The following is a guest post from Prince Oppong, senior director of strategic finance at PayPal. Opinions are the author’s own.
There is a moment every finance leader eventually faces: You are sitting across from the CEO or CFO with a model that took days to build, and the question they ask has nothing to do with the numbers. It is about judgment. What does this mean for us? What should we do? The answer to that question does not live in a spreadsheet.
For most of the history of financial planning and analysis, that moment rarely arrived. FP&A was a support function; competent, necessary and largely invisible. Teams produced monthly variance reports, built the annual budget, and handed the outputs upward. The real decisions happened in other rooms.
That is no longer true, at least not at the companies doing this well. Over the past several years, and accelerating rapidly since 2020, the FP&A function has undergone a transformation that is quietly reshaping who holds influence in large corporations. The most effective finance leaders today are not just reporting on the business. They are driving it.
I have seen this shift from the inside at one of the world’s largest financial technology companies, and in conversations with heads of FP&A at peer Fortune 500 organizations. The pattern is consistent: The companies where FP&A has the greatest strategic impact share a set of common traits. And the leaders driving that impact have developed capabilities that go well beyond financial modeling.
The companies where FP&A has the greatest strategic impact are not the ones with the most sophisticated models. They are the ones where finance leaders have earned a seat at the table by consistently converting complexity into clarity.
The old FP&A and why it is no longer enough
The traditional FP&A model was built around a single question: What happened? Monthly close packages, budget-to-actual variance analysis and rolling forecasts that extrapolate recent trends into the future. These outputs served a purpose, but they were fundamentally backward-looking. By the time the analysis reached the executive team, the window for meaningful action had often passed.
The limitations of this model were exposed decisively by the volatility of the past five years. Supply chain disruptions, rapid interest rate shifts, digital business model transformation and macroeconomic uncertainty created an environment where historical patterns were a poor guide to the future. Companies needed finance functions that could generate insight in real time, model scenarios that had never occurred before, and communicate trade-offs with enough clarity that non-finance executives could act on them.
The organizations that navigated this environment best were, almost universally, those where FP&A had already evolved beyond the scorekeeping role. Their finance leaders were not just preparing reports, they were shaping the questions the business was asking.
Defining the new FP&A leader
Based on my experience and conversations across peer networks of large-cap finance leaders, three capabilities separate the finance professionals who are reshaping their organizations from those still operating in the traditional model.
1. Translating complexity into decisions, not data into reports
The old currency of FP&A was completeness. The new currency is clarity. A 40-page variance package that explains everything explains nothing; it places the burden of synthesis on the executive reader rather than the finance leader. The most effective FP&A professionals I know have developed a discipline of ruthless prioritization: what are the two or three things leadership must understand to make the right call, and what is the simplest way to surface them?
This is harder than it sounds. It requires judgment about what matters, confidence to set aside analysis that is technically correct but strategically irrelevant, and an understanding of how senior decision-makers actually process information under time pressure. Finance leaders who master this skill find themselves being pulled into more conversations, earlier.
2. Being a trusted advisor, not a numbers provider
Trust is built through consistency and candor, and the most important form of candor in finance is the willingness to deliver an uncomfortable analysis. When the numbers suggest a strategy is not working, or a planned investment will not generate its expected return, the finance leader who surfaces that finding early, clearly and constructively becomes indispensable. The one who buries it in footnotes becomes irrelevant.
The shift from numbers provider to trusted advisor also requires a genuine understanding of the business, not just its financials. The best FP&A leaders I have encountered know the product, the competitive dynamics, the operational constraints, and the human factors that drive performance. They can sit in a strategy conversation and contribute a perspective, not just a model.
The finance leaders who earn the most trust are not always the ones with the best models. They are the ones who are honest when the model says something no one wants to hear.
3. Owning the financial narrative
Some of the highest-stakes work in corporate finance is invisible to most observers: the financial story told to a board of directors, an investor community, or a leadership team making a multi-year strategic commitment. These narratives are not communications exercises. They are analytical frameworks that define how the company understands its own performance, what it is committing to deliver, and how it will measure success.
FP&A leaders who can build and own these narratives, translating the company’s strategic ambitions into rigorous, credible financial frameworks, are doing some of the most consequential analytical work in the organization. The growth model behind an investor day presentation, for example, is not just a financial projection.
It is a public commitment that shapes analyst expectations, affects the cost of capital, and sets the performance bar for every business unit for the next several years. The finance leader who builds and defends that model must be both analytically precise and strategically sophisticated.
What this means for how we develop finance talent
If the capabilities that define elite FP&A leadership have expanded beyond technical finance skills, the implications for talent development are significant. The traditional finance career path, analyst to manager to director, deepening modeling and accounting expertise at each level, produces exceptional technical professionals. But it does not automatically produce the trusted advisors and strategic communicators that the new FP&A role demands.
The development investments that tend to matter most for finance leaders who make this transition are, perhaps counterintuitively, not financial. They are the experiences that build judgment, communication and business acumen: Rotational assignments in commercial or operational roles, exposure to board and investor conversations, deliberate practice in presenting complex analysis to non-finance audiences and peer exchange with leaders who have navigated similar challenges in different organizational contexts.
The technical foundation remains essential. A finance leader who cannot build a rigorous model will not retain credibility. But technical skill is increasingly the entry requirement, not the differentiator. The finance professionals who advance to the most consequential roles are those who have built the capacity to exercise judgment under uncertainty and to communicate that judgment in ways that move organizations.
The organizational opportunity
For CFOs and senior finance leaders thinking about how to position their FP&A functions, the opportunity is significant, and so is the cost of inaction. In organizations where FP&A remains a reporting function, strategic decisions are being made with less analytical support than they could have. Finance leaders are not at the table when the most consequential choices are made. And talented finance professionals, recognizing the ceiling on their impact, look elsewhere.
The organizations that have made this transition intentionally, restructuring FP&A around business partnership rather than process execution, investing in the development of judgment alongside technical skill, and giving finance leaders genuine influence over strategic conversations, consistently describe the same outcome: better decisions, made faster, with greater organizational alignment.
The FP&A function is not waiting for permission to play a larger role. In the best organizations, it already is. The question for every finance leader is whether the structure, the talent and the mandate are in place to make that potential real.
