The Evolving CFO: Talent, Technology, and Leadership

A Conversation with Smriti Vicari, Partner, Egon Zehnder Interviewed by Shiva Rajgopal, Director, Columbia CFO Program

Introduction

Few people have a clearer window into what it actually takes to become — and thrive as — a CFO than Smriti Vicari. A Partner at Egon Zehnder, one of the world’s most respected executive search and leadership advisory firms, Smriti leads searches for CFOs, CEOs, and board members with a particular focus on financial services, fintech, consumer businesses, and scale-up companies. She holds a B.Sc. in Finance from the University of Southern California and an MBA from London Business School, and she began her Egon Zehnder career in London before relocating to New York. Over the past six years, Smriti has advised boards and investors — from large global banks and private equity firms to high-growth fintechs — on how to find, develop, and retain world-class financial leadership. Her firm recently published a landmark global CFO study surveying 600 chief financial officers across industries and geographies, offering a rare empirical lens on how the role is changing.

The following interview, conducted as part of the Columbia CFO Program’s Faculty Live Online series, distills the key insights Smriti shared with current and aspiring CFOs on what the market demands, how headhunters really assess candidates, and what separates good from truly great in the C-suite.

The Expanding Remit of the CFO

Shiva Rajgopal: Let’s start with the big picture. Your firm just published a major study of 600 CFOs globally. What was the headline finding?

Smriti Vicari: The role is bigger and more complex than ever before. There’s a traditional model of the CFO — FP&A, Treasury, Tax, the core technical toolkit — but over the last five years there’s been an increasingly broad and complex set of responsibilities landing in the CFO’s lap. We’re talking about ESG, operations, M&A, risk management, cybersecurity, and supply chain. Things that would have seemed outside the finance remit entirely a decade ago.

Shiva Rajgopal: As one CEO put it to me, the CFO’s job is basically whatever the CEO does but needs to put somewhere — and it’s because the CFO is so often the trusted lieutenant to both the CEO and the board. That breadth is only going to grow.

Shiva Rajgopal: Is there tension within the function about whether that’s actually the right model?

Smriti Vicari: Absolutely. Some CFOs feel strongly that their core job is the traditional one — that they shouldn’t be taking on all these extra responsibilities — while others genuinely relish the breadth. No COO role is the same across companies, and the CFO role is beginning to resemble that: context-dependent. The real debate is whether the role can be done well if it gets too broad, and what gets sacrificed when a CFO is pulled in so many directions. Boards are wrestling with that question too.

What Boards and CEOs Actually Look For

Shiva Rajgopal: When you survey CFOs about the competencies that matter most, what comes back?

Smriti Vicari: The number one competency is the ability to drive change. Not just being strategically oriented but having the network inside an organization to facilitate change, inspiring people to come along, and having the resilience and grit to push things through. The best CFOs are genuine change agents — not incremental BAU operators. That’s becoming a huge differentiator. Strategy is the other big one. The ‘strategic CFO’ has become an increasingly popular model with CEOs. But I’d push back a little on the idea that technical CFOs aren’t strategic — they are. The better question is whether someone has the breadth of experience to advise across a wider set of issues.

Shiva Rajgopal: You’ve given some vivid examples of how two banking CFOs approach this very differently. Can you walk us through that?

Smriti Vicari: Sure. Take Jeremy Barnum at JPMorgan — excellent CFO, grew up as a capital markets banker, very technically deep, and he would not place anyone on his bench who didn’t have significant depth in the finance function itself. That’s his model. Now compare that to Mike Santimassimo at Wells Fargo, who I spoke to recently — he’s open to investment bankers, strategy professionals, people who bring different experience and can help think about the broadening remit. Two world-class CFOs, fundamentally different views on how to build talent. So, when I’m doing a search, I always have to understand the CEO’s model first.

Shiva Rajgopal: What about the internal composition of the finance team? Which roles do CFOs lean on most?

Smriti Vicari: FP&A was the clear frontrunner in our survey. The head of FP&A tends to have the broadest network across the business, carries strategic firepower, and is often a strong candidate for CFO succession. The Controller is also critical — that’s a role where you simply cannot sacrifice technical expertise; you can’t put someone from strategy in a controllership and expect it to work. And in banking specifically, Treasury is hugely important — the CFO at State Street, John Woods, came up through that route from Citizens, for example. But the ranking will differ by industry.

Shiva Rajgopal: When you ask CFOs what they wish they could spend more time on, what do you hear?

