Spend management innovation yields equity value

Today’s business leaders are looking closely at how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and automation can help them aggregate and parse an ever-expanding amount of data needed to effectively operate their organizations. The advent of AI is only accelerating the evolution of the finance function, which is increasingly tasked to serve as a leader of strategy at the business.

The role of the controller, for instance, is becoming much more forward-thinking and creative in an age when data is at everyone’s fingertips, said Kristi Chapman, enhanced corporate reporting and accounting leader at Ernst & Young Americas. Chapman has logged a near 30-year tenure with the Big Four firm, and her role focuses on advising the controllership function on the skills and tools needed in the face of transformational events, she said.

Managing data has long been a key responsibility for controllers, but in today’s world, that goes beyond the information they traditionally looked to, according to Chapman. Controllers are now becoming the source of information across the business “to be able to drive the forward-looking thinking and the strategy areas of the company,” she told CFO Dive in an interview.

“I think that's why, when we start looking at what controllers are doing today, the importance of being able to collect data and have it in a way that other parts of the organization can access very readily is becoming increasingly important,” she said.

The stewards of data  

As the finance function becomes a more strategic leader, the importance of having access to a wide quantity of information, and quickly, is increasingly critical. With CFOs taking on more responsibilities outside of finance, the controller is swiftly becoming their trusted adviser, with finance chiefs “relying much more heavily on that controller to have those bits and pieces of information available very quickly,” Chapman said.

That reliance doesn’t end with the CFO, however. Modern controllers have access to key data flows and are now working cross-functionally to make sure “all the various portions of the organization have the right information and have the right view into the areas that they are needing,” she said.

“The controller, when it comes to providing that information for other parts of the organization, they are really like the spoke of a wheel,” Chapman said.

With controllers serving as a key nexus point of information, they’re also seeing their own remits widen. For instance, while historically, controllers have been responsible for monitoring changes in accounting regulations, they are now looked to as the executive responsible for staying up to date with sustainability or other key regulatory shifts, Chapman said.

“We see that happening a lot, especially in the world of sustainability or ESG reporting,” she said. EY is also seeing a “huge crossover between what a controller is responsible for and needs to know and what is happening in the supply chain organization,” Chapman said. 

Tech and the talent game   

The increasing need for clear, data-driven insights is doing more than just changing the controllership role, however. It’s also impacting the technologies controllers themselves need to use, as well as the skills or experience they are seeking out when hunting for talent on their teams.

“We definitely see a difference in what controllers are looking for in terms of their team,” she said. Controllers need to have a team that can anticipate the needs of the rest of the business, she said.

“They can't just wait for bits and pieces of the organization to ask for the information, they have to be thinking at all times, ‘OK, how should I be slicing and dicing information to make it most readily available for the needs of the business and really create that easy access?’” Chapman said.

Additionally, controllers themselves are also taking second looks at how AI could benefit their own day-to-day as they take on that more forward-thinking position, Chapman said. A 2024 survey by EY found that 89% of financial controllers reported they had adopted AI in some form, while 65% said they were utilizing generative AI on a frequent basis, according to the report.

“Everyone now in a controllership function seems to have a need for, the willingness and openness to try new technologies, whether they're AI-driven or whether they are third-party provided services,” Chapman said.

About one-third of organizations have advanced to full-scale deployment of agentic artificial intelligence technology, up three-fold after two consecutive quarters at 11%, according to a KPMG study released Thursday.

Fifty-seven percent of surveyed organizations are piloting agents, down from 65%, and 10% are exploring the possibility of using them, compared to 25% last quarter, the Big Four accounting firm found.

“The data shows just how quickly AI agents are moving out of pilots and into production — and that momentum will only accelerate,” Steve Chase, KPMG’s vice chair of AI and digital innovation, said in a press release. “What makes this moment unique is that leaders increasingly see agents not just as a way to cut costs, but as a way to rethink growth and create new value.”

The still nascent technology continues to pose implementation challenges, KPMG said. The primary obstacles to agent deployment include technical skills gaps, workforce resistance to change and system complexity, according to a report on the findings.

Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at Gartner, said in a Wednesday press release. “This can blind organizations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production. They need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology.”

Many vendors are contributing to the hype by engaging in “agent washing” — the rebranding of existing products, such as AI assistants, robotic process automation and chatbots, “without substantial agentic capabilities,” according to the release.

Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Workday are among tech giants that began launching agents last year, promising the next stage of enterprise automation.

Big Four accounting firms such as KPMG and Deloitte have quickly jumped on the band wagon as well, offering their own agentic AI solutions for customers.

Among the enterprises now using agentic AI, many are taking a balanced, strategic approach, according to the results of the KPMG survey.

Nearly half of leaders (46%) said they were focused on efficiency and revenue growth as it relates to their AI agent strategies, according to KPMG’s report. Meanwhile, leader concerns about data privacy, regulatory issues and data quality are at their highest in three quarters, the report said.

KPMG polled 130 U.S.-based business leaders representing organizations with an annual revenue of $1 billion or more.

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By Tropic

Every company knows what they sell, but few know what they buy. With 50-60% of revenue flowing to suppliers and tech spending hitting record highs, that's a costly blind spot. The good news? Building a world-class spend management program isn't about complex technology or bureaucracy. It's about asking the right questions, in the right order, and building on solid foundations

1. Start With the Basics: A Real Spend Policy

You don’t need to buy anything to start managing spend. What you do need is a documented, enforceable policy. For many companies, that means revisiting something created years ago, or starting from scratch.

A solid spend policy answers questions like:

• Who can spend what, and on what?
• What needs approval, and from whom?
• How are purchases requested, reviewed, and recorded?

The best policies are clear, short, and simple enough that budget owners actually follow them. A policy that isn’t enforced, or understood, isn’t a policy at all.

2. Map Your Spend Before You Buy Anything New

Before you start optimizing, centralize what you’ve already got. A full tech stack or supplier map sounds daunting, but it can start with a spreadsheet. Gather the essentials:

• Who are we paying?
• How much are we paying?
• What is this used for?
• Is it still needed?
• Are we open to exploring other options?

Many companies, especially small or fast-growing ones, waste money on unused or duplicate software. To identify consolidation opportunities and high-risk renewals, ask stakeholders to rate each tool's business criticality (1–5), link it to a company goal, and inquire about alternatives. This reveals misaligned spend.

3. Evaluate Usage, Not Just Contracts

Contract value doesn’t always reflect actual usage. In fact, underutilization is one of the most consistent ways companies overspend.

If you have 200 licenses for a tool and only 100 people log in regularly, or if a team is using just 10% of a product’s features, you’re likely overpaying. Look beyond invoice totals:

• Are all licenses being used?
• Can we downgrade to a different tier?
• Are there more cost-effective tools serving the same function?

Request detailed usage data from vendors ahead of renewals. This simple step can lead to major cost reductions with minimal business impact.

4. Use Data to Lead (and Defend) Every Negotiation

Negotiating without benchmarks is like driving blind. Finance leaders reviewing proposed deals want to know: Is this a good price? Is this a good use of budget?

Access to pricing benchmarks by supplier, contract length, or company size helps answer those questions. But data should do more than justify decisions, it should shape strategy.

Ask yourself:

• What’s the right time to kick off renewals?
• Are we negotiating from a position of strength?
• What terms should we push for beyond price (uplift protection, flexibility, service levels)?

Early engagement (90–180 days before contract end dates) secures better pricing and terms by allowing supplier comparisons and avoiding rushed approvals.

5. Automate Intake, But Keep It Simple

One of the biggest blockers to policy adoption is complexity. If your intake process is too manual, people work around it. If it’s too rigid, it creates friction.

The goal is to guide people, not impede their progress. Whether you’re using a form, workflow tool, or integrated platform, the best intake experiences:

• Ask relevant questions based on purchase type
• Route approvals to the right stakeholders (finance, legal, security)
• Connect with your ERP or contract systems to track spend and actuals

Even small improvements like renewal reminders and status alerts can dramatically reduce last-minute chaos.

