Why CFO Now Stands for ‘Chief Forecasting Officer’

For decades, the title of chief financial officer evoked an image of someone buried in spreadsheets and focused on quarterly closes, regulatory compliance and carefully hedged projections.

Today, however, trade volatility has gone from exception to norm, and traditional Excel-based forecasting no longer suffices.

“If we don’t have visibility, we can’t move forward,” Luc Lesénécal , CEO of Parisian fashion company Saint James , said in a July 3 report by The New York Times.

Since the start of 2025, businesses around the globe have been subject to tariff whiplash. President Donald Trump announced new Canadian tariffs Thursday night (July 10).

In this kind of environment, the old planning tools like manual Excel models, static quarterly forecasts and generalized revenue targets are no longer fit for purpose. Spreadsheet forecasting in 2025’s landscape is like navigating a thunderstorm with a paper map. Businesses need the equivalent of an always-on business radar, and CFOs are being tasked with creating it.

For companies with much of their revenue exposed to international trade, accurate and adaptive financial forecasting is no longer a best practice, it’s essential for survival. This reality is turning CFOs into chief forecasting officers while positioning them as a new nerve center for strategic decision making.

Read also: Forget the TACO Trade, B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash

The Rise of Forecasting-First Finance

In the traditional model, finance operated like a rear-view mirror. Teams tallied up what happened, compared it to the plan, and adjusted the next plan accordingly. But that traditional approach no longer suffices. The future needs to be forecast, and it may also need to be financed. PYMNTS Intelligence data found that 1 in 5 small- to medium-sized businesses ( SMBs ) without access to financing fear they may not survive the trade-induced operational tumult.

The entire office of the CFO — including financial planning and analysis, treasury, controllership, tax, investor relations and strategy — is being restructured around real-time forecasting, decision intelligence and scenario modeling. As traditional planning cycles break down, forecasting agility has become the CFO’s most valuable currency.

Firms can’t make an equipment investment with 6-month-old assumptions, and solving that problem requires cross-departmental cooperation when it comes to modeling scenarios with, for example, five different interest rate paths and three trade regimes .

This forecasting transformation is underpinned by a new generation of enterprise tools, replacing the fragmented spreadsheets of the past.

Companies are implementing integrated planning platforms that connect ERP, procurement, logistics, treasury and risk management systems into a single financial model. These platforms ingest real-time data from global operations and allow finance teams to simulate changes in volumes, costs and working capital on demand.

Against this backdrop, the integration of artificial intelligence isn’t just automating old tasks but reframing how finance contributes to strategy. AI models and advanced regressions are being used to simulate scenarios, identify patterns and highlight leading indicators across vast datasets.

See also: Trump’s Global Tariffs Position CFOs as New Supply Chain Architects

How CFOs Are Unlocking Forecasting as a Strategic Weapon

The implications of this CFO shift go beyond better numbers. As forecasting becomes more predictive and granular, it can shape decisions traditionally led by product, marketing or sales.

Financial visibility and predictive forecasting are important when exploring new pricing strategies. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “ Tariffs and Business Uncertainty: The Current State of Play ” showed that 42% of goods firms and 21% of services firms are planning to increase prices in reaction to the tariffs.

Separate PYMNTS Intelligence in the June CAIO Report, “ The Enterprise Reset: Tariffs, Uncertainty and the Limits of Operational Response ,” found that 60% of firms reported that they are addressing today’s tariff-induced challenges through tighter partner coordination, smarter sourcing contract terms, more dynamic price modeling and greater alignment between finance and procurement function.

The transformation is still underway. Many companies are grappling with fragmented systems, siloed data and a talent gap in advanced analytics. Others struggle to embed insights from finance into day-to-day decisions outside the C-suite.

Agility is a competitive advantage, so finance teams are stepping into a new role not just as stewards of capital — but as architects of growth.