According to a recent report from HTF market intelligence, the outsourced senior financial officer market will be worth more than US$15bn globally by 2033, with Asia Pacific showing the fastest growth over that period.
This tallies with the findings of a 2025 report from international consulting marketplace Business Talent Group, which noted that temporary finance chiefs were the most sought after interim leaders with more than half of all requests being for interim CFOs.
While fractional treasurer roles are useful for all types of companies who can’t justify a full-time appointment or need short-term support as cover or for a specific project/area of expertise, the profile of the company most proactive in using this type of service is one owned by private equity suggests John James Dunne, Group Treasurer at GlenDimplex, a multinational consumer electrical goods firm with operations in Hong Kong and Shenzen.
“These companies want to stay lean and mean so they bring in a fractional treasurer to set up the function before handing it over in good order to lower priced employees,” he explains. “The fractional treasurer may go on a retainer afterwards for a few days a month to ensure strategic oversight and expertise.”
One of the obvious issues to consider when pondering the fractional treasurer approach is how it would be received by other senior financial officers.
According to Dunne, finance directors and chief financial officers welcome such an appointment on the basis that corporate treasury is a specialised function of finance for which the typical finance team would not necessarily have the required skillset.
“In many instances they don’t even have the same mindset,” he says. “Accounting is backward looking and financial planning and analysis look forward but often don’t lead, whereas treasury look backwards, analysis the forward and shape the future path.”
A treasurer has a wider view of the organisation and is a strategic thinker closer to what you would expect from a CFO, adds Dunne. “In addition, the depth of technical and system knowledge that a treasurer is comfortable with is difficult for non-treasury employees to understand.”
There is a perception in some quarters that the fractional approach is only suitable for smaller, fast-growth companies. However, Dunne observes that fractional treasurers can support larger or slower growth companies, for example during spin offs, M&A, transformations or system implementations.
“The fractional support can take the pressure off the existing team at certain pinch points or to deliver a significant project,” he says. “While there may already be a treasurer in these companies, the fractional role can be rebranded as required.”
Tommy Leung from Lupiter Consulting observes that while fractional senior financial officers have become mainstream in the west, helping companies of all sizes access top-tier financial expertise, adoption in Asia has been slower.
He attributes this to cultural preferences for full-time, long-term hires – especially in markets like Japan and South Korea – combined with a focus on building internal teams. But he adds that this is starting to change on the back of Asia’s booming start up scene in places like India, Indonesia and Singapore.
