Stop treating your CFO as a Corporate Secretary
Send this to your CEO and the board. It’s time to redefine the CFO’s role.
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AI is not a magic button. AI is a journey.
I started this newsletter in January and we grew very fast. To celebrate and understand CFOs’ frustrations and what keeps them up at night, I hosted an in-person event in Dubai. Luckily, it was a big success and we tried to make it exciting, fun and full of value.
A lot of CFOs stayed until the end and kept saying how transformational tonight had been for them.
I remember one CFO from a top FMCG company told me that CFOs are still being treated like a corporate secretary.
Today’s letter is a reply to that. Every CEO and board needs to hear it. And for every CFO reading, a reminder: your authority is earned, not given.
Let’s dive in.
Stop Treating Your CFO as a Corporate Secretary
If your CFO spends most days approving invoices, stitching spreadsheets, and preparing decks others don’t read, you are burning the most strategic seat in the company on clerical work.
The role didn’t shrink. Our expectations did.
The modern CFO is not the head accountant.
The modern CFO is the operating system for decision-making. When you reduce that role to meeting minutes and month-end, you don’t get more control. You get less intelligence, slower action, and a weaker business.
What a CFO Actually Is
Stewardship under uncertainty. Finance exists to keep the business alive when the world moves. That means judgments, trade-offs, and timing, not just accuracy.
Focus as a service. The CFO’s job is to force clarity: what matters, in what order, with what constraints.
Story over spreadsheet. Numbers don’t move people. Narratives move people. The CFO translates data into a story bold enough to drive action and sober enough to survive the board.
Forward bias. Close the books, yes. But the value is in what happens next—scenarios, options, and bets.
Hold those four ideas, and every tactical choice becomes easier.
So Why the “corporate secretary” trap happen?
Legacy KPIs reward error-free reporting, not decision speed. So teams optimize for perfect packets delivered too late.
Siloed systems force manual reconciliation. The more fragmentation, the more finance as glue.
Risk culture equates innovation with exposure. We confuse control with slowness.
Tool sprawl creates the illusion of progress while cementing more busywork.
No narrative owner. When nobody owns the story, everyone demands more data.
You break the trap by changing incentives, architecture, and expectations at the same time.
The mindset shift: From keeper of history to builder of outcomes
Ask these 2 questions every week:
What outcome are we trying to create in the next 90 days?
What is the smallest financial mechanism that moves us toward it?
Everything else is noise.
Your job as a CFO is to decide what signal matters.
Every CFO Must Think in 3 Layers
1) Data foundation
One truth: unified warehouse or lakehouse.
Clear dimensions: product, customer, region, channel, cohort.
Hygiene: IDs, master data, audit trails.
2) Agentic workflows
Close agent: pulls subledgers, flags anomalies, and drafts adjusting entries for review.
FP&A agent: updates rolling forecast daily; runs sensitivity; pushes alerts when thresholds break.
Treasury agent: monitors cash windows; drafts transfers; simulates covenant risk.
Spend agent: reads contracts, maps usage, and recommends renegotiations with redlines.
3) Decision room
A living two-page memo: situation → options → recommendation → risks → next checkpoint.
Weekly scenario stand-up: one hour, three scenarios max, decision at the end.
If you implement only the decision room, your culture changes.
If you implement all 3, your speed changes.
The Two-Page Memo Template (steal this)
Page 1: Where we are
Signal: Top 5 metrics vs. last week, last month, and plan.
Movement: 3 lines on what changed and why.
Cash: runway, risk triggers, upcoming obligations.
Confidence: what we know with high certainty and what we don’t.
Page 2: What we do
Options: A / B / C, with impact, cost, and reversibility.
Recommendation: one path, one sentence.
Risks & Mitigations: bullets only.
Next checkpoint: date, metric, owner.
If it doesn’t fit on two pages, the thinking isn’t done.
Metrics that matter (and the ones that don’t)
Keep these front and center:
Cash conversion cycle and runway.
Gross margin by product/cohort (not just blended).
LTV/CAC with payback on realized cohorts.
Sales capacity vs. pipeline realism (close rates by segment).
Net revenue retention and discount leakage.
Operating leverage: opex growth vs. gross profit growth.
Decision speed: time from signal → memo → decision → action.
De-emphasize:
Vanity dashboards with 40 KPIs.
Precision without consequence (arguing over the second decimal).
Historic decks are delivered after the decision window closes.
If a metric doesn’t change behavior, it’s trivia.
Org design: the CFO team you actually need
Head of Decision Intelligence (or Head of FP&A, AI): owns the forecast, the scenario library, and the memo cadence.
Data Finance Lead: owns the model layer, definitions, lineage, and quality.
Automation Lead: owns agent workflows, controls, and auditability.
Business Partners (Sales, Product, Ops): own unit economics and narrative by domain.
Small, sharp, and cross-functional.
Hire for curiosity, communication, and bias to ship.
Where CFOs waste time (and what to do instead)
Wasting time: perfecting a deck nobody reads.
Do this instead: a two-page memo with an appendix link the curious can explore.Wasting time: debating assumptions for a week.
Do this instead: set a test, define the stop-loss, and make the smaller reversible bet.Wasting time: building tools before decisions.
Do this instead: make the decision framework first; tools follow.Wasting time: chasing data every month.
Do this instead: fix the data path once; automate forever.
The Bottom Line
CEOs must stop treating their CFO as a corporate secretary.
That version of the role never created value. It only recorded it.
The AI era removes the excuses for why we waited, why we needed 3 more weeks, and why we thought control required slowness. It gives you clean numbers faster, broader visibility, and strong drafts.
The CFO’s job is to bring judgment, focus, and story.
The companies that win will do one simple thing better than the rest: decide faster on better information. That is the CFO’s job. That is your job.
Start with the memo.
Start with testing AI tools.
Start with a weekly scenario lab. But start now.
When you upgrade the role, you upgrade the company.
Send this to your CEO and stakeholders so everybody can act on Monday.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
Find me on LinkedIn