One of the key findings of EY’s June 2026 Global DNA of the CFO Survey was that a majority of finance leaders want to become more strategic partners, with more than half of respondents believing that finance should accelerate value creation initiatives.
However, only one in four of those surveyed said they led discussions on which value drivers matter most for the organisation and how these are evolving. So what are the options for embedding finance as a strategic partner in shaping enterprise value?
Stef Lanye, Vice President of Finance at Klaviyo, says the best example of how she has positioned her treasury team as a strategic partner came during the company’s international expansion.
“Market entry usually runs as a legal and commercial exercise, with treasury brought in only after the entity is registered and the contracts are signed – by which point you are solving cash problems someone else created,” she explains.
“So I put a treasury owner into the market entry workstream from the design phase, giving them a voice in four early decisions that are expensive to reverse: the local entity’s functional currency, the currency we bill in, the local payment methods we support, and the banking and entity structure set-up.”
Layne describes the importance of aligning treasury strategy with corporate priorities as the difference between being consulted and being informed. “It shows up as treasury optimising something nobody asked for, securing basis points on idle cash while the company is trying to launch a pricing model that needs liquidity headroom and different payment rails,” she adds.
Her approach is to keep it simple. Every treasury initiative maps to a stated company objective – and if it doesn’t map, it is maintenance work that gets prioritised accordingly.
Seat at the table
Scott Taylor, Treasurer at Bandwidth, acknowledges that in the just over seven years he has been at the company, finance has not always had a seat at every table.
“Since we are not yet at the point of having dedicated finance liaisons to the operations and revenue generating sides of the business, we have become representatives for the finance organisation in many of those discussions, along with our financial planning and analysis team,” he says.
Taylor also refers to the importance of aligning treasury strategy with corporate priorities, noting that treasury is now plugged into areas of the business such as risk evaluation for new opportunities, vendor negotiations, contract review, capital expenditures and financing decisions.
“It is difficult to manage working capital without being part of the decision-making process,” he says, adding that communicating treasury’s impact on the business to senior management begins with building relationships and trust.
“Have conversations and listen to what the business needs and wants,” suggests Taylor. “People are more likely to listen to what you have to say when it becomes a conversation instead of a list of demands.”
His approach to securing the resources and visibility needed to move treasury from a cost centre to a value creator involves implementing best practices, being consistent in how treasury works and serves the business, generating value-creating ideas and always executing them.
Furthermore, Layne recommends translating everything into cash, risk and time and dropping the treasury vocabulary.
“Treasury business cases are often read as overhead requests,” she says. “So pick one narrow, visible, genuinely painful problem, fix it with the resources you have and quantify what it released in dollars, days or hours – and then make the ask with a payback period attached.”
Another option is to attach the ask to an initiative that already has an executive sponsor and a budget line, adds Layne. “Like most finance functions, treasury tooling as a standalone request competes with everything. The same tooling as an enabler of a pricing transition rides along with something the company has already committed to.”
