Enterprise Performance Management
Why Finance Transformation Feels So Hard
I had the pleasure of hosting a group of finance leaders recently, and our conversation quickly turned to new technology investments, the potential of AI, and ways to make finance a more strategic partner to the business.
Yet despite the ambition around the table, many admitted progress felt slower than expected.
It seems that finance transformation isn’t difficult because people resist change. More often, it struggles because the way things have always been done continues to shape what feels possible today. Every spreadsheet, workaround, approval chain and disconnected system was originally created to solve a real problem. Over time, those solutions become part of the organisation’s operating DNA.
The challenge is that transformation becomes less about introducing something new and more about untangling the accumulated logic of the past while the business continues moving forward.
Or, as one of the delegates put it:
“It’s like trying to change the engine of the plane whilst we’re flying.”
As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the issue was not a lack of vision or willingness to invest. It was understanding where to start and ensuring the right foundations were in place for transformation initiatives to succeed.
The Finance Ambition Gap
What struck me most was how consistent this pattern was, despite the room representing very different sectors; banking, retail, media, and very different stages of growth. We call this the Finance Ambition Gap: the structural distance between the finance function a business has today, and the finance function its ambition actually requires.
It tends to bite hardest in one particular zone. Businesses below roughly £200m generally haven’t hit the complexity yet. Businesses above £2bn have usually already built the infrastructure to cope with it. It’s the businesses in between; too complex for the tools and habits that got them this far, not yet large enough to have built what they actually need where the gap is widest, and where it tends to get noticed last.
Growth Creates Complexity
Many of the challenges being discussed were not caused by a single system, process or technology decision.
They were the result of growth.
Each acquisition, new market, reporting requirement or increase in headcount added complexity. Individually, those changes made perfect sense. Collectively, they created the conditions for a gap to emerge between what the finance function was originally designed to do and what the business now expects from it.
That gap is often where transformation starts to feel difficult.
Despite representing different sectors and being at different stages of their finance transformation journey, many of the conversations sounded remarkably similar. Reporting and planning processes that required significant effort to maintain. Data held across multiple systems, making it difficult to access, trust and use consistently. Manual workarounds had become embedded in day-to-day operations, and confidence in the information being used to make decisions was consequently limited.
We’ve seen this pattern often enough across growth-stage businesses that we’ve started cataloguing it properly. Today we track 21 recurring struggles across seven themes, and very few finance teams recognise fewer than several of them. The challenges varied in the detail, but most pointed to the same underlying issue: growth creates complexity faster than finance infrastructure evolves to support it.
The Warning Signs Don’t Arrive Overnight
One of the most interesting observations from the discussion was that very few of these challenges appear overnight.
The month-end still closes. The board pack still gets produced. The forecast still gets submitted. From the outside, everything appears to be working.
The challenge is that the effort required to make it happen keeps increasing.
- More manual intervention.
- More reconciliations.
- More spreadsheet workarounds.
- More dependency on a handful of individuals who understand how everything fits together.
Over time, these behaviours become accepted as normal. The warning signs are there, but because the work is still getting done, they are easy to overlook.
Until the business reaches a point where finance is expected to move faster, answer more complex questions or support a new stage of growth; a board that suddenly wants live scenario answers, an acquisition that needs consolidating from day one, an IPO timeline that puts a spotlight on three years of inconsistency. That is often when the gap becomes impossible to ignore.
Why AI Isn’t Solving The Problem
Unsurprisingly, AI featured heavily throughout the discussion.
For many organisations, it represents an opportunity to improve efficiency, accelerate analysis and unlock new insights. Yet the conversation quickly moved from possibility to readiness.
Several finance leaders spoke about the challenge of moving AI initiatives beyond experimentation, not because the technology wasn’t capable, but because they weren’t yet confident in the information feeding it.
One organisation had invested heavily in AI and self-service access to information, only to realise the underlying data needed attention first. The initiative paused while they focused on strengthening the foundations beneath it. Once the foundations were in place, the initiative moved forward with far greater confidence.
Another faced the opposite challenge. Their data was highly structured and governed, but making that information accessible and useful across the organisation remained difficult. The opportunity wasn’t starting over; it was building the analytics layer their data was already ready to support.
Different situations, but the same underlying issue. Confidence in the information being used to make decisions. AI has the potential to amplify the value of good information, but it can just as easily amplify existing weaknesses.
AI has the potential to amplify the value of good information, but it can just as easily amplify existing weaknesses.
Closing The Gap
The strongest message from the discussion was not about AI, automation or technology. It was about laying the right foundations.
Finance leaders have a clear vision of the role they want their teams to play in the future. They understand the value of better insight, faster decision-making and more intelligent use of technology. The difficulty lies in bridging the gap between that vision and the reality of how many organisations operate today.
The organisations making the greatest progress are not necessarily those pursuing the latest technology trend. They are the ones taking the time to strengthen the foundations that everything else depends on.
When data is trusted, processes are connected and information is accessible, transformation becomes significantly easier. Technology delivers greater value because it is built on reliable foundations. Decision-making becomes faster because confidence in the numbers already exists. Finance teams spend less time validating information and more time helping the business move forward..
Ultimately, transformation is about creating an environment where finance can operate with confidence.
We don’t start with a demo. We start with a diagnosis, because the right starting point looks different for every business, and the cost of guessing wrong is usually a wasted year.
How ready is your finance function for its next stage of growth?
Our Growth Readiness Assessment benchmarks your finance function against the 21 struggles we see in growth-stage businesses and gives you a prioritised roadmap for closing your own Finance Ambition Gap. Contact us to find out more
If you’d like to join a small, in person discussion with a limited group of senior finance leaders, we’d be delighted to welcome you. Together, we’ll explore the practical challenges of finance transformation, where to start, and the foundations that make lasting progress possible.
