What Will 2026 Have in Store for Finance Leaders?

2025 was another landmark year in the world of finance. The threat of trade tariffs caused market uncertainty, making it harder to predict demand for products and services. Additionally, the AI boom continued, with many leading financial software products introducing AI features directly into their tools to boost efficiency.

If this is anything to go by, 2026 will require finance leaders to be agile and resilient by seizing new commercial opportunities, scenario-planning for downturns, and seeking continuous improvement across the function through best-in-class technology.

As part of the Next Gen Finance leaders series, I’ve reached out to my previous guests to get their take on what 2026 will have in store.

Humans Aren’t Going Anywhere

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype promised by efficiency gains from AI. However, Robert Collings, Founder of Flexal, an AI-native accounting practice, believes that humans in the finance function will be needed more than ever to act as business partners across organisations and provide strategic advice to clients.

Humans will still be in the loop. 2026 won’t be the year accountants go extinct. AI ERPs will continue to explode with growth, but for everyday clients and internal decision makers, human interaction is always important.

Robert Collings, Founder, Flexal

Next Gen Board Reporting

Tasnim Mustafa, Founder of Barnes & Scott, an accounting practice that specialises in servicing the technology sector, thinks that board reports will become enhanced due to advances in technology, making it easier than ever to analyse big data sets to present meaningful KPIs and identify outliers. These outputs should help finance leaders and the C-suite fine-tune business performance.

We’ll see a new era in board reporting packs, where data processing capabilities are used to crunch large volumes of disparate data, transforming them into concise, easily consumable insights for boards.

Tasnim Mustafa, Founder, Barnes & Scott

Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Financial Control

Sophie Conaghan, Finance Lead at CharlieHR and Founder of Finance for Founders, believes that there will be a shift toward businesses becoming financially sustainable, rather than the “growth at all costs era” that required repeated funding rounds. This means that financial control will become more important.

2026 will be the year of the rise in the appreciation of the financial controller. While financial controllers have always been around, we’ve now entered a new era of sustainability, with tighter cash controls and reporting. This means there is a growing need for financial controllers to produce solid, regular, accurate, and timely information to enable business decision-making. This sits alongside the increasingly appreciated FinOps role, which focuses on systems and processes that speed up the work of financial controllers. Together, these roles will also enable business data that is of high enough quality to be fed into the AI tools we will be increasingly using.

Sophie Conaghan, Finance Lead, CharlieHR and Founder, Finance for Founders

Finance Will Take on Operations Responsibility

Laura Beales, Co-Founder of Tally Workspace, thinks that finance departments will continue to evolve by taking ownership of operational data. These efforts should improve the quality of financial and operational data while also enabling finance teams to increase their overall value within their businesses.

In 2026, greater discipline around revenue and contract data will push finance to integrate much more tightly with other systems and teams, particularly CRM and billing. The finance function will be expected to own that data end-to-end, not just book the numbers at the end.

Laura Beales, Co-Founder, Tally Workspace

An Increased Focus on Strategy

Advancements in automation, most recently influenced by AI, will result in finance leaders having more time freed up from transactional work, which can be used to contribute to company strategy. Angela Brown, Founder of FinFlare, a boutique practice that provides fractional CFO services, believes that whilst AI will do a lot of the heavy lifting associated with transactional work, judgement and human skills will still need to be applied with finance partnering across the business to identify, track, and forecast the key numbers.

Our time will be less doing and more strategising. Staying in the finance lane, this will be much more about rolling forecasts and building stronger scenarios and tracking outcomes.

Angela Brown, Founder, FinFlare

Changing Business Models

Developments in technology, particularly related to AI, are changing business models. Scaling businesses don’t necessarily have a cost base that increases in line with higher sales due to productivity gains from technology. Imran Chagpar, Fractional CFO at Onside Accounting and Scale Now, believes that the way digital businesses sell is evolving, and that forward-looking forecasts will also need to consider how this impacts the relationship between revenues and cost of sales.

Next year, CFOs will need to stay at the forefront of how changing business models will impact budgeting. We’re now starting to see the convergence of headcount costs and tools for the first time. Certain tools are increasing staff productivity, so you don’t need to hire as many people.

Imran Chagpar, Fractional CFO, Onside Accounting and Scale Now

Check out our Next Gen Finance Leader profiles for more personal insights from the finance experts featured in this post.