Accounting Beyond the Spreadsheet: Shifting Landscape of Financial Leadership Roles

Today’s world trades in change: tools and processes evolving at hypersonic speeds, breakthroughs awaiting on every corner and geopolitical landscapes shifting continuously. Our workplaces and roles are also affected by these worldwide changes – one function that has felt this tremendously is that of financial leaders or CFOs.

Finance departments have gone from a control and reporting function, closely associated in colleagues’ minds with a cost centre, to a value driver that plays a role in transformation, strategy, operations and governance. In a report, CFOs share they spend a lot more time on strategic leadership and organizational transformation than on improving core finance capabilities. Deloitte’s Finance Trends 2027 Report illustrates the expansion of the finance leaders’ mandates with these new responsibilities: enterprise AI and technology capital allocation; AI trust including reliable AI outputs; oversight of AI and technology spending; regulatory compliance and cybersecurity.

Mathieu-William Gilbert, Chief Financial Officer at Adocia, believes that this transition in finance leadership has been happening at different paces in pharma and biotech. For the past ten years, centralization and automation in pharma have ensured the business partnering piece of finance is seen as the norm.

On the other hand, in biotech companies this shift has been slower – picking up now with the advance of AI. Mathieu has coined this shift the “dynamic CEO-CFO duo”, where the CEO often plays the role of the visionary who knows the product inside out and holds the long-term vision, while the CFO acts as a grounding presence and a voice of reason both from financial and business perspective.

Mathieu also envisions a much broader collaboration between the finance function and legal, HR and business development.

“I think for biotech it makes sense to create more centralised support function where anything to do with resource allocation and support is handled by one function spear-headed by a CFO whose competencies go beyond financials.” - Mathieu-William Gilbert, Chief Financial Officer at Adocia

Evolving skills for an evolving role

The expansion of CFOs realm of responsibilities also requires the adoption of new skills to drive success. In their report, Deloitte highlight how finance leaders need to also broaden the capabilities of their team through hires in change management and data science/engineering alongside the more traditional finance degrees such as banking and consulting.

But what sits at the core of a successful CFO in this new age?

Mathieu-William Gilbert shares curiosity, courage and patience as key skills for modern CFOs to master.

According to him what differentiates a traditional good CFO to a great CFO is the propensity to understand how things work. Not just the technology itself but how to develop innovation, what and who sits behind the processes at the organisation. It makes a CFO’s story more compelling when talking to investors but also supports them internally with the board of directors and when thinking about their equity story. Mathieu’s recommendation is to spend time on field with the people that are producing – be it sales, innovation, clinical trials. In fact, a survey by EY ranks emotional intelligence and experience in people issues as the most important skill for future success. This can come from time spent with people on site and developing relationships with them.

Mathieu also suggests getting comfortable saying no – it takes courage to raise the problems that sometimes people don’t necessarily want to hear about and opening doors that people might want to keep closed. With courage also comes owning – CFOs may not be responsible directly for solving, but it is their responsibility to ensure the “burning platform” has a team of people working on it and doing what it takes to resolve it. And that takes courage particularly when CFOs are starting to deal with things that are not in their traditional finance competency such as AI enablement.

With new responsibilities come new challenges

The finance function, alongside others, is experiencing a big push to integrate AI in business processes and move towards more predictive insights. Mathieu thinks that AI can pose a challenge – not so much its advancement, but the lack of AI literacy and appropriate integration. Gartner points out that in a traditional finance team today 50% of staff are basic technology users with 35% staff leveraging more advanced technology capabilities.

“You need to have a strategy for integrating AI. You can’t just slap an agent on top of a broken system; you need to educate and inspire your organization. Otherwise, there will be a lack of trust in the new technology and people will end up working over the same thing twice because they are receiving information from different places and need to reconcile it manually.” - Mathieu-William Gilbert, Chief Financial Officer at Adocia

Additionally, for biotech financing is becoming super challenging. Now more than ever it is crucial for finance leaders to have the ability to be creative in the way they look at financing the business, being open and persuasive to the different stakeholders.

The advance of technology and a rapidly changing world have created the perfect conditions for the role of finance leaders to evolve and expand. With that have come new responsibilities, new questions to consider and new challenges to address. Being agile and continuously learning are crucial for modern CFOs to pivot and find their new place in the financial world. You can hear more from Mathieu-William Gilbert at the panel discussion “The Future of CFO Leadership: Driving Transformation in Finance” at the Life Sciences Accounting and Reporting Summit Europe 2026.

The Life Sciences Accounting & Reporting Europe Summit is the premier European forum where top pharma and biotech finance leaders gather to address industry-specific accounting challenges and transform them into competitive advantages. This conference is designed for senior finance and accounting professionals working in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and life sciences sectors such as CFOs, Controllers, FP&A Directors and Managers, Accounting Managers, Corporate Development. This is the inaugural European event, launched following the success of our US event Life Sciences Accounting & Reporting Congress.