6. Define Ownership and Accountability

If no one owns procurement and spend management, no one improves it. As spend scales, make sure someone is clearly responsible for maintaining your processes and leading improvements. Whether it’s a finance lead, procurement manager, or dedicated operations role.

This person should:

• Review upcoming renewals regularly
• Monitor adoption and compliance
• Gather insights from past deals to improve future ones

Ownership turns procurement and spend management from reactive to strategic and helps avoid renewal surprises and shadow spend.

Start Small, Act Often

Spend management is an ongoing process, not a one-off project. It’s about aligning spending with business outcomes and efficiency, not just cutting costs.

If you’re not sure where to start:

• Review your top 20 suppliers and upcoming renewals
• Build a basic contract tracker
• Set a spend policy, even if it’s one page
• Ask stakeholders what they actually use

Great programs aren’t built overnight. But with a clear process and the right questions, you can go from reactive to strategic, one step at a time.

Microsoft’s finance department has incorporated various artificial intelligence agents into its toolkit as the team ramps up its years-long digital transformation push, an official said.

The agents add to a mix of AI-powered tools that are helping the team streamline a range of functions, including procurement, payment collections and financial forecasting, according to Cory Hrncirik, the company’s modern finance leader.

AI is “driving so much change at the company … saving us thousands upon thousands of hours” as well as millions of dollars, he said at a finance conference last week at the University of Southern California.

The arsenal of AI agents deployed by the finance team includes off-the-shelf Microsoft tools such as an analyst agent that can perform advanced data analysis, according to Hrncirik. The team is also using custom-built agents that it developed for specialized functions, including a tool designed to simplify the process of sourcing suppliers. 

The sourcing assistant is saving the company an estimated $10 million in costs per year, while also resulting in an estimated 15,000 hours in annual time savings, according to a PowerPoint slide shown during the presentation. 

Besides generating cost savings and productivity gains, AI initiatives have also helped to bend the finance team’s “headcount curve” over the past decade, Hrncirik said.

“Whereas we always had to rely on hiring a lot of people, armed with nothing other than Excel spreadsheets and a ... desire to power through broken systems and processes, we now have been able to really streamline a lot of the work that we do,” he said. “We’re seeing the opportunity to really empower every person that works in our finance division to achieve more.”

The event, sponsored by the University of Southern California and Financial Executives International, a professional organization for finance leaders, featured Hrncirik as a keynote speaker.

Hrncirik’s career at Microsoft spans a period of nearly 17 years. As part of his current role, which he assumed in 2018, he helps guide the digital transformation of the tech giant’s finance team in addition to sharing ideas with finance executives of other leading companies, according to his LinkedIn profile. His prior titles at the company have included senior business analyst manager and finance manager.

The finance team at Microsoft began its AI journey about a decade ago, long before OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool grabbed the world’s attention, according to Hrncirik.

“It started with traditional machine learning, primarily in the forecasting domain,” he said. The use cases quickly expanded to include areas such as audit reviews, he said. Eventually, the team also began using AI for purposes such as automating invoice payments, reconciliations and approvals of all kinds.

“We have learned a lot about AI and applying AI to finance over the past decade,” he said. “But we’ve seen more progress in the past couple of years than we’ve seen in a long time ... With the evolution of ChatGPT ... AI became common language ... and it’s at our fingertips. And that accessibility has opened up new ideas.”

The team’s AI push came after the groundwork was laid by CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, Hrncirik said.

After becoming CEO in 2014, Nadella sparked a cultural shift in the company when he pushed the overall organization to embrace a growth mindset, Hrncirik said.

“Amy and all of our finance leaders have leaned into that concept,” he said. “It’s really important, especially for risk averse finance and accounting professionals, who don’t always love change and don’t always love changing a system or process.”

He said the cultural shift was crucial in that it challenged people to ask themselves how they could “do things better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently.”

“There are some areas [where] you want to change things more methodically than others [to avoid running] afoul of any compliance or regulatory issues, of course,” he said. “But there are so many areas where we can move really, really fast.”