Smriti Vicari: Strategy, overwhelmingly. Most feel pulled into operational firefighting day-to-day and they want to be a more central voice in shaping the business. The second thing is developing their own teams. And this is important: we always tell our clients that if the only option when a CFO leaves is to go external, then something has gone wrong. You’ve failed as a leader. Developing internal succession is a core responsibility of the role, and frankly, too many CFOs wait too long to start doing that work seriously.

How the Search Process Actually Works

Shiva Rajgopal: Let’s lift the hood on how boards do succession planning. What does that actually look like in practice?

Smriti Vicari: Best-in-class boards do annual market scans — and for CFO and CEO, only those two roles, which tells you something about how critically they view this position. The exercise is simple: if our CFO won the lottery and moved to the Maldives tomorrow, who externally and internally is ready right now, and who is ready in 18 months? We do referencing, we call around, we score candidates across criteria — readiness, team leadership, strategy, AI capability — often without even speaking to them directly, just by talking to people around them. Then they do the same exercise with internal candidates and compare the two cohorts. The preference is almost always to go internal if a strong candidate exists. But here’s the key insight: they never evaluate internals in a vacuum. They have to see how their people stack up against the external market. And CEOs and board members will often meet two or three external candidates informally each year, just to calibrate.

Shiva Rajgopal: So your external network actually has a direct bearing on whether you get a promotion inside your own company?

Smriti Vicari: Exactly — and this is something people underestimate. We’ll score external candidates based on what their network says about them. If people aren’t talking about you, you’re invisible in that process. The network you build is not just for your next external move. It’s shaping how boards see your readiness right now.

Shiva Rajgopal: What does the distinction between internal and external candidates look like from your perspective?

Smriti Vicari: In most cases, there is a clear preference for internal talent. An internal candidate knows the business, has the networks, understands the context, and can hit the ground running. When a CFO has successfully developed a strong internal successor, that’s a sign of real leadership. The external search comes in either when there’s no internal candidate ready — which is, frankly, a failure of talent development — or when a company needs a genuinely different skill set that doesn’t exist inside. For companies that are highly M&A-driven, for instance, they might prioritize deep corporate development experience and explicitly decide to supplement the CFO with strong technical number twos.

AI, Technology, and the Skills That Will Define the Next Generation

Shiva Rajgopal: Everyone is talking about AI. What does it actually mean for how you assess CFO candidates today?

Smriti Vicari: It’s changed how we do our job markedly in the last twelve months. We’ve now included a specific AI competency in our CFO assessment framework. But what we’re really measuring is not ‘do you know how to use a particular tool’ — it’s learning agility. Can you demonstrate that you’ve been dropped into very different situations and thrown yourself into the deep end and learned? We look for career variety as a proxy for that — people who’ve worked in large globals and in privates, who’ve been individual contributors and managed large teams, who’ve changed industries. That mix signals someone who can adapt. On AI specifically: a CFO should be using Co-pilot like tools on a regular basis, should have participated in or driven a finance function technology transformation, and should be actively helping educate their teams. That’s now a baseline expectation.

Shiva Rajgopal: What are CFOs telling you about the actual impact of AI on finance operations?

Smriti Vicari: This is where the conversation gets really candid. The uncomfortable truth is that the productivity changes AI enables could be implemented almost immediately, if companies wanted to act that fast. The technology exists today to remake significant parts of a finance function. One CEO I spoke with told me there is not a single question that comes into his bank’s call center that cannot be answered by an AI agent. Not one. But wiping out an entire call center has social, operational, and emotional workforce implications that go way beyond cost savings. So, the real question isn’t whether to do it — it’s what’s the responsible pace of change, and how do you prepare your workforce rather than simply displace them. CFOs are at the center of that decision, and it’s one of the biggest questions on their minds right now.

Shiva Rajgopal: What about data infrastructure? Is AI actually solving CFOs’ information problems?

Smriti Vicari: Not as cleanly as people imagine. One banking CFO told me recently that getting excellent data-driven insights still feels ‘artisanal’ — like it requires a heroic manual effort even with all the modern tools available. The issue is data infrastructure in large, complex organizations. The pipes don’t connect. It’s garbage in, garbage out, regardless of what sits on top. So, when we do CFO searches, we specifically ask candidates: what kind of data or technology transformation have you driven within your finance function? What have you done to markedly improve operations from a data perspective? The answer tells us a lot about whether someone will be effective in this environment — not just whether they understand AI conceptually.

The CFO–CEO Relationship and the Path to the Top

Shiva Rajgopal: A number of CFOs aspire to the CEO role. What separates those who make that leap from those who don’t?

