Blog

For decades, CFOs relied on fragmented systems and tools to manage complex business operations. Fast forward to today and not much has changed in the finance stack: 93 percent of finance teams still juggle multiple software solutions.

However, the tides are turning. Savvy CFOs are realizing that the conundrum of disparate tools is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. In response, they are strategically building software stacks tailored to their industry-specific needs, driven by the desire to maximize their technology investments. They’re reimagining their software stacks to better address their unique requirements across all accounting, finance, and data-centric workflows.

This transformation presents an immense opportunity for software entrepreneurs, particularly those who can provide comprehensive solutions that help CFOs unlock the full potential of their technology investments. The Office of the CFO market is massive, topping $52B USD (€50 billion) in 2023 and is expected to grow by more than 13% through 2028. 

The convergence of legacy CFO challenges and emerging technologies like AI offers an exciting opportunity for new entrants to reshape how finance teams operate. We mapped the landscape of incumbents and high-growth startups across the global CFO software market. Our key finding: tech innovators have a chance to augment the CFO software stack to help finance teams work smarter and faster, and generate more value for their organizations. In fact, innovative specialty providers in our portfolio, like FloQast (accounting transformation platform) and Enable (rebate and pricing management), have successfully addressed niche CFO needs with targeted solutions.

Market Map: Key Software Categories Across the Office of the CFO

The global market for tailored financial solutions is flourishing—and getting more crowded by the day (see our market map in Figure 1). Core financial management solutions from incumbents like NetSuite and SAP offer critical ERP functionalities, but we see CFOs increasingly adopt specialized solutions designed to address specific needs and new responsibilities.

Figure 1: Market Map: Global Office of the CFO Software Stack

The right solutions can optimize each of the main 15 functions across the CFO suite.    

• Core Financial Management Suite. Comprehensive platforms that manage essential financial operations including general ledger, AR / AP, fixed assets, financial analytics and reporting, and more. These solutions provide a unified view of the company’s financial health, but can lack the deep insights and functionality focused solutions provide

• Intelligent Automation. Tools that leverage AI and deep integrations to streamline manual workflows across varying use cases (i.e., document processing, audit automation, etc.), oftentimes with AI agents

• Financial Corporate Performance Management (CPM) & Close. Tools designed to streamline the financial close process, ensuring accuracy and compliance across reporting processes.

• Strategic CPM and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). Solutions that assist in budgeting, forecasting, and strategic planning to drive informed business decisions. These enable scenario analysis and performance monitoring, aligning financial goals with organizational strategy.

• Accounts Receivable (AR), Billing, Invoice, and Revenue Automation. Tools that streamline and automate invoicing, payment collection, and revenue-recognition processes. 

• Billing Infrastructure. Provide the underlying systems for businesses to manage pricing, invoicing, and payment processing at scale. These solutions enable flexible billing models, including subscription, metered, and usage-based pricing, while ensuring automation, accuracy, and seamless integration with financial operations. 

• Cash and Treasury Management. Systems focused on optimizing liquidity, managing cash flows, debt management, and/or mitigating financial risks. These provide real-time visibility into cash positions and support cash management strategies.

• Procurement and Accounts Payable (AP) Automation. Platforms that streamline procurement processes and automate AP to improve efficiency and control over expenses. These facilitate supplier and subscription management, PO processing, and compliance with procurement policies. 

• Expense Management. Tools that facilitate the tracking, approval, and reimbursement of employee expenses, ensuring compliance and cost control. These can offer various features such as receipt captures, policy enforcement, and integration with accounting systems.

• Payroll & Compensation Management. Software that manages employee compensation, tax withholdings, and compliance with labor laws. Although similar solutions are also sold into the HR function, CFOs often find themselves as the final decision-makers for these tools.

• Tax Management. Solutions that assist in tax prep, optimization, and reporting, ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements. These help automate tax calculations, support multi-jurisdictional compliance, and facilitate audit readiness. 

• CPA / Tax Prep. Includes software designed to streamline tax preparation, compliance, and advisory services for accountants and businesses. These tools assist with filing, tax calculations, workflow automation, and client collaboration to ensure accuracy and efficiency in tax reporting.