While it’s now “accepted wisdom” that CFOs serve today as strategic partners to CEOs, top financial executives are expected to expand their skillsets further still, said Bea Ordonez, CFO for financial services company Payoneer.

A CFO is increasingly expected to be an “innovation champion,” as well as a strategic leader for the business — dual roles that require finance chiefs to ensure they are taking a deeper look at how to best deploy their organizations’ data, Ordonez said.

“The CFO is really driving that internal championship of those initiatives, and really positioning the company that they're at to use data as a strategic asset of the business,” Ordonez said in an interview.

Doing the boring work right  

The new emergence of the CFO as a champion of innovation is the latest twist in the evolution of a role that has expanded far beyond its traditional responsibilities in budgeting, accounting and finance.

Since Ordonez joined Payoneer in 2023, for example, the New-York based money transfer and digital payment provider has rolled up many of the operational responsibilities under the CFO office, she said. That speaks to the continued expansion of the finance chief role, which is now not only touching operations, but areas such as risk and compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and other strategic areas, she said.

“I actually have a maybe somewhat bizarre and slightly nerdy love for all things operational in financial services companies, because I think that they represent very real problems for how you externalize your service in an effective and frictionless way to your customers,” she said.

The course of Ordonez’s career has also allowed the finance chief to gain critical experience in operations, as well as other areas that are steadily falling more often under a CFO’s umbrella. Beginning her career at accounting firms Arthur Andersen and PricewaterhouseCoopers before taking on an account manager role for Marsh &McLennan Companies, Ordonez’s “itchy feet” soon carried her through multiple financial and operation roles, she said.

That included serving as CFO for startup broker G-Trade, as chief operating officer and managing director for financial services company Convergex, CFO and EVP for Sterling National Bank and chief innovation officer for Webster Bank, before assuming Payoneer’s top finance seat in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Throughout her time in various C-suite roles, Ordonez has "worked always at the intersection, I would say, of regulated financial services and technology, often at sort of a fairly early stage,” she said.

As the CFO’s remit has evolved, it’s also shepherded a change in the overall role that the finance function plays in business. Ensuring the organization is able to make strategic use of data is integral to the effectiveness of the team.

“I take that as a given that you should now be using the power of data to ensure that your FP&A team, your finance organization is deriving insights, and not just crunching numbers,” Ordonez said. Before that can happen, however, the finance chief needs to ensure that the company has clear and easy access to that information.

“Data can only become useful and an asset to the extent that you do all of the boring work to make it readable, accessible, a single source of truth, properly cataloged and so on,” Ordonez said. “So supporting what is otherwise sort of mundane, foundational work, including the investment necessary to actually make that transformation, [is a] critical step one.”

Once that foundation is in place — which can be a lengthy and costly process, Ordonez acknowledged — CFOs can enable various parts of the business to begin utilizing that data for future projects and innovations, she said. In finance, for example, that foundation enables more flexible scenario planning, while the product team can utilize the data to better drive customer engagement.

Taking a modular approach  

Flexible scenario planning is becoming increasingly critical for businesses in the current macroeconomic environment, when companies across industries are juggling a number of large-scale changes — whether in regulation or technology.

In the payments business, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digitization, Ordonez said, although she noted certain aspects of that ecosystem, such as cross-border payments, remain relatively cumbersome and opaque. Completing such transactions often requires multiple entities and takes place across a number of platforms, creating a complex environment for both users and payment players to navigate.

As such, “as I look to Payoneer, what we've developed over 20 years in business, certainly in how we connect to that ecosystem of providers, becomes very modular in approach,” she said. In the midst of a complicated array of new and old payment technologies and rails, the company looks to make sure “we ingest the services of multiple players in the space to best serve the needs of our customers,” she said.

Payoneer, alongside card network Mastercard and fellow payments provider PayPal, is also among the companies mulling how stablecoins could potentially be utilized for business-to-business payments, CFO Dive sister publication Payments Dive previously reported.

The company sees stablecoins as “complementary” to its core business at the moment, Ordonez said, with some interest from its customers, but there are still some challenges left to solve in the space, particularly regarding the infrastructure necessary to utilize such assets as a payment rail at scale.