Smriti Vicari: Stakeholder management. Full stop. The CEO role is almost entirely about that. Managing the board, managing external communications, managing employees through uncertainty and change — those are the skills that distinguish a CFO who can step up from one who can’t. Where it goes wrong is when a technically excellent CFO has had little exposure to owning those external communications and relationships. The board sees them as a technical archetype rather than someone with broader strategic presence. My advice: start developing those relationships with board members and senior executives beyond your own remit as early as possible. Participate in things that go beyond your lane. Build the brand awareness that there is much more to you than the numbers.

Shiva Rajgopal: How does the CEO-CFO relationship work best in practice? And what happens when it doesn’t?

Smriti Vicari: The best CFOs and CEOs are genuinely co-running the business. It’s a relationship of trust that often extends to the personal level — knowing each other’s families, multiple touchpoints per day. The CFO frequently leads investor meetings, runs external communications, and is the co-face of the business alongside the CEO. When it works well, there’s no siloing — a CFO who wants to sit in a call center and listen to customer complaints, or who goes and learns how to code with developers, should be celebrated, not questioned. A CEO who sees that as overstepping is, in my view, not someone you want to work for.

Shiva Rajgopal: Where do boards and CEOs diverge in how they assess CFO candidates, and how do you bridge that gap?

Smriti Vicari: CEOs tend to be short-term in their thinking — they’re fighting immediate fires and need someone who can solve today’s problems. Boards are constitutionally long-term — they’re thinking about CEO succession, about whether this person could ultimately step into the top role. So, boards often want a broader skill set, while CEOs want proven capabilities against immediate needs. The best way to bridge that is to be very explicit about what the new CFO is coming in to do and what support they’ll need. Someone who’s motivated to take a role often brings growth opportunities and therefore gaps — and the job is to build the right structure around them to address those gaps in the short term while they develop.

Building Your Team, Your Network, and Your Board Profile

Shiva Rajgopal: When you coach sitting CFOs on developing their teams, what are the one or two things that matter most?

Smriti Vicari: The first is giving high-potential people early board exposure. Bring select direct reports into the boardroom with you. Let them present on a topic. Let them start building those relationships directly. The second — and this one is underestimated — is customized rotation. A lot of finance organizations have a program that rotates everyone through the same six-month stints. That’s lazy. What actually develops talent is looking at a specific individual, identifying where their gaps are, and designing a 12-to-18-month path specifically for that person. And the third is breaking insularity. The biggest weakness I see in finance teams globally is that people just don’t pick their heads up. They don’t have diverse sources of learning. Creating genuine external connections — with investors, with peers in other industries, with the broader ecosystem — is something CFOs should be actively manufacturing for their people.

Shiva Rajgopal: Should sitting CFOs be pursuing non-executive board seats?

Smriti Vicari: Yes, and sooner than most people think. There’s growing demand for people with current operating experience on boards — the pace of change requires it. I’d say that once you’re well into building your CFO profile, or already in a CFO role, it’s absolutely the right time to explore. Even starting with a non-profit audit committee is valuable. Board roles are highly competitive, and prior board experience is now a genuine differentiator when boards are selecting new independent directors. Starting to build that muscle early makes a real difference.

Shiva Rajgopal: Practically speaking, how important are CVs and LinkedIn in the search process?

Smriti Vicari: More important than some think, but not in the way most assume. Our research teams are actively scraping LinkedIn alongside CVs, so having a rich, detailed LinkedIn presence is critical. On the CV itself: one to two pages of key achievements is ideal. A six-page CV will get fed into AI and summarized anyway. But here’s what I really want you to understand: at the senior level, there are two pipelines in every search. One is the research team combing through databases and LinkedIn profiles. The other is me and my colleagues calling CEOs and investors and asking ‘who’s exceptional right now?’ The people who come through that second pipeline — through referral and reputation — are often treated differently. Your CV is a ticket to the first pipeline. Your network and how people talk about you is your ticket to the second.

Deal-Breakers, Diversity, and the Realities of the Market

Shiva Rajgopal: When a candidate gets to the final stages of a process, what actually causes things to fall apart?

Smriti Vicari: By the final stage, experience is largely off the table — they’ve gotten there because they have the experience. What derails people at the end is almost always competency or relationship fit. We’ve had processes fail because a candidate and a board member had a dinner that went badly — not just poor chemistry, but values misalignment that surfaced over a meal in ways it hadn’t in formal interviews. The other thing that derails people is a lack of self-curiosity. We use a four-component model of potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. And the dimension where we see the most failure at senior levels is self-curiosity — specifically, the knowledge that you don’t know everything. When a candidate walks in and says ‘I can do this job with my eyes closed,’ that is a red flag. What we look for is someone who can articulate exactly where they can hit the ground running on day one and where they genuinely need a strong number two. That self-awareness is what differentiates good from great.

