By Brian Veloso, Managing Director at SAP Concur Canada
2025 saw a record high number of CEO exits across global indices, driven largely by planned succession as leaders from across the C-suite stepped into top executive roles. In Canada, this shift is also reshaping how organizations view finance leadership, with businesses increasingly looking to CFOs not only for financial oversight, but also for strategic leadership.
One common transition is from CFO to CEO roles. According to this year’s annual SAP Concur CFO Insights Survey, 78 per cent of Canadian CEOs and MDs believe their company’s finance head has the potential to become the CEO in the future.
Include link to report once live
Yet, while CFOs bring a high level of skill to the C-suite, most business leaders (67 per cent) say they have critical areas to upskill in before they take the top spot.
Let’s unpack the top three skills CFOs must develop before they become CEO, according to the survey’s findings.
- Strategic leadership
50 per cent of Canadian CEOs and MDs cite strategic leadership as a CFO skill that requires the most development. If finance chiefs want to transition from setting the financial agenda to the overall direction of the enterprise, they’ll need to develop their ability to make strategically sound, effective decisions around business priorities, trade-offs, and timing.
Strategy again comes to play when thinking about where finance should contribute the most to business growth. As an integral part of this strategic focus, CEOs want CFOs to provide new business models that ensure their companies long-term success.
- People leadership
The second-largest skills gap that Canadian CEOs and MDs perceive is people leadership, cited by 50 per cent of respondents. Business leaders see the jump from managing a ringfenced finance team to leading an entire organization as a hurdle for finance chiefs to overcome. But why do they lack confidence in their CFOs?
It could come down to how they perceive the head of finance’s ability to run their own department. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of Canadian CEOs report that finance faces talent and skills challenges which impact performance. Technology is a particular talent leak, with 86) per cent of CFOs finding it challenging to attract or retain talent with hybrid finance-technology skills.
If finance chiefs can overcome department-level talent challenges by enhancing recruitment, upskilling, and mentorship programmes, they could present a “proof of concept” of their wider people leadership capabilities to CEOs and MDs. It would illustrate that CFOs are capable of building a high-performing culture that can be replicated across the wider business – positioning them as the natural successor to the CEO.
Beyond finance, spearheading cross-functional initiatives that target multiple departments would help CFOs showcase expertise in other areas that business leaders see as developmental priorities. These include communication (25 per cent ) and visibility (25 per cent).
While CEOs and MDs believe the latter two skills need less development than others, they’re by no means unimportant.
- Commercial insight
Commercial or customer insight is ranked as the CFO’s third-largest development area (63 per cent%). Business leaders aren’t looking for finance leaders to play a background role that centres only on cost optimisation. Instead, they want a strategic partner who understands why customers buy and why they exit the revenue stream.
How the CFO works with customers, boards, investors, and partners – and accurately reports on revenue – matters just as much as internal performance management.
That’s not to say demand has fallen for traditional financial management activities. Canadian finance and business leaders still believe that finance priorities such as risk management (71 per cent) and cost efficiency (79 per cent) should contribute to growth. However, there’s a feeling that more could be done, just 46 per cent and 43 per cent of respondents say these areas contribute to the company’s growth, respectively.
To support business leaders as needed, CFOs will need to deliver substantive insights on revenue, costs, and growth opportunities both internally and externally. This is where data and analytics upskilling can unlock new opportunities for forecasting, scenario planning, and cost control.
By prioritising the focus areas identified by the business leaders of today, CFOs can prime themselves to become the business leaders of tomorrow. It’s the aspiring few with the necessary strategic leadership, people leadership, and commercial capabilities who will become CEO and play an integral role in shaping the future of business.
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This entry was posted on June 16, 2026 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags SAP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Guest Post: From numbers to networks: Top 3 skills that will turn CFOs into CEOs
By Brian Veloso, Managing Director at SAP Concur Canada
2025 saw a record high number of CEO exits across global indices, driven largely by planned succession as leaders from across the C-suite stepped into top executive roles. In Canada, this shift is also reshaping how organizations view finance leadership, with businesses increasingly looking to CFOs not only for financial oversight, but also for strategic leadership.
One common transition is from CFO to CEO roles. According to this year’s annual SAP Concur CFO Insights Survey, 78 per cent of Canadian CEOs and MDs believe their company’s finance head has the potential to become the CEO in the future.
Include link to report once live
Yet, while CFOs bring a high level of skill to the C-suite, most business leaders (67 per cent) say they have critical areas to upskill in before they take the top spot.
Let’s unpack the top three skills CFOs must develop before they become CEO, according to the survey’s findings.
50 per cent of Canadian CEOs and MDs cite strategic leadership as a CFO skill that requires the most development. If finance chiefs want to transition from setting the financial agenda to the overall direction of the enterprise, they’ll need to develop their ability to make strategically sound, effective decisions around business priorities, trade-offs, and timing.
Strategy again comes to play when thinking about where finance should contribute the most to business growth. As an integral part of this strategic focus, CEOs want CFOs to provide new business models that ensure their companies long-term success.
The second-largest skills gap that Canadian CEOs and MDs perceive is people leadership, cited by 50 per cent of respondents. Business leaders see the jump from managing a ringfenced finance team to leading an entire organization as a hurdle for finance chiefs to overcome. But why do they lack confidence in their CFOs?
It could come down to how they perceive the head of finance’s ability to run their own department. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of Canadian CEOs report that finance faces talent and skills challenges which impact performance. Technology is a particular talent leak, with 86) per cent of CFOs finding it challenging to attract or retain talent with hybrid finance-technology skills.
If finance chiefs can overcome department-level talent challenges by enhancing recruitment, upskilling, and mentorship programmes, they could present a “proof of concept” of their wider people leadership capabilities to CEOs and MDs. It would illustrate that CFOs are capable of building a high-performing culture that can be replicated across the wider business – positioning them as the natural successor to the CEO.
Beyond finance, spearheading cross-functional initiatives that target multiple departments would help CFOs showcase expertise in other areas that business leaders see as developmental priorities. These include communication (25 per cent ) and visibility (25 per cent).
While CEOs and MDs believe the latter two skills need less development than others, they’re by no means unimportant.
Commercial or customer insight is ranked as the CFO’s third-largest development area (63 per cent%). Business leaders aren’t looking for finance leaders to play a background role that centres only on cost optimisation. Instead, they want a strategic partner who understands why customers buy and why they exit the revenue stream.
How the CFO works with customers, boards, investors, and partners – and accurately reports on revenue – matters just as much as internal performance management.
That’s not to say demand has fallen for traditional financial management activities. Canadian finance and business leaders still believe that finance priorities such as risk management (71 per cent) and cost efficiency (79 per cent) should contribute to growth. However, there’s a feeling that more could be done, just 46 per cent and 43 per cent of respondents say these areas contribute to the company’s growth, respectively.
To support business leaders as needed, CFOs will need to deliver substantive insights on revenue, costs, and growth opportunities both internally and externally. This is where data and analytics upskilling can unlock new opportunities for forecasting, scenario planning, and cost control.
By prioritising the focus areas identified by the business leaders of today, CFOs can prime themselves to become the business leaders of tomorrow. It’s the aspiring few with the necessary strategic leadership, people leadership, and commercial capabilities who will become CEO and play an integral role in shaping the future of business.
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This entry was posted on June 16, 2026 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags SAP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.