“We view stablecoin as a really powerful rail, potentially within our ecosystem, but that last mile infrastructure has remained sort of the key challenge for players to solve,” she said.

Salesforce’s new agentic artificial intelligence product known as “Agentforce” has so far generated over 8,000 deals, the company said Wednesday.

Agentforce is also now producing $100 million in annual order value, CEO Marc Benioff said during an earnings call. 

“It's much faster than any product in our history, and we are not even fully deployed on all geographies, currencies or languages,” he said.

Salesforce is among tech giants whose heavy AI spending is being closely watched by investors.

Microsoft expects to spend roughly $80 billion during the current fiscal year on AI-enabled data centers to train large language models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications, Microsoft President Brad Smith said in January. The tech giant remains on track to achieve this spending goal despite a recent pullback in AI data center projects, a spokesperson told CFO Dive in April.

In September, Salesforce’s venture capital division, Salesforce Ventures, announced a $500 million AI fund, which at the time marked a total commitment of $1 billion in the space over a period of 18 months. 

That announcement came just days after Salesforce unveiled Agentforce, a suite of AI agents designed to perform workplace tasks. At the time, Benioff said the company was seeking to deploy one billion agents by the end of 2025.

In addition to generating over 8,000 deals, Agentforce has also handled over 750,000 requests on help.salesforce.com, cutting case volume by 7% year over year, the company said Wednesday.

“As a result, we have reduced some of our hiring needs, enabling us to rebalance and redeploy 500 customer support employees to higher impact data plus AI roles by year-end, driving $50 million in savings,” Salesforce Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington said during the Wednesday earnings call.

The enterprise software giant highlighted the Agentforce news as it also posted $9.8 billion in total revenues for its fiscal 2026 first quarter ended April 30, an increase of 8% compared with the year-earlier period.

Despite the revenue growth, the company’s stock fell more than 9% on Thursday.

Analysts at RBC Capital Markets on Thursday downgraded their rating for Salesforce, questioning the wisdom of the software giant’s Tuesday announcement that it agreed to buy cloud data management firm Informatica for about $8 billion.

“While we understand wanting to control the full stack at the data layer, we don’t know that it was mission-critical to own Informatica outright, especially with Informatica having integrations with Salesforce (including Agentforce),” the analysts said. “Furthermore, given many of Salesforce’s prior acquisitions have not been integrated, we believe this creates deal risk, not to mention the risk that Informatica becomes a distraction from Salesforce’s core business.”

The analysts also said they’ve heard from industry participants who are “mixed on Agentforce and whether the technology truly lives up to the marketing yet.”

Today’s CFOs are facing a growing crop of challenges, from persistent inflation to questions over how to best utilize emerging technologies such as AI.  

While there’s always been pressure associated with the top financial seat, the expanding scope of the role’s responsibilities, plus increased volatility in the business environment, is only compounding those pressures — leading to increased risk of burnout, as well as rising CFO turnover, said Jay Peir, head of strategy and interim CFO for Pigment, a business planning software provider.   

“I think the expanded importance and role of the CFO [to] a strategic partnership coupled with increasing pressure and change driven by volatility are both factors,” Peir said in an interview regarding CFO turnover.

Rising pace of change  

CFO turnover reached a six-year high this year, a trend occurring as the supply of finance talent continues to shrink as more and more experienced financial professionals retire, a recent survey by Russell Reynolds found.

While some of the turnover within the role is due to finance chiefs departing for board positions or to the CEO seat, CFOs are also faced with an expanded to-do list that could contribute to burnout. Today’s finance chiefs play an integral role in developing their companies’ strategies — including responding to shifting market developments, the top external risk on finance chiefs’ minds, according to Pigment’s 2025 Office of the CFO survey.

The evolution of the CFO role has also dovetailed with the accelerating pace of change in the global business environment, Peir said.

Companies had to pivot quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and since that point, “we've seen high inflation, supply chain disruption and geopolitical events…and then even this year, it seems as though every week or every day there's news where companies need to make decisions and need to pivot quicker than ever before,” he said. 

