In his 2016 book The Chief Value Officer: Accountants Can Save the Planet, corporate governance expert Professor Mervyn King advocated retitling the traditional chief financial officer as chief value officer or CVO as an evolution of the former role that reflects a focus on long-term, sustainable and integrated value creation.
More recently, Protiviti’s 2025 global finance trends survey report noted that CFOs are increasingly expected to unlock new sources of value.
According to interim CFO Frank Zijlstra (a former vice president of finance at Expedia and senior director finance operations at Booking.com), the CVO enables the finance function to act as a cross-functional business partner rather than a back office team.
“However, that undersells the role,” he says. “The CVO’s primary job isn’t to make finance more collaborative – it is to make value creation visible, measurable and executable across the entire organisation. Finance becomes a true business partner only when it stops reporting on value and starts driving it and that requires someone who understands operational leverage, not just financial mechanics.”
A CFO manages capital whereas a CVO manages value creation capacity and Zijlstra suggests the skill delta is significant.
“You need operational depth alongside financial acuity, the ability to diagnose where value is being destroyed in real time, redesign systems under pressure and align people around execution rather than reporting,” he adds. “Most CFOs are trained to explain what happened whereas a CVO is accountable for what happens next.”
The CVO concept reflects the shift of finance from historical reporting and control toward enterprise-wide value creation agrees Abdul Jabbar, Vice President Finance at payments company Qenta.
“The role is not only about measuring financial performance but also about connecting strategy, operations, capital allocation, risk management, technology and long-term sustainability across functions,” he says. “In many organisations, finance is increasingly expected to act as the ‘translator’ between operational decisions and shareholder value outcomes.”
Jabbar observes that a traditional CFO is heavily focused on stewardship, governance, liquidity, reporting and compliance and that a CVO requires those foundations but with a stronger emphasis on strategic influence, transformation leadership, data-driven decision making, operational understanding and stakeholder alignment.
He suggests the CVO mindset is broader, focusing not only on protecting value but also on identifying, shaping and accelerating value creation opportunities across the organisation.
“In many companies, the CFO role is already evolving into a value-oriented leadership role, so organisations may not see the need for a separate title,” says Jabbar. “Additionally, some businesses still operate with a traditional perception of finance as a control function rather than a strategic partner. Organisational silos, legacy culture, short-term performance pressures and lack of integrated data environments can also limit adoption of such roles.”
Overall, he believes the title is less important than the mindset and that the organisations that will perform best over the long term are those where finance leadership actively participates in shaping enterprise value, rather than simply reporting financial outcomes.
Zijlstra refers to three factors that prevent companies from appointing chief value officers, the first of which is that they rarely feel the absence of a CVO until margin compression forces the issue.
“Secondly, the profile is genuinely rare,” he says. “It requires someone equally fluent in boardroom strategy and operational reality. Thirdly, appointing a CVO implicitly acknowledges that significant value is being left on the table and that is a politically uncomfortable conclusion for most leadership teams to reach voluntarily.”
