Finance in 2025: A CFO’s Guide to Making Actionable Changes in 2025
Turn Soft Topics into Hard Value
Finance leaders today are facing a new wave of responsibility. Beyond balancing budgets and optimizing spend, they’re being asked to deliver strategic value in areas that feel frustratingly intangible like sustainability and cybersecurity. These topics are critical for long-term success but often lack the concrete metrics and proven ROI that finance teams need to prioritize confidently.
Finance in 2025: A CFO’s Guide to Making Actionable Changes in 2025
Turn Soft Topics into Hard Value
Finance leaders today are facing a new wave of responsibility. Beyond balancing budgets and optimizing spend, they’re being asked to deliver strategic value in areas that feel frustratingly intangible like sustainability and cybersecurity. These topics are critical for long-term success but often lack the concrete metrics and proven ROI that finance teams need to prioritize confidently.
Worse yet, finance is increasingly on the hook for reporting and accountability. As regulations tighten and public scrutiny intensifies, these “soft topics” are becoming hard requirements. The question is no longer whether to act, but how to act efficiently, effectively, and in ways that create measurable value.
The real challenge: “Fluffy” topics, hard accountability
For CFOs and finance teams, few things are more frustrating than being tasked with achieving results in areas that lack clear definitions or KPIs. Sustainability and cybersecurity are both high on the boardroom agenda – but translating these into financial strategy is easier said than done.
Take sustainability. With frameworks like CSRD becoming mandatory across Europe, finance is now expected to report detailed ESG metrics and ensure sustainable procurement practices. But where does the data come from? How can you verify its accuracy? How do you draw a direct line between greener suppliers and financial performance?
The same goes for security. Cyber risk in the supply chain can have massive financial implications, but most organizations are in the dark without real-time insight into supplier compliance and vulnerabilities. Regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) also add urgency to cybersecurity and operational risk management across financial services sectors. Finance professionals are left trying to quantify unquantifiable risks, relying on outdated spreadsheets or siloed tools that don’t connect to their spend management processes.
At the same time, doing nothing is no longer an option. Regulatory fines, audit failures, and reputational risk are real threats. The expectation is clear: finance needs to lead on these issues. But are they the first in line for support tools? Not so much.
This disconnect creates stress, inefficiencies, and, ultimately, risk. Both financial and operational.
What finance in 2025 really needs: structure, automation, and insight
What finance teams need isn’t more pressure; it’s better support. That starts with structured, centralized tools that transform sustainability and security into measurable parts of the financial strategy.
Imagine being able to automatically flag suppliers that lack valid environmental certifications or have expired security audits. Or having a dashboard that consolidates emissions data across your supplier base, pulling from standardized, verifiable sources. This kind of automation reduces manual work, increases data reliability, and gives finance professionals the transparency they need to assess risk and opportunity.
It also enables smarter reporting. When your supplier risk, sustainability, and spend data live in the same ecosystem, creating audit-ready reports or CSRD-compliant disclosures becomes a repeatable process not a last-minute scramble.
Crucially, this isn’t just about compliance. It’s about identifying inefficiencies, negotiating better contracts, and de-risking procurement decisions. Security breaches and environmental violations don’t just cause PR nightmares. They cost money. With the right systems, finance can move from reactive to proactive, managing these risks like any other financial exposure.
In short, make the intangible tangible. Structure and automation create clarity. Clarity enables action. And action leads to results.
Connect the dots with software and automation
The right finance and procurement software can bridge the gap between strategic priorities and day-to-day operations, especially when turning soft topics like sustainability and security into hard value.
Today’s leading platforms are evolving to offer more than just transactional support. They provide centralized visibility across supplier performance, ESG credentials, compliance documentation, and cybersecurity risk, integrated directly into your source-to-pay process. That infrastructure allows finance teams to monitor, report, and act on issues in real-time without relying on disconnected spreadsheets or chasing down documents.
With tools that pull in data from specialized ESG and risk partners, finance professionals can:
- Monitor sustainability scores alongside spend performance
- Identify and mitigate risks before they impact operations
- Ensure documentation is always audit-ready and up-to-date
- Receive automated alerts for critical compliance changes
More importantly, these systems reduce complexity. Instead of adding new layers to your workflow, they streamline how you manage spend, risk, and regulation in one place. The result is stronger control, fewer blind spots, and clearer insights, all of which help finance teams meet today’s expectations with tomorrow in mind.
Onventis is fully GDPR-compliant and hosted in Europe, ensuring your supplier and financial data remain secure. And because our platform integrates directly into your source-to-pay process, you’re not just adding another tool but rather upgrading the systems you already use.
The result? Finance teams can manage ESG and security initiatives with the same confidence and precision they bring to budgeting and forecasting. It’s not about checking boxes. It’s about enabling real impact and doing it in a way that drives measurable financial value.
This is finance in 2025.
