The CFO Leadership Lens

The CFO Leadership Lens newsletter offers timely insights, market intelligence, and strategic perspectives for CFOs and senior finance leaders. Our goal is to support financial executives in navigating complexity, driving performance, and shaping resilient, future-ready organizations.

In this edition, we address the critical role that finance leaders play in creating a culture of innovation by elevating the overall quality of business cases to stay ahead of important technology shifts. This issue was prepared by Paul Dennis, on behalf of Boyden’s Financial Officers Practice.

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Elevating the Quality of Business Cases: A CFO Imperative

There's one question that CFOs hear frequently, especially at this time of year, and usually from frustrated business unit executives or department heads:

"What does it take to get a business case approved around here?"

It's probably a fair question. In many cases, when it comes to business case approval processes, finance departments can operate like a black box. Decision-making feels opaque, evaluation criteria are unclear, and business partners are left none the wiser about what actually gets funded.

But there is another bigger problem too.  Over time, this lack of transparency quietly kills innovation. Leaders start to believe that no matter how small the investment or how great the potential benefit, finance will never say yes. So they stop asking.

It’s no coincidence that CFOs in disruption-resilient organizations review a higher volume of strong business cases than their competitors. It’s not because these companies naturally have better ideas, it’s because they've deliberately built a culture around fostering innovation and business case quality. The CFO plays a central role in making this happen.

The modern CFO is so much more than a gatekeeper. Today's leading CFOs are educators, facilitators, and innovation champions. Even when budgets are tight, CFOs who focus on elevating the quality of business cases go on to create an environment where the organization stays relevant and doesn't miss opportunities for growth, efficiency, or competitive differentiation.

At Boyden, we work with high-growth, transformative companies that are actively disrupting the status quo. For our clients, one of the clearest indicators of a CFO's impact is how they approach business case development and investment prioritization.

These organizations don't need a finance leader who just filters ideas or protects the balance sheet. They need a CFO who can build a capital allocation system that strengthens ideas, raises the quality of strategic thinking across the business, and ensures that every dollar/euro/or pound of investment capital drives momentum.

Collectively, over the past couple of years Boyden partners have interviewed thousands of industry-leading CFOs.  Here are some of the traits that the strongest leaders demonstrate to stimulate innovation and improve business case quality.

Invest in Proposal Quality, Not Just Evaluation

The best CFOs don't just wait for the best business cases to land on their desks.  Instead,  they actively shape the conditions that help stronger, clearer, and more compelling proposals emerge from the ground up. By giving teams the right tools, guidance, and early support, they reduce friction and help business leaders bring forward better ideas. This turns finance from a perceived barrier into a trusted partner for innovation and growth.

Here are some examples of how they do it:

• Provide accessible tools like AI-enabled analytics platforms and standardized financial modeling templates that make it easier for teams to build credible and “finance ready” proposals.
• Share best practices and educate leaders on "what good looks like," demystifying the process and building organizational confidence in the process.
• Ensure finance business partners review early drafts and offer constructive feedback, which helps to eliminate the unproductive "us vs. them" dynamic.
• Make relevant data available including operational and financial information that strengthens assumptions and helps quantify opportunities (when permissible, of course).
• Keep submission requirements simple.  Just focus on the most critical criteria and the alignment with a larger strategic priority.  Most business cases can be kept to one page.  

Make Collaboration a Prerequisite

Business cases built in isolation often miss key dependencies, underestimate implementation challenges, and fail to capture enterprise-wide value. By making cross-functional collaboration a prerequisite, leading CFOs bring stakeholder alignment forward, helping teams validate assumptions, surface risks, and identify benefits beyond a single department. Just as important, collaboration reveals potential conflicts early such as competing priorities, resource constraints, and implementation challenges that need to be discussed and ideally addressed before submission. Some CFOs require an executive sponsor from another department to review and support the case, spreading accountability across the leadership team and ensuring that proposals with the best portfolio-level ROI have the strongest chance of approval.

Allow Space for Some Big Bets

Even when capital is tight, the best CFOs create room for a few bold, higher risk and higher reward investments. 

When a business unit is deeply passionate about an opportunity, has clear insight into the market, and is well-positioned to execute, leading CFOs are willing to let them try. The key is setting smart guardrails that define milestones, establish an exit plan, and monitor progress closely so the organization can fail fast if needed.

While most investments need to meet rigorous ROIC criteria, a portfolio that includes a handful of "big bets" generates energy, encourages innovation, and increases the odds of uncovering transformative breakthroughs. Many of these bets won't pay off, but the ones that do can reshape the trajectory of the business and fuel further innovation elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

Great CFOs don't just approve business cases, they shape the environment for better ideas, smarter investments, and bolder bets. By equipping teams, driving early collaboration, and allowing space for high-impact opportunities, they turn finance from a gatekeeper into a catalyst for growth and innovation.

The result? Capital gets deployed wisely, ideas gain traction, and the organization stays agile, competitive, and ready to seize transformative opportunities.

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