🌐 CFOs lead in fintech’s next frontier

AI agents and blockchain redefine finance from the inside

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Vanessa Carter
August 13, 2025

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Hey there, CFOs! 💼

In this issue, we’re diving into the fintech shifts already rewriting finance—think AI that predicts risk in seconds, payments that clear instantly worldwide, and banking embedded into everyday apps.

These changes aren’t coming someday—they’re here now.

📰 Upcoming in this issue

  • 💳 Fintech Innovations Shaping the Future of Financial Services

  • 📊 Structured Data Is Rewriting the CFO Playbook

  • 📊 APAC CFOs Put AI at the Center—Salesforce’s New COFO Model Shows the Shift

💳 Fintech Innovations Shaping the Future of Financial Services

AI, embedded finance, and real-time payment rails are remaking how money moves—cutting costs, speeding decisions, and opening new revenue for banks and fintechs alike.

Key Takeaways:

  • 🤖 AI Becomes the Decision Engine: From fraud detection to dynamic pricing and credit, AI moves finance from manual workflows to predictive, automated decisions at scale.

  • 🛒 Embedded Finance Everywhere: Payments, lending, and insurance are surfacing inside non-bank apps, creating seamless B2B2X models and new monetization paths.

  • ⚡ Real-Time, Data-Rich Rails: Instant payment networks and ISO 20022-ready data unlock faster cash cycles, better reconciliation, and smarter working-capital control.

  • 🔐 Trust by Design: Digital identity, consented data sharing, and regtech automation tighten security and compliance while preserving a smooth customer experience.

📊 Structured Data Is Rewriting the CFO Playbook

High-quality, real-time data is moving finance from scorekeeping to strategy—linking forecasting with procurement, payments, and logistics. Semi-structured documents only add value once refined and integrated.

Key Takeaways:

  • 🧮 Know Your Data Types: Structured ledgers and KPIs plug cleanly into finance stacks, while semi-structured items like PDFs and XML bank statements require OCR/NLP/RPA to become actionable.

  • 🗺️ From Spreadsheets to One View: Unified dashboards link shipment status and supplier performance directly to working-capital projections, speeding decisions across the value chain.

  • 🧱 The Real Bottlenecks: Legacy ERPs, messy data formats, supplier reluctance to share detail, and skills gaps inside finance slow time-to-insight.

  • 🤖 Tooling That Unlocks ROI: Centralized data lakes, AI-assisted classification, and finance-specific ML models standardize disparate inputs and turn them into forecast-ready intelligence.

📊 APAC CFOs Put AI at the Center—Salesforce’s New COFO Model Shows the Shift

Salesforce is uniting finance and operations under a COFO, and its new APAC study shows CFOs shedding caution on AI—just 3% now call their strategy conservative as agents reshape how ROI is measured.

Key Takeaways:

  • 🧭 COFO Breaks Silos: Combining CFO and COO roles strengthens insight and execution, positioning finance as a true operating partner.

  • 📉 From Cautious to Committed: In APAC, “conservative” AI postures fell from 63% (2020) to 33% (2023) to just 3% today.

  • 📏 ROI Gets Rewritten: Half of APAC CFOs say AI agents are changing ROI evaluation beyond short-term cost cuts to revenue, productivity, and decision quality.

  • 🛠 Usage Is Already Practical: Finance teams are deploying agents for analysis and executive-ready summaries while aligning ops and finance to extract AI’s full value.

Why It Matters

The future of finance will belong to those who adopt these tools early, gaining speed, insight, and an edge that latecomers can’t match.

Vanessa Carter
Editor-in-Chief
CFO Executive Insights

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