What 2025 Revealed About Finance and What It Means for 2026
What 2025 Revealed About Finance and What It Means for 2026
There’s something about the start of a new year that encourages big promises.
New systems. New structures. New ways of working. More strategic finance. Better forecasting. Faster reporting.
Most of it is well intentioned. Some of it is overdue.
But 2025 had a way of cutting through the noise. It didn’t announce itself with one defining moment. It simply revealed which finance teams were built for the pace of modern business and which ones were having to rely on sheer effort to keep up.
That’s why January can be such a useful point in the calendar. Not because it demands reinvention, but because it offers clarity. You can usually see what worked, what didn’t, and what quietly drained the team more than it should have.
From the conversations we had across the market last year, one theme came through repeatedly. Finance teams rarely struggle because they lack talent. They struggle because the function becomes heavier than the business around it. Processes pile up. Reporting expands. Stakeholders want more, and faster. The team ends up spending too much time producing and too little time influencing.
The strongest teams we saw in 2025 weren’t always the biggest or most resourced. They were the ones with a clear operating rhythm. The close was controlled. The numbers were trusted. Reporting didn’t feel like a recurring crisis. And because of that, finance had the headspace to do what the business actually needed: interpret, challenge, and guide decisions.
Speed mattered more than it used to, but not in the shallow sense of moving fast for its own sake. Finance can’t afford that. What changed was the definition of value. In many organisations, accuracy is assumed. The differentiator is how quickly finance can get to the point, how confidently it can explain what the numbers mean, and how early it can give decision-makers the insight they need.
Part of this shift has been driven by the tools now available. Automation has reduced tolerance for slow reporting cycles. AI has raised expectations around pace and interpretation. And as finance becomes more connected to decision-making, the spotlight on governance and control has sharpened too, particularly as regulation and risk considerations continue to evolve.
In practice, perfect reporting delivered too late has limited impact. The finance teams that gained influence last year were the ones who reduced friction. They streamlined what didn’t add value. They simplified the way information travelled. They stopped treating every pack like a museum piece. And in doing so, they created something stakeholders genuinely relied on.
That shift also made the idea of “strategic finance” more real. For a long time, the word strategic was used as a status label. But in 2025, organisations became more specific about what they meant by it. Strategic finance is not about producing more analysis. It’s about strengthening judgement. It’s the ability to model different outcomes, challenge assumptions without creating resistance, and steer conversations towards the decisions that matter.
This is one reason planning capability and commercial insight have become so highly valued. Many organisations are putting far more emphasis on scenario thinking than they used to, because leaders are being asked to decide faster with less certainty. When finance can bring structure to that uncertainty, it becomes indispensable.
You can see that shift clearly in hiring too. Across a wide range of roles, organisations became less impressed by volume of output and more interested in impact. The candidates who stood out most weren’t always the ones with the most technical detail in their CV. They were the ones who could bring clarity to messy situations, influence stakeholders, and connect finance work to commercial decisions.
That doesn’t mean technical strength matters less. It’s still the foundation. But it’s increasingly the entry point, not the differentiator.
At the same time, 2025 pushed control and resilience back into the centre of the conversation. As organisations move faster and adopt new tools, risk doesn’t disappear. It becomes less visible. Finance leaders understand this instinctively, and we saw more attention last year on governance, controls, and resilience, particularly where finance has oversight of systems, data quality, and risk exposure.
This wasn’t driven by panic. It was driven by maturity. The best leaders know speed without foundations is fragile. They understand that finance can only move quickly when the basics are stable. When data is clean. When systems are trusted. When controls are sensible rather than suffocating. When the team isn’t constantly reworking the same issues under pressure.
This is also why role design and retention became sharper topics last year. Demand for strong finance talent didn’t slow down, but what candidates wanted from a role shifted. Many people were less interested in “busy” positions that reward endurance. They were looking for clarity of remit, visible impact, and teams with rhythm and leadership that values thinking time as much as output.
Employers noticed. Some of the most attractive opportunities weren’t necessarily the ones with the flashiest job titles. They were the ones where the role made sense. Where the function was structured to allow finance to influence, rather than just report on decisions already made.
So what does all of this mean for 2026?
It means finance teams won’t become more effective by doing more. They’ll become more effective by doing fewer things better, with less friction and more clarity. And finance professionals at every level will benefit from paying attention to the skills that were quietly rewarded in 2025.
The close that stays controlled. The insight that arrives early enough to matter. The stakeholder conversations that are calm, clear, and commercially focused. The ability to explain implications simply and confidently. The judgement to know what matters and what doesn’t.
None of this is solved by a single project. It’s solved by leadership decisions, by operating rhythm, and by being willing to let go of work that no longer justifies its cost.
The market is moving. Expectations are rising. And the finance teams that will be most valued this year will be the ones that bring calm to complexity. Not through perfection, but through clarity.
Because in the end, that’s what the best finance functions really offer. They don’t just explain what happened. They help shape what happens next.