Peir has served in his current role at the Paris, France-based company since December 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Pigment, Peir served as EVP, corporate development and strategy for Tableau Software, and logged an eight-year tenure at SunPower Corporation in roles including VP of corporate development and CFO.

Another factor increasing the pressure on finance chiefs is the dual mandate of both improving efficiency and lowering costs. While finance is often asked to identify efficiencies, available technologies have not “evolved at quite the same pace to support the extended scope and needs” of the finance team, Peir said.

Trust, but verify

Bringing in new technology could help CFOs to better tackle their growing list of responsibilities, both enabling more efficiency as well as helping to attract and retain top talent. In the face of an ongoing accountant shortage, employee recruitment and retention within the finance function remains top of mind for finance chiefs. 

According to Pigment’s survey, managers identified “inadequate technologies and tools” as one of the main reasons for attrition inside of their finance teams, with “work-life balance” and compensation emerging as other key factors. Those at the director level or above, meanwhile, pointed to compensation, business performance, and a lack of training or professional development as reasons behind departing finance employees.

One way CFOs could approach the issue of inadequate technology is by paring down the number of tools they use.The finance function, like other areas of businesses, typically taps multiple platforms for their daily operations — one such platform for budgeting or forecasting, another for financial planning and analytics and so on. However, that means “decision making is spread between those [platforms] where there's, many times, a lack of a single source of truth,” Peir said.  

As well as removing redundant or outdated technologies, CFOs could also utilize emerging tools like AI. Though finance chiefs are still interested in AI’s potential applications — with its potential usages for generating insights and automating manual tasks top of mind — the technology still remains on the list of top risks for CFOs, according to Pigment’s survey.

There’s an element of “trust, but verify” when looking at the technology for finance chiefs, Peir said, especially when it comes to ensuring good data governance and security.

“I think it's hard for finance to just receive an answer versus…having the underlying dynamics of the [forecasting] models or the rationale for the answer,” he said.

President Donald Trump has quickly moved on several fronts to make good on his promise to be a pro-cryptocurrency president: he’s ordered the creation of working groups focused on crypto and the issuance and operation of assets such as stablecoins and is exploring the potential creation of a national stockpile of digital assets. At the same time, he’s also sparked concerns about potential conflict of interest stemming from his family’s own financial interests in the sector. 

Taken together, Trump’s actions have helped bring crypto further into the mainstream financial fold in recent months, at the same time that buzz is rising around stablecoins — digital assets which have their value pegged to another asset such as a currency. The shift is pushing many businesses and their finance chiefs to take a second look at the pros and cons of bringing digital assets onto their balance sheets.

However, CFOs eying digital assets also need to keep pace with shifting regulations and accounting requirements surrounding crypto, at the same time as they seek out potential use cases for crypto assets. As the Trump administration is moving to cultivate friendlier relationships with crypto-focused firms and platforms, it’s the “right time to get educated” about the potential capabilities of crypto — and especially, stablecoins for CFOs, treasury officials, and other financial leaders, said Paul Bances, VP of market development for PayPal.

Stablecoins 101

Along with appointing pro-crypto leaders to agencies such as the SEC — the new administration is also walking back aggressive enforcement against cryptocurrency assets and platforms, and creating a large opportunity for the industry to woo new customers.

Ever since the election of President Trump to his second term, “I would say there has been a lot more demand from the corporate segment,” Steven Capozza, director, Americas institutional sales for Coinbase told CFO Dive. For one thing, there’s “a lot of public companies starting to add crypto, not just stablecoins, but Bitcoin, Ethereum, to their balance sheet as part of their treasury,” he said.

This is not the first time cryptocurrency has captivated the attention of business leaders, however — and its past time in the spotlight shone a harsh light on its potential drawbacks, such as the volatility of certain digital assets. As such, many vendors are honing in on stablecoins as a potential asset to draw in often risk-adverse finance chiefs.  

PayPal sees stablecoins as “the first killer use case for crypto,” Bances told CFO Dive in an interview, “because you're basically taking this concept of [a dollar] and tokenizing it and then adding to it and unleashing the power that a blockchain can provide.”

