Survey: CFOs Prioritize Optimizing Costs and Efficiency to Drive Growth in 2025

The third SAP Concur CFO Insights report is now available. The latest iteration of this annual report examines finance leaders’ views on the evolving business environment and how they are leading the charge to prioritize company growth in 2025. It also compares CFO perspectives with those of HR and IT leaders—an interesting new facet this year.

The report finds that the top focus of finance leaders is cost-cutting to drive growth, based on survey responses from 350 chief financial officers and senior finance leaders across eight countries from December 2024 to January 2025. Additionally, nearly all those surveyed report success from using artificial intelligence (AI).

Below are some of this year’s key findings:

Optimizing costs and efficiency is this year’s top priority to drive growth.

• The top external challenges that finance leaders cite are worsening economic conditions (41%), geopolitical tensions (37%), and supply chain constraints (32%).
  • Many responses have changed rather substantially since 2024. Here is where finance leaders stood on the above challenges last year:
    • Worsening economic conditions (55%).
    • Supply chain constraints (38%).
    • Geopolitical tensions (11%).
• This year’s top goal for fueling expansion is optimizing costs and driving efficiency (69%). Notably, 58% of finance leaders are turning to automation and AI to drive performance, with a focus on automating manual processes. As AI continues to gain popularity, finance leaders are increasingly aware of opportunities to automate and optimize processes, making this a key focus for 2025.

AI is a key technology to achieve this ambition, and finance leaders are seeing positive results.

• According to the finance leaders in the survey, 94% say that AI has already helped improve decision-making and 73% say it has positively impacted cost and risk reduction at their organization.
• Finance leaders see more possibilities for the technology, citing a wide range of benefits that may be realized with AI, including:
  • More accurate forecasting (43%).
  • Automation of mundane tasks (38%).
  • More efficient business operations (36%).
  • Better insights (36%).
  • Better audits (30%).
  • Reduced fraud (26%).
  • More accurate scenario planning (25%).
  • More effective risk management (21%).

CFOs are good at achieving cross-functional buy-in, but are not willing to share responsibility for growth.

• Ninety-six percent of finance leaders rate themselves as “excellent” or “good” at getting buy-in from the wider business on new growth initiatives. Eighty-nine percent of HR leaders and 88% of IT leaders agree that their organization’s finance leaders are good at cross-functional communication.
• However, data indicates that finance leaders could better prioritize becoming a strategic partner to all business functions in 2025. What is getting in the way of this?
  • Fifty-eight percent of finance leaders say the biggest barrier is conflicting departmental priorities.
    • Fifty-seven percent of IT leaders agree with them, although 57% of HR leaders say the biggest blocker is insufficient data sharing and transparency.
    • While finance and IT leaders prioritize implementing flexible budgets for collaborative projects, HR would prefer to focus on aligning shared goals and KPIs. Only 11% of finance leaders see that as a main priority for working together.
    • Interestingly, only 9% of CFOs think growth leadership should be shared across the C-suite.

Cybersecurity budgets are increasing, but CFOs are hesitant to collaborate with their IT counterparts.

• According to surveyed IT leaders, many would like to see finance leaders prioritize cybersecurity in financial planning (57%) and increase budgets for security measures (51%).
• Luckily, 59% of finance leaders say they plan to increase their cybersecurity budgets in response to growing threats.
• However, finance leaders appear to prefer having limited involvement in driving the cybersecurity and data privacy agenda for their organization. While 42% of IT leaders want to enhance collaboration with finance around cybersecurity, only 20% of finance leaders are aligned.

Talent retention and acquisition are seen as the CHRO’s responsibility, and they are not viewed as particularly important factors for growth.

• Although finance leaders recognize the importance of attracting and retaining talent, only 36% believe it is essential to growth.
• HR leaders say they need help from finance to support talent recruitment and retention—for instance, 54% want their finance partner to provide them with financial insights to support workforce planning—but most finance leaders see talent recruitment and retention as an HR responsibility.
• HR leaders also cited measuring the impact of HR initiatives (48%) and increasing budget allocations (44%) as areas in need of support from finance leaders to drive talent-related growth.

Download this year’s CFO Insights report and HR and IT infographic whitepapers for additional findings as well as actions that you can take to help your company break through the challenges and seize the opportunities of 2025.

Methodology: SAP Concur surveyed 350 CFOs and senior finance leaders, 115 HR leaders, and 115 IT leaders for its latest CFO Insights report. The research, conducted in December 2024 and January 2025, covered Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the UK, and the U.S. The sectors in the survey ranged from finance to technology, healthcare, utilities, consumer, and industrial.