A CFO’s Guide to Navigating Today's Top Investments and Financial Priorities
CFOs are steering their organizations through a destabilizing environment in 2025. Massive shifts in technology, geopolitics, and regulations are upending the dynamics of their industries and how their own businesses respond. Amid the change, CFOs continue a mission to secure financial security and smart, future-focused investments for their companies.
CFOs are facing unique challenges and constraints in 2025—as well as opportunities for meaningful improvement—in five priority areas:
Transformation and AI Adoption
Leaders across industries are eager to benefit from adopting artificial intelligence (AI) into how their organizations do business, but not everyone is ready.
Progress incorporating digital technology and automation has been slow in many organizations across industries. Digital transformation delays (and, in some instances, stagnating projects) remain common: 2023 Gartner research found that only 19% of boards reported progress on achieving digital transformation goals.
For digital transformation and/or AI adoption to be real priorities in 2025, CFOs need a better read on projects underway. They need to know and understand the statuses, goals, potential impacts, and risks associated with both new and in-process technology projects.
CFOs also need to be part of ensuring their organizations have a framework to identify and mitigate digital and AI-related risks. For example, 68% of financial services firms, according to research by ACA Aponix and the National Society of Compliance Professionals, have not adopted an AI risk management framework.
Data, Metrics, and Analytics
Organizations can’t improve what they don’t measure—but for many, the governance for monitoring, measuring, and analyzing data could use improving.
In Gartner’s 2025 Finance Executive Priorities Survey, “data, metrics, and analytics” was the top CFO priority for the year (an even greater concern than efficient growth, which came in second). Gartner's analysis pointed to “siloed approaches to governance across the enterprise (that) can result in inconsistent data quality, duplication of effort, and difficulties in data integration.” To address these issues, CFOs and their data teams have to design and put into place more comprehensive data governance programs across the business.
Addressing Talent Gaps
Organizations need people with the right skills to implement digital technology, embrace AI, and improve data governance procedures and infrastructure—but most organizations are held back in this area.
Digital talent is underrepresented on finance teams by 50 to 75% of optimal levels, according to the Gartner 2025 Finance Executive Priorities Survey. In 2024, IDC research found that 87% of North American IT leaders experienced digital transformation delays due to skill shortages.
Although attracting and retaining people with digital skill sets isn't easy, organizations that become more digital through transformation are more desirable employers to top digital talent. CFOs can help their organizations get there by encouraging teams to invest in developing digital skills among current employees, as well as by forging relationships that grow their organizations’ digital and AI talent pipelines.
Fraud Protection
Managing and reducing risk is a big part of every CFO’s job, with security and fraud among the biggest risk areas. Payments fraud, for example, happens widely across industries; a whopping 80% of organizations were affected in 2024, according to the AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. It marked a 15% increase over 2023.
It's up to CFOs to make sure finance team members—as well as staff across the business—are trained and up to date on common fraud tactics. These include business email compromise schemes, AI deepfakes, and other spoofing scams from external (and internal) players, along with primarily internal threats, such as check and accounting fraud.
CFOs should establish rules and procedures and implement tools that help their teams detect suspicious payment requests or activities and flag them for verification. Screening payments in real time can help teams spot troubling patterns that indicate fraud—and stop it before it happens.
Efficient Growth
Achieving both top-line and bottom-line growth is a goal for many companies, but it's a hard goal to reach.
Efficient growth is the second-highest priority of 2025 for CFOs, according to Gartner, but 95% of organizations don’t achieve it. Gartner notes that practices like “chasing competitors’ capabilities, aversion to risk taking, overfocus on underperforming investments, and unprincipled cost management and investment decisions” are leading reasons organizations come up short.
To combat these practices, CFOs should know and closely monitor the costs of delivering products and services, and assess how pricing is affecting profitability. They also should evaluate how well the business' appetite for short- and long-term risk (and existing investments, in both cost-cutting and innovation efforts) are serving the business. With this information, CFOs can make ongoing changes that help balance the organization’s growth profile over time.
Financial Resiliency for Today's CFO
Regardless of how quickly or slowly their markets and business environments change, CFOs can’t predict what’s ahead. Having the right partners in their corner, however, can make it easier to navigate changing demands both today and in the future.
Old National, a top 30 U.S. bank headquartered in Illinois, is a trusted partner to Midwestern businesses. Committed relationships with business clients help Old National deliver the best service possible. Working with Old National, CFOs across industries can tackle complex challenges to build businesses that are ready for 2025 and beyond.
For more information, go to oldnational.com/business.