• Equity Management. Platforms that handle the administration of equity plans, cap tables, and stock options, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and providing transparency for stakeholders.

• Rebate & Pricing Management. Platforms that help businesses optimize pricing strategies, manage complex rebate programs, and enhance revenue efficiency. These tools provide automation for contract-based pricing, discount structures, and real-time analytics to maximize profitability and customer incentives.

• Corporate Secretary & Compliance. Platforms that facilitate the management of corporate governance, regulatory compliance, and statutory record-keeping. These tools assist corporate secretaries in maintaining accurate records, ensuring timely filings, and complying with laws. 

Innovation is not confined to these spaces, however. Norwest-backed Enable founder Andrew Butt saw that supplier rebates were growing rapidly and eating into margins; he sensed an opportunity to improve collaboration among finance, commercial teams, and trading partners. “A modern cloud solution was needed but nothing existed. So we created Enable,” he explains. 

Today, Enable’s AI-supported solution can simulate thousands of scenarios quickly and propose the best action based on a company’s objectives. Butt’s insight is spot on. “By addressing what is an often overlooked financial process and aspect of the CFO stack, we were able to deliver immediate value, carve out our niche, and then expand our platform to address adjacent needs in financial operations to areas including operations, compliance management, pricing, and more.”

“By addressing what is an often overlooked financial process and aspect of the CFO stack, we were able to deliver immediate value, carve out our niche, and then expand our platform.”

—  Andrew W. Butt, Founder, Enable

The progression in Enable’s solution offers an excellent model  for founders in this space: the best opportunity to land with enterprises is to build a product with deep capabilities within a specific niche and then expand modularity from there.

The Evolution of the CFO Software Stack

CFO software has come a long way in a very short time, advancing from spreadsheets to AI-enabled tools capable of generating actionable insights. This rapid evolution can be tracked across four eras, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: A Brief History of the CFO Tech Stack

Today’s CFO software stack prioritizes real-time data and seamless integration. API-first platforms like Ramp, Brex, and Airbase have revolutionized expense management, providing CFOs with real-time insights into cash flow and financial performance. Companies like Norwest-backed ORO Labs deploy AI tools that help guide users through the “procurement maze” without them having to learn procurement policy details. “AI in ORO is geared towards understanding user intent and mapping it to procurement processes,” explains CEO and Co-Founder Sudhir Bhojwani. “We can automate 70-80 percent of the manual effort in procurement and supply chain.” 

Similarly, Anrok uses AI to provide contextual understanding and automation across workflows that previously relied on OCR techniques. Anrok’s approach improves predictive capabilities and enables dynamic decision-making in a way not previously seen within the tax domain. In the FP&A space, a notoriously difficult category to sell into, Pigment applies AI to help finance teams build dynamic forecasts and scenario models, replacing static spreadsheets with real-time, data-driven planning. By integrating business data and surfacing actionable insights, Pigment allows finance teams to shift from reactive reporting to proactive decision-making.

“AI in ORO is geared towards understanding user intent and mapping it to procurement processes.”

— Sudhir Bhojwani, CEO and Co-Founder, ORO Labs

Fit-for-Purpose Solutions Gain CFO Adoption  

As the financial technology landscape evolves, CFOs are looking for tools that provide advanced functionality, are tailored to their specific needs, and reflect three key characteristics. 

1. Deep domain understanding. As pragmatic buyers, CFOs want software solutions developed or validated by professionals with firsthand experience in finance and accounting. This gives them confidence that the tools can address their specific pain points and challenges. CPAs Mike Whitmire and Chris Sluty cofounded FloQast, another Norwest portfolio company, after identifying inefficiencies in the financial close process from their own experiences. Whitmire pinpointed the need after seeing the number of practicing CPAs decline and fewer professionals enter the field. “The pressure on accounting leaders to do more with less has never been greater,” he says. “Our platform is designed to meet that reality head-on.”
   