Unlike many other digital assets like bitcoin, stablecoins owe their name to their structure and are viewed as being more stable due to being pegged to another asset — often a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar — making them more viable as a method of payment for finance leaders.

In October, PayPal completed a proof of concept with Coinbase and Big Four firm Ernst & Young, where it used stablecoins to pay EY invoices, according to a press release at the time. The following month, it conducted a similar pilot with Google Cloud, both aimed at demonstrating to CFOs and finance leaders the efficiency and speed of such transactions, Bances said.

Using stablecoins for cross-border transactions can offer an alternative way of moving money than traditional methods such as wire transfers, which can take between two and five days. But “if you're able to do that instantly, and you deliver it on the other end, there's so many more efficiencies in terms of repatriating money,” Capozza said.

However, many finance chiefs are starting from the ground level when it comes to identifying the potential benefits of stablecoins. Getting finance and treasury teams comfortable with stablecoins and educating them about the asset’s uses and benefits can often be a multi-month process, Capozza said.

“These large corporate treasury teams are conservative by nature, and so probably haven't done super deep dives on any of this stuff,” Capozza said. “And so when they come in, it's really a process on our part to help educate them.”

Stablecoins have swiftly seen their transaction volume rise in recent years, a trend that is likely to accelerate with the continued adoption of the asset by large companies, vendors, and payment providers, as well as with a friendlier relationship with federal agencies such as the SEC. In addition to PayPal, Mastercard and Payoneer are among the payment entities which have moved to expand and experiment with stablecoins for transactions, CFO Dive sister publication Payments Dive reported.

It’s important for finance chiefs to take a look at stablecoins currently, because over the next few years, “I would say we're probably not even talking about stablecoins. It is just a net operating part of moving money,” Michelle O’Connor, Vice President of Global Brand and Market Expansion at digital asset tax firm TaxBit told CFO Dive.

The other side of the (stable)coin  

While crypto enthusiasts have praised the Trump administration’s actions to create regulatory clarity and align crypto more closely with traditional finance, others remain wary of the potential risks stablecoins and other digital assets might pose.

“To me, stablecoins remain all risk with little reward,” Jack Castonguay, an associate professor of accounting at Hofstra University in New York, told CFO Dive in an email.

“For most US-based companies, stablecoins are a solution looking for a problem to solve. Most of our companies and CFOs have access to the actual assets the stablecoins are pegged to in value. In my opinion, stablecoins create an unnecessary risk for companies who hold them,” Castonguay said. “They would be better off just buying the asset: dollars, foreign currencies, etc., outright and placing it on their balance sheet instead of investing through a stablecoin.”

Another potential hiccup is the fact that stablecoins — which currently lack an accepted legal definition — could swing in value even though they are pegged to a fiat asset due to a number of different factors. If the stablecoin fails to maintain proper reserves, or the entity issuing it has a risky balance sheet, “then it will decline in value even if the pegged asset is increasing in value,” Castonguay said. From an accounting standpoint, those changes in valuation could potentially increase the P&L exposure of the asset, he said.

Regulators themselves have also expressed concern over potential risks associated with such digital assets. The STABLE Act which recently passed the House Financial Services Committee received pushback from lawmakers largely along partisan lines, with many Democrats arguing the bill could open the gate to conflicts of interest and to consolidating private forms of currency into the hands of corporate firms such as Facebook parent Meta, Time Magazine recently reported.

The act sketches out a framework for stablecoin regulation, requiring privately-issued stablecoins to be backed one-to-one with the U.S. dollar or assets controlled by federal or state regulators, Bloomberg reported. However, it does not bar politicians — including President Trump — from issuing their own stablecoins.  

There will also be those in the crypto space which are looking to make a “quick buck,” O’Connor said.

“I think there are those projects that unfortunately will continue to cast a shadow over us, but also with traditional finance, my hope, and where I see this going is, there's a lot of good coming that hopefully overshadows some of the nonsense and the meme coins and all of that,” O’Connor said. “With where the market has gone recently, I was worried that we could go into another cycle of that. I haven't seen it as much.”