Shiva Rajgopal: Compensation — can mismatched expectations derail a process?

Smriti Vicari: Not if we’ve done our job properly, and that’s on us. Compensation alignment should happen very early in a search process — we have market data, we have visibility into your expectations, and a good recruiter should be constantly calibrating both sides throughout. If there’s a fundamental mismatch, we address it before the process even begins. Where surprises do occasionally happen is around unvested equity — some candidates don’t fully calculate what they’d be walking away from until they’re about to sign. Those situations can be tricky, but they’re not the norm.

Shiva Rajgopal: There’s clearly a diversity and gender gap in finance leadership. What are you seeing, and what’s your honest assessment of whether it’s changing?

Smriti Vicari: There is a real gap — gender, diversity, across the board. And certain markets are more conservative than others. I’m embarrassed when I hear about candidates in my own industry being asked inappropriate questions about their personal lives — that should not happen, full stop, and we have a collective responsibility to call it out. My honest view is that the disruption happening right now — the fact that historical models of CFO success are being fundamentally challenged by AI, by changing business models, by the pace of change — creates a genuine opening. The CFOs of the past are not necessarily the right ones for the future. If you have to learn everything differently, then the question of whether you learned accounting the way your predecessor did becomes less relevant. I see real momentum toward bringing in different profiles, different backgrounds, different archetypes. It hasn’t fully arrived everywhere, but it hasn’t stopped either. The change is real — it’s just uneven.

Closing Thoughts

Shiva Rajgopal: As a final thought for our students — what is the single most important thing a CFO or aspiring CFO should do differently based on everything you’ve shared today?

Smriti Vicari: Build relationships relentlessly — and make sure those relationships understand the full three-dimensional version of you, not just what’s on your CV. Just doing your job brilliantly is necessary but not sufficient. The people who advocate for you, who know your story, who will say your name when a board member calls asking who’s exceptional in this space — those relationships are what determine your trajectory. The technical skills matter enormously. But the network, the reputation, and the visibility of your whole story are what elevate you. That’s the work that happens outside the building, and most CFOs start doing it far too late.

Key Takeaways for CFOs and Aspiring CFOs

The following ten themes capture the most actionable insights from this conversation:

1. The remit is expanding — embrace it or manage it deliberately.

The CFO role now routinely encompasses ESG, cybersecurity, M&A, operations, and more. Whether you embrace that breadth or negotiate tighter boundaries with your CEO, the expansion will not reverse. Be intentional.

2. Change agility is the defining competency.

Technical depth remains essential, but the ability to drive change — with resilience, strategic clarity, and organizational influence — is what separates the best CFOs from the rest.

3. Your internal succession is a reflection of your leadership.

If a board can only go external when you leave, you have failed as a leader. Start building your bench actively and deliberately, and do it years earlier than feels necessary.

4. Boards assess you against the external market — continuously.

Even if you’re an internal candidate, best-in-class boards are annually scanning the external CFO talent pool and quietly calibrating you against it. Your visibility in that external market shapes your promotion trajectory.

5. AI is a baseline — learning agility is what gets assessed.

Using Co-pilot tools, participating in finance function transformations, and demonstrating curiosity about how technology reshapes your work are now table stakes. What recruiters really probe for is whether you can continuously adapt and learn.

6. Stakeholder management is the gateway to the CEO role.

If you aspire to the top job, the single biggest gap you likely need to close is external communications, board relationships, and the ability to inspire broad audiences. Build those skills long before you need them.

7. Self-awareness is a deal-breaker — or a deal-maker.

Candidates who cannot articulate where they need a strong number two lose searches. Knowing your gaps and showing how you’d address them is a sign of strength, not weakness.

8. Network is curriculum.

The most powerful pipeline in any executive search runs through referral networks, not databases. Invest in knowing your peers, your industry’s investors, and key recruiters — and make sure they know your full story, not just your last two roles.

9. Pursue board experience earlier than you think.

Board roles are competitive, and prior board experience now differentiates candidates. Starting on a non-profit audit committee or advisory board early builds a muscle that compounds over time.

10. HR is too important to delegate.

As a CFO, you have enormous influence over culture and talent across the enterprise — not just within finance. The best CFOs own that responsibility rather than relegating it to HR. Culture and human capital are every senior leader’s job.

About Smriti Vicari

Smriti Vicari is a Partner at Egon Zehnder, where she leads CEO, CFO, and board searches across financial services, fintech, and consumer sectors. She holds a B.Sc. in Finance from the University of Southern California and an MBA from London Business School. Egon Zehnder’s global CFO study is available at egonzehnder.com.