   On the flip side, Jeron Paul, founder of the Norwest alumni company Spiff, ultimately interviewed over 200 CFOs before building the company’s sales compensation automation platform. However a concept comes to fruition, CFOs want to know that software providers understand their world and are offering a solution to a real problem. That is what will lead to adoption. 
2. Dependable data integration and quality. The promise of AI agents is enticing, but ultimately useless without strong APIs and integrations within existing data stacks. Simply put: an agent using bad data will yield bad results. Platforms like Nanonets and Klarity have garnered significant hype given their ability to extract clean data. By automating document workflows and eliminating manual data extraction tasks, both tools save finance teams significant time while making human error less likely. Implementing robust data-extraction solutions enables finance teams to increase data accuracy, streamline operations, and ensure seamless information flow across diverse systems.
3. Vertical focus. CFOs favor financial tools tailored to the specific needs of their industries. Such vertical-specific solutions address unique workflows and compliance requirements more effectively than generic platforms. Companies like Waystar provide end-to-end, revenue- and payment-management tools for hospitals and specialty practices. On the flip side, targeted solutions that address specific problems within an industry are also in demand, like our construction portfolio companies Ediphi and BuildVision, whose cloud-based solutions estimate costs and streamline procurement in commercial projects.

The Next Frontier of CFO Challenges: Integrating AI in Financial Management

Unlike in earlier technological eras, AI now has the potential both to automate tasks and augment decision-making with precision and speed across the finance department. AI-enabled tools can accomplish in minutes what used to take hours or days in areas ranging from tax to treasury management to procurement.  

Yet, AI is not a cure-all. Even the best AI-enabled tools require CFOs to address several challenges, including: 

1. 1. Data quality, security and compliance. A survey by AvePoint found that 52 percent of respondents encountered issues with internal data quality and organization in assessing their company’s AI implementation readiness. Similarly, a BlackLine survey found that nearly one-third of financial executives believe data-quality issues result from having too many data sources. As data continues to multiply, myriad EU, national, and state compliance frameworks and certification standards also underscore the ongoing importance of data privacy usage and security. CFOs need a reliable process to maintain internal compliance and thoroughly assess each vendor’s compliance workflows and history. 
   2. Talent and skill gaps. Deploying AI technologies requires specialized skills that many finance teams lack. A survey by Wolters Kluwer found that 40 percent of respondents believe successful AI adoption requires human-AI training programs and stronger human control of AI algorithms. Only 61 percent rated their recent AI initiatives as successful or very successful. The current state of the market supports the view that AI is meant to aid existing finance workflows, not completely replace the humans involved.
   3. Solutions that are a mile wide but an inch deep. The promise of broad-based finance agents is great, but the reality is that performance often comes up short. CFOs make decisions based on tangible top-/bottom-line benefit and overall ROI. At the enterprise level, it is very difficult to find a horizontal solution that can manage the complexity of all the workflows across subverticals (i.e., accounting, treasury, tax, etc.) and end markets (e.g., tech, manufacturing, retail, etc.). Solutions that can go deep in certain workflows will be preferable over those that cast a wide net of use cases but sacrifice quality. 

Evolving the Role of the CFO: From Accountants to Operational Architects 

The evolution of the CFO software stack mirrors the broader transformation of the CFO’s role—from a meticulous keeper of books to a strategic architect. What was once a function bogged down by spreadsheets and disparate systems has now become a hub of innovation driven by AI, automation, and vertical specialization. CFOs today must be equipped to tackle a wide range of challenges with versatility and strategic insight.

Despite the ongoing innovation in the CFO software space, integration of solutions and data streams remains a challenge. And let’s not lose sight of the big picture: today’s CFO software stack isn’t just about the software—it’s about identifying and using tools that unlock the full potential of their organizations. Solutions developed by professionals with firsthand knowledge or experience in finance are poised to win and grow market share, as evidenced by the high-growth entrants we’ve observed—and invested in. Solutions that also deliver seamless integration and ease of adoption, improve data portability, and generate AI- and API-driven insights will add real value now and in the future. 

If you’re building in the space or have any thoughts on the CFO software stack, we’d love to chat! Reach out to us: Sean Jacobsohn (LinkedIn or email) or Nikhil Goel (LinkedIn or email).