How today’s CFOs drive business transformations: Takeaways from CFOLC 2025

Summary (TL;DR)

• This article summarizes insights from the Spring 2025 CFO Leadership Conference breakout session, “The CFO’s Role in Driving Business Transformation,” featuring Chad Wonderling (CFO, Zone & Co), Eduardo Arreaga (CFO, Stavvy), and Yoana Land (CFO, Jaya Apparel Group).
• The panel explored how CFOs can lead digital transformation efforts by balancing financial discipline with strategic investments – especially in times of uncertainty, change, and rapid growth.
• The session covered practical strategies CFOs use to lead transformation: Yoana shared a stakeholder communication framework to prevent fatigue, Eduardo showed how credibility and timing helped him shift leadership behavior and delay non-essential investments and all three CFOs reflected on the evolving skills finance leaders need – including IT literacy, cross-functional influence and factual storytelling.

Insights from the breakout session “The CFO’s role in driving business transformation”

72% of CFOs view technology investment as a crucial driver of competitive advantage, and these leaders are increasingly positioned to put finance at the tip of the spear. As digital initiatives accelerate across every industry, CFOs are uniquely positioned to pair financial expertise with tech leadership – and lead transformation from the front.

But turning strategy into execution is where many transformations break down – draining resources, eroding morale and leaving finance to clean up the mess.

This topic took center stage during a breakout panel “The CFO’s Role in Driving Business Transformation” at the Spring 2025 CFO Leadership Conference, where Chad Wonderling, CFO of Zone & Co, was joined by Eduardo Arreaga (CFO, Stavvy) and Yoana Land (CFO, Jaya Apparel Group). Together, they shared hard-won lessons and forward-looking strategies for leading transformation from the finance seat.

Here’s what stood out.

The role CFOs play in powering strategic change

In nearly every industry, companies are facing a technological crossroads. The business world as a whole is contending with significant changes – including, but not limited to, the arrival of advanced generative AI and next-generation ERPs. 

Because of that, many companies are actively rethinking how they operate, scale and compete. But while systems, processes and technologies all play important roles in these strategic shifts, every successful business transformation begins with strong leadership.

So what does this mean for CFOs? Given these circumstances, they can’t afford to continue doing things the way they always have. Instead, they must be active participants in creating and pursuing a clear vision for their company’s future (even if they’re still figuring out exactly what that future might hold).

“Today’s CFOs are really at a pivotal point. We’re no longer just the stewards of a company’s financial health and well-being – we’re the change agents guiding organizations through complexity, ambiguity and even a degree of resistance.” – Chad Wonderling, Chief Financial Officer, Zone & Co

Finding a balance between transformation and discipline

Rethinking your business strategy can open the door to real growth – but that ambition often collides with another priority: financial discipline. CFOs need to navigate this tension to lead transformations that are both bold and sustainable.

A clear vision goes a long way in keeping transformation efforts grounded. For example, when a company plans to acquire another organization, the CFO needs to understand the bigger picture. Is the goal market expansion? New products? Geographic reach? That clarity helps finance weigh decisions more effectively – investing where it matters, and holding back where it doesn’t.

Eduardo Arreaga shared how that strategic clarity helped his team prioritize go-to-market tech tools investments over finance stack upgrades – even sticking with Excel longer than planned – because the business needed growth enablement first. The ability to weigh trade-offs clearly and avoid premature investments helped his team stay lean while scaling.

Improving stakeholder communication about business transformations

Business transformations don’t fail because of technology. They stall when people lose context – or feel left out of the process. 

Yoana Land, CFO at Jaya Apparel Group, shared the approach she now uses in every major project to keep people aligned, involved and motivated throughout the change. “If people don’t believe in it or help build it, it won’t stick,” Yoana said. 

Here’s the framework:

• Map your stakeholders: who they are, what they care about, and how they’re affected.
• Classify them: are they decision makers, influencers, directly impacted teams, or sponsors?
• Plan your communication cadence: decide when and how each group will hear from you – email, town hall, check-ins, pulse surveys, community posts.
• Take communication back in: listen for fatigue, confusion or blockers. Don’t just broadcast – close the loop.

Why empathetic leadership matters

Significant adjustments to business plans don’t just affect key stakeholders – they can also have an impact on finance team members. Because of that, CFOs need to be ready to protect and motivate their people during times of high-stakes change.

So, how can finance leaders ensure their team members feel supported? 

• Regulate office politics: CFOs are in a position to minimize office friction while entrusting the people working for them to handle execution. 
• Check in with the team: While CFOs should still check in on how their team is doing, they can benefit from giving their people the freedom to make appropriate financial decisions.
• Listen and lighten the load: CFOs should stay abreast of the emotional impact that large-scale change can have on their employees. Making space for dialogue and easing burdensome tasks can reduce the effects of fatigue and help their teams achieve the best possible results.

Yoana shared how her team at L’Oréal faced severe transformation fatigue after acquiring a $1.3B brand with zero personnel attached. With chaos mounting and limited data from the seller, her team made a costly reporting error. Instead of reacting harshly, she shielded the team, acknowledged what went wrong and helped them regain energy by reinforcing that mistakes happen – especially when you’re building the plane mid-flight.

“I always told my team members, ‘I’ll stay in the front of the bus together with you.’ As long as you create that trust, people will feel comfortable talking to you about what’s going on.” – Yoana Land, Chief Financial Officer, Jaya Apparel Group

The importance (and dangers) of taking risks

Since modern CFOs are change agents, they are often among the first people in their organizations to see what’s coming next. As a result, they can easily end up in situations where they have the chance to take risks on emerging opportunities – even if they don’t come with a clear short-term ROI.

CFOs embracing project risk should always account for: 

• The need to pivot: Discussing what went wrong can be helpful, but CFOs should always be prepared to course-correct as efficiently as possible. 
• Possible exit strategies: Defining a clear exit strategy for key parts of a plan and having a data-based assessment of what each choice may mean is essential for balancing risk and reward when environments are in flux.
• Growth beyond scope: Because projects tend to be ambitious by nature, finance leaders should be ready to intervene if they’re overextending. By taking that step, they can reduce the scale of rapid transformations and refocus on what their business is truly trying to accomplish.

As Chad noted: “It’s not about being right – it’s about getting it right.” Being able to stop, reflect and course-correct, even when a project has momentum, is a trait CFOs must embrace.

Getting buy-in from other leaders

Technology and automation are often tied to company-wide strategy, which means CFOs work closely with other senior leaders to move transformations forward. But getting everyone on board doesn’t always happen overnight.

When Eduardo Arreaga, Chief Financial Officer of Stavvy, began to establish a travel and expense policy for his company, he found himself facing pushback. Some of his colleagues felt the business should trust its employees to use resources for travel purposes, but Eduardo believed the business needed to follow a more structured and disciplined approach.

After trying to keep travel restrictions to a minimum for roughly a year (and encountering travel-related misbehaviors as a result), Stavvy began enforcing a more conventional T&E policy. Eduardo’s initiative was successful because it allowed leaders to gradually gain insight into the situation on their own rather than aggressively enforcing his perspective. This bolstered his credibility on a difficult issue while making space for buy-in to develop organically among his colleagues. 

“It involved a lot of letting leaders see the cause and effect and then start correcting over time. If I tried to push for a stricter policy on day one, people would have panicked and pushed back; even then, they would have probably misbehaved on expenses.” – Eduardo Arreaga, Chief Financial Officer, Stavvy

Yoana added that bringing in third-party experts – like Accenture – to educate resistant executives can be a subtle but effective way to shift their perspective without creating friction. She recommends doing this when leaders don’t yet have the appetite or capacity to lead at scale.

What skills will tomorrow’s CFOs need?

Since the world of finance is constantly changing, skills that are currently overlooked in CFOs may become vital in just a few short years. 

• Keeping pace with tech changes: Because of the advantages of digital tech, companies may benefit from hiring CFO candidates with IT backgrounds – especially if these candidates also have communication and leadership skills.

“IT is so convoluted and complicated. Many times in an organization, you have multiple systems interacting, and there’s always archaic systems connecting to new systems. Because of that, I think it would be easier to hire an IT person and teach them finance.” – Yoana Land, Chief Financial Officer, Jaya Apparel Group

• Adaptability and flexibility: CFOs will need to be highly adaptable and ready to act in different capacities depending on the situation their company is in. 
• Narrative communication: CFOs looking to take point on transformation will need to be “factual storytellers,” utilizing financial information to help their companies understand and navigate shifts in the market.

“I think about the CFO as a midfielder in soccer. Sometimes they score, sometimes they pass the ball so someone else can score, sometimes they play defense. That ability of a CFO is something I’ve been trying to promote internally with my team and myself.” – Eduardo Arreaga, Chief Financial Officer, Stavvy

Chad added that while everything else may change, three traits will always matter for CFOs:

1. strong relationships
2. the ability to speak the language of the business
3. a deep understanding of finance 

These will stay central to the CFO’s role – no matter how much AI or automation shows up.

Driving transformation from the CFO’s chair

CFOs will increasingly find themselves at the helm of transformation for their companies, and success will depend on having the key skills, relationships and technology to drive powerful change. The systems and integrations they choose to automate financial processes and optimize data streams will serve as the foundation of their business’s future strategy and growth.  

As Chad put it, the transformation ahead may not always come with a map. But with leadership, collaboration and a few smart trade-offs, today’s CFOs are more than ready to lead the way.

We’re continuously helping finance leaders steer their companies to success and take the lead on growth by leveraging the full capabilities of their financial architecture. To learn more, explore our finance automation solutions to find out how to revolutionize your back-office operations with digital technology.