Five trends that will redefine finance and accounting in 2025

January 7, 2025 1:22 PM

"Accounting is the best place to start because it's the purest form of finance," wrote Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Man Poor Dad series of personal finance books. "You can't fool it; it's empirical."

This insight resonates deeply in today's business environment, where organizations must navigate macroeconomic uncertainties, technological disruptions and transformational opportunities. Amid these buffeting currents, finance and accounting have evolved from a number-crunching function to a strategic and consultative one, playing three critical roles — safeguarding assets, streamlining operations and influencing future growth. As we move into 2025, five key trends will define the F&A landscape and its ability to drive strategic value.

Doing more with less will dominate priorities

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According to a survey by Accounting Today, 84% of accounting firms reported an increasing demand for client accounting services in 2024. As expectations soar, F&A leaders will lean on digital solutions to achieve more with fewer resources. The latest technology, with its data-rich environment, not only significantly reduces efforts in the old normal, but it creates massive opportunities for new value accretive outcomes. Leveraging artificial intelligence-driven analytics and hyperautomation, CFOs will prioritize aligning financial strategies with business challenges to unlock:

Superior stakeholder experiences;
Improved cash management;
Better working capital management;
Sustained profitable growth;
Better controls to improve capitalizing on business ideas;
Reduced costs; and,
Enhanced risk management and governance.

Hybrid global business services models will unleash agility

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The move toward hybrid GBS models will be crucial for F&A to maximize outcomes for shareholders.

Simplification, standardization, centralization and automation of business processes remain on the agenda for transformation. However, different operating models, such as those based on captive centers and outsourced providers, offer distinct advantages. Effective F&A frameworks will maximize outcomes by leveraging best-of-breed systems, ensuring processes complement rather than compete with each other to achieve superior outcomes.

Hybrid GBS models also offer access to specialized talent, scalable technology and cost-saving innovations, enabling CFOs to enhance agility, improve risk management and pivot from cost-containment to outcome-driven value creation. Smart infrastructure investments and innovative transformation funding and pricing models will deliver cost optimization.

Boundaries between service providers will continue to blur

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As software-as-a-service evolves into business-process-as-a-service, consulting converges with managed services, and business process management firms expand to offer both proprietary technologies and advisory capabilities, the distinctions between different types of service providers are fading. This shift will become more pronounced in 2025, potentially causing confusion about what truly drives value.

However, the questions that merit our attention are what is the most relevant expertise needed today and where does it lie? The transformation to a future-ready F&A function must be led by good processes, enabled by technology, and not vice versa. In this effort, deep operational experience in functional domains will trump generalized capabilities. Specialist knowledge is needed not just of the function but also upstream and downstream business activities. Such a process-first, technology-enabled, experience-led transformation will deliver actionable insights, seamless workflows, robust data privacy and cybersecurity, and tailored customer journeys, powered by AI, analytics, automation and cloud-based accounting.

Transformation of judgment-intensive processes will step up

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2025 will continue to see significant investments in transformation of judgement-intensive processes such as planning, forecasting and controls.

Historically, automation efforts focused on transactional processes such as invoice processing, cash application and reconciliations. However, there has been a notable shift in recent years toward investing in judgment-intensive processes. This reflects a change in how business outcomes are being evaluated, moving beyond functional cost efficiencies, like full-time equivalent reduction, to broader metrics that impact the total cost to business, such as shareholder value, risk avoidance, freeing up management bandwidth, generating sharper insights for better decision-making and more.

Centralizing and standardizing judgment-intensive processes remains a challenge but is long overdue. These processes, which often involve close collaboration with business leaders, are typically highly customized, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for actionable insights. In today's data-rich, AI-powered world, transforming these judgment-intensive processes rapidly is critical to gaining a competitive edge, especially given the volatile business environment. This focus has driven substantial investment, with high volumes of F&A transformation budgets now allocated to these areas. Hybrid GBS models and collaboration with service providers will continue to be key in accelerating this transformation.

Generative AI will redefine the CFO’s office

As stewards of investment capital and strategic advisors on transformative innovation, CFOs will harness the power of generative AI to scale businesses, accelerate revenue streams and drive meaningful outcomes.

Gen AI and large language models will revolutionize areas such as financial planning, budgeting and enterprise risk management. For F&A service providers, these technologies will open up exciting avenues to:

Leverage federated AI models to safeguard enterprise data;
Fund and scale Gen AI investments to enhance strategic business decision-making; and
Transform into value creators and experience designers.

According to a June 2024 Everest Group study, CFOs are prioritizing accelerated growth, shareholder value and adaptability to rapidly changing customer needs with new business models. Moving into 2025, the F&A function is poised to deliver on these priorities by building long-term value, maximizing immediate profits and enhancing timely decision-making in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Harnessing agility, collaboration and future-ready capabilities, F&A is expected to reinvent itself with CFOs leading the charge.