How the CFO Role Is Evolving

The CFO role has always included two jobs: keeping score and shaping strategy. What’s changed is the balance between them. Deloitte’s Finance Trends 2026 report, based on a survey of 1,326 global finance leaders, found that 57% now play a leading role in shaping their organisation’s strategy, and that these strategy-influencing leaders manage 20% more responsibilities than peers who remain focused on financial stewardship alone. 

That shift is well documented, but it doesn’t happen by itself. It depends on three enablers working together: systems that free up time, skills that shift from technical to commercial, and team structures that reorganise around business partnering rather than transaction processing (source: Deloitte, Finance Trends 2026). 

Here’s what we cover:

What the shift from scorekeeper to strategist actually means 

A scorekeeper CFO produces accurate, timely numbers about what already happened: the close, the management accounts, the statutory reporting. A strategist CFO does that as a baseline and also shapes what happens next, sitting in decisions about pricing, investment, market entry and resource allocation before they’re made rather than reporting on them afterwards. The two aren’t mutually exclusive; the shift is about how much of the CFO’s time and attention moves from the first to the second. 

None of that shift happens because a CFO decides to spend more time in strategy meetings. It happens because the systems, skills and team structure underneath the role change enough to make it possible. 

Enabler one: Systems that free up time for analysis 

The most basic constraint on any CFO’s move toward strategy is time, and most of that time is currently spent on data assembly rather than analysis. The Access Group’s 2026 survey of 400 UK mid-market CFOs and Finance Directors found that finance teams lose an average of 20 hours a month consolidating fragmented data across disconnected systems, and that 84% of respondents were planning to switch finance software as a result (source: The Access Group, Mid-Market Finance Report 2026).

Twenty hours a month is roughly two and a half working days, recovered only when the underlying systems stop requiring manual reconciliation between them. 

This is the same constraint covered in why UK finance teams can’t close faster: a close that consumes most of the month leaves little time for the analysis that strategic input actually requires. 

Enabler two: Skills that shift from technical to commercial 

Systems create the time; skills determine what happens with it. Deloitte’s research found that 64% of finance leaders plan to build more technical and commercial capability into their function, reflecting a broader shift in what CFOs are expected to bring to the table: not just technical accounting expertise, but the ability to read a market, model a decision, and communicate a recommendation to non-finance stakeholders. 

For CFOs and FDs newly stepping into this expanded remit, this shift often shows up earliest in the first few months of a new role. See our new CFO’s first 90 days checklist for what tends to matter most early on, and our overview of financial planning software for the tools that typically support this more commercial, forward-looking way of working. 

Enabler three: Team structure built around business partnering 

The third enabler is organisational. Finance functions built around transaction processing, one team per process area, tend to reinforce a scorekeeper mindset by design, since the structure itself is built around producing accurate historical numbers. Functions further along this shift tend to layer a business partnering structure on top: analysts and finance leads embedded alongside commercial, operational or sector teams, translating finance data into decisions those teams can act on directly. 

This shows up distinctly by sector. In financial services specifically, the pressure to combine regulatory rigour with commercial agility has pushed this restructuring further and faster than in many other industries; see sustainable growth for financial services firms and Sage Intacct’s financial services experience for how that plays out in practice. 

Final thoughts: What this means for CFOs and FDs building the case internally 

None of these three enablers moves quickly on its own. Systems change takes a business case and a transition period. Skills development takes time and, often, different hiring. Team restructuring takes buy-in beyond the finance function itself. What the data suggests is that businesses treating these as three connected changes, rather than picking one, tend to make the shift faster than those addressing them in isolation. 

For CFOs already working through what a more decision-oriented reporting structure looks like in practice, two related pieces are worth reading alongside this one. 

Explore Sage Intacct for how the underlying finance system fits into this shift as one of the three enablers, not a replacement for the other two.