The soft skills finance leaders need today

The CFO role has evolved from one focused primarily on managing costs and reporting on the business’s results to one that’s more strategic and embedded across every department. As a result, the technical expertise that once made finance leaders stand out is now the baseline.

With AI transforming the finance function and automating the more transactional tasks, the real value of the modern CFO lies in leadership, interpreting the numbers, and influencing decisions.

However, many finance leaders still operate with an outdated toolkit designed mainly for control and reporting. This shift is exposing a gap in the finance soft skills CFOs need to thrive in today’s economic and digital environments.

At Forge Connect Antwerp in November 2025, several finance leaders highlighted the new set of capabilities shaping the next generation of CFOs — curiosity, storytelling, critical thinking, and resilience.

The 2030 deadline for the modern CFO

During discussions at Forge Connect, one statistic from a Deloitte Access Economics report captured the urgency of the moment: by 2030, as much as 65% of existing jobs are expected to change or disappear as technology shapes how organisations operate and moves the focus to more skill-intensive roles.

For finance teams, this shift is particularly significant. Many of the traditional responsibilities of finance, such as producing reports, analysing data, and validating transactions, are processes that AI can automate, creating new expectations for finance professionals.

This also impacts the CFO's role, who is no longer seen as simply the business’s scorekeeper but as a strategic partner who helps shape decisions. This means less time compiling numbers and more time dedicated to interpreting results, communicating their implications, and helping their teams navigate uncertainty.

For many finance leaders, the challenge of adapting to this new reality doesn’t lie in adopting new tools, but in developing new leadership skills.

Curiosity in finance as a strategic advantage

One of the most underrated skills in finance leadership is curiosity.

Organisations already have access to vast amounts of data, but that knowledge is no longer enough. Curiosity is what makes finance professionals look beyond the data, challenge the numbers, and uncover new insights.

Curiosity is a really important soft skill. It’s about learning new things, but also about being willing to learn from and to have connections with each other.

Niels de Kind, Digital Transformation Analyst @ BMW Group

For CFOs, curiosity is what allows them to identify patterns and opportunities earlier, making it a strategic advantage in volatile markets. But curiosity in finance isn’t just an individual trait. It’s a soft skill teams must actively cultivate to stay open to learning, testing new tools and workflows, and to adapt faster to change.

As technologies continue to evolve, staying curious supports learning and thinking outside of the finance function’s comfort zone.

Moving from information sharing to insight sharing

One of those comfort zones is the way finance teams produce and share information with the rest of the business. There’s rarely a shortage of data, but that data doesn’t always drive decisions.

During his masterclass on storytelling for finance at Forge Connect, Soufyan Hamid highlighted that many finance teams still rely on information sharing through accurate reports, but should move toward insight sharing through storytelling.

Storytelling in finance isn’t only about communicating the numbers. Instead, it’s about translating financial data into meaningful context that other teams can understand and act on.

Storytelling is the key to make finance more usable for the rest of the company.

Soufyan Hamid, Founder @ The Finance Circle

Frederik Bakx, Co-Founder and COO/CFO at EAGL, adds that simplicity is key here. Finance professionals often work with complex datasets, but influence depends on the ability to communicate those insights clearly.

By turning financial data into compelling narratives, CFOs are able to drive decision-making across their organisations. Storytelling is an essential soft skill in finance, especially at a time when AI is generating information at a never-before-seen pace.

The critical mindset in an AI-driven world

As AI automates analytics and reporting, and even interprets and acts on data, a new risk for the finance function emerges: misleading conclusions.

In a world flooded with automated insights that arrive at an uncontrollable speed, CFOs must quickly evaluate information and instinctively assess if it’s reasonable or not. This is why, in addition to storytelling, Soufyan Hamid also mentioned a critical mindset as one of the most important soft skills for modern finance leaders.

Developing this mindset requires a deep understanding not only of the data but also of how the business operates at all levels. This provides CFOs with all the context they need to validate AI outputs, calculate risks, and make decisions.

Resilience and the courage to take risks

Traditionally, finance leadership has been associated with caution. However, in rapidly changing markets and amidst digital transformation, excessive caution can limit innovation and business growth.

More and more, CFOs must spearhead change by taking calculated risks. For Dr. Christian Reinhardt, Director of Human Risk Management at SoSafe, they must ‘first build trust and then facilitate the change’ that supports transformation initiatives and new strategies.

Doing this requires resilience. On the one hand, leading change means balancing innovation with compliance and security, which is a challenge in and of itself. On the other hand, markets shift quickly, technologies evolve, and organisations must constantly find ways to adapt.

This means CFOs need to develop the ability to stay calm under pressure and remain resilient in the face of these shifts, while driving long-term change. Moving a business forward often means challenging the status quo, which in turn requires keeping an open mind and considering different points of view.

Breaking silos through listening and observation

When teams are disconnected and work in isolation, they can unintentionally create data silos that prevent cross-departmental information sharing. For finance teams, this means they can fall into the trap of focusing on numbers without fully understanding their organisation's operational realities.

Breaking these silos is key to finance becoming a true strategic partner, and breaking them starts with listening.

Alexandru Grebeniuc, Senior Business Analyst at Tech Mahindra, highlighted listening as one of the most important skills for finance leaders. By actively engaging with teams across departments, CFOs gain a broader perspective on the organisation’s challenges and opportunities. Melle Eijckelhoff, Co-Founder and Director at M&A Community Belgium, echoes this view, adding that finance leaders must ‘ask the hard questions, if needed’ so that they ‘help make the right decisions.’

Taking into the equation inclusion and ethics, I think listening will be very important.

Alessandra Guion, Strategic Partnerships Director BeNeLux @ Mifundo

By integrating diverse perspectives and observing the broader business environment, finance becomes the "glue" of the organisation, making a strategic difference.

Leadership is the real use point

The finance function is entering a new phase. As AI automates transactional work, the differentiating factor for finance leaders is no longer technical expertise alone, but the ability to interpret information, connect people, and guide decisions.

The finance soft skills highlighted by experts at Forge Connect reflect this shift. They enable CFOs to move beyond managing numbers to shaping conversations and determining where the business goes next.

The leaders who develop these soft skills will be better equipped to bridge departments, challenge assumptions, and help their companies navigate an increasingly complex environment.

And treating these skills as a priority is what will make a difference heading into the changes expected by 2030 and define the next generation of CFOs.