Building & developing a world-class finance team

When Ruth Porat arrived at Google in May 2015 from Morgan Stanley, Alphabet's finance organization had roughly 1,800 people and a reputation for engineering-first chaos. By the time she transitioned to President & CIO in September 2024, she had built a 4,000-strong finance function that institutional investors openly credit with adding an estimated $300 billion in market capitalization through disciplined capital allocation, segment reporting transparency, and the introduction of "Other Bets" as a separate reporting unit. The lesson buried in that nine-year arc is simple and uncomfortable: the CFO who builds the best team wins. Spreadsheets don't compound. People do.

In a 2025 Deloitte survey of 312 CFOs, 71% identified "talent capability" as the single greatest constraint on their finance transformation agenda, ahead of technology (54%), data qualitydata qualityThe degree to which data is fit for purpose: accurate, complete, consistent, timely, valid and unique. Poor quality data undermines analytics, reporting and AI.View full definition → (49%), and budget (31%). And yet, when those same CFOs were asked how many hours per month they personally spent on talent development, the median answer was four. This lesson is about closing that gap.

The talent architecture: from pyramid to diamond

The traditional finance function looked like a pyramid: a broad base of analysts doing reconciliations and variance reports, a narrowing middle of managers reviewing the work, and a small executive layer interpreting it. That model is dead, or should be. Automation (RPA, AI-driven close, embedded analytics in ERPs like SAP S/4HANA and Workday) has hollowed out the base. The pyramid has become a diamond: fewer entry-level processors, a much wider middle of analytical "finance business partners," and a still-narrow executive tier.

Jeff Bekiarian, who has led Progressive Insurance's corporate finance and treasury organization through one of the most admired transformations in the P&C insurance industry, structures his team around this diamond model. Progressive's finance function, supporting a company that grew net premiums written from $32 billion in 2019 to over $74 billion in 2024, deliberately under-hires for transactional roles and over-invests in what Bekiarian calls "decision-grade analysts." These are people who can move from a loss-ratio variance to a pricing recommendation to a board narrative without changing seats. The result: Progressive's finance headcount has grown at roughly half the rate of its premium base since 2020, while the team's involvement in product pricing, underwriting analytics, and capital deployment has expanded dramatically.

The three talent archetypes every finance function needs

Top CFOs are increasingly explicit about hiring against three distinct archetypes, rather than the generic "strong analyst" profile:

1. The Quant Architect, Deep technical fluency in financial modeling, data engineering (SQLSQLSales Qualified Lead: a prospect the sales team has validated as ready for direct outreach and a proposal, having passed clear qualification criteria.View full definition →, Python, dbt), and statistical inferenceinferenceThe moment a trained AI model is put to work: it takes a new input and produces an answer, prediction or generated output.View full definition →. These are the people who build the pricing engines, the working-capital optimizers, the M