital offers a competitive edge within the office of the CFO. CFOs who embrace AI/ML technologies realize significant business benefits, such as improved financial reporting, proactive risk management, enhanced operational efficiency, and better decision-making. Regardless of an organization’s stage in its digital journey, here are best practices from the SD Digital team on how to derisk, simplify, and accelerate digital in the office of the CFO to drive bottom-line impact across the 2025 agenda.