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Inside the minds of India’s CFOs
CFOs are held out to be strategic business partners, but are they able to free up their time from dealing with the day-to-day to be able to play that role?
The modern CFO is expected to shape business strategy, influence investment decisions and act as a trusted advisor to the board. Yet operational oversight, reporting and compliance continue to consume a significant share of leadership bandwidth. The findings of the inaugural India Finance Leaders Barometer survey show that strategy and business partnering feature prominently among modern CFO priorities. Strategic planning and decision support rank highest in their current time allocation (23% rank it top), closely followed by business partnering with leadership and the board.
But this tells only part of the story. These priorities are competing with operational oversight, reporting, and compliance requirements, which demand significant CFO attention. Nearly half of the CFOs surveyed rank operational oversight in the top three areas of current time allocation.
The result is that CFOs are doing strategic work, but not at the level, consistency, or intensity they believe is required.
Finance leaders want to focus on strategy, but day-to-day demands still take up much of their time
When asked how they would prefer to spend their time, CFOs are clear about their priorities. Half (50%) say strategic planning should be their primary focus, and 86% place it in their top three areas of focus. Business partnering follows closely, reinforcing the idea that CFOs want to shape decisions rather than report on them. This indicates a clear disconnect between the current and ideal state. CFOs want to operate as architects of business outcomes. In reality, they remain constrained in their ability to run the engine.
Operational oversight, reporting cycles, and compliance remain deeply embedded in the CFO agenda. The prominence of reporting, ranked among the top four current time areas, signals that CFOs are spending considerable time translating data into insight for the business.
Despite mature frameworks, regulatory and compliance requirements consume meaningful leadership bandwidth, often due to escalation-heavy processes.
While CFOs are spending time on automation and increasingly leveraging technology, they are yet to deliver the promised outcomes in terms of efficiency and meaningfully freeing up CFO bandwidth.
Meanwhile, areas such as ESG and talent leadership are consistently deprioritised, indicating they are still treated as secondary or compliance-led activities rather than core levers of value creation.
For organisations, the question is not about what the CFO should focus on, but what needs to change to enable that focus. The future finance model must:
CFOs want to spend their time shaping strategic choices, enabling faster decision-making, and partnering at the highest levels of the organisation. But realising that shift will depend less on changing priorities and more on redesigning the systems, processes and workflows around them.
Every organisation’s journey is different. Our experts work with finance leaders to navigate evolving priorities, from technology enablement and process transformation to strengthening strategic decision-making.
Let’s discuss what the next chapter of your finance function could look like.
The India Finance Leaders Barometer 2026 by Grant Thornton Bharat captures the perspectives of CFOs and senior finance leaders on the priorities, challenges and opportunities shaping the finance function.
Drawing on insights from across industries, the survey explores how finance leaders are responding to an increasingly dynamic business environment and where they expect the function to evolve over the coming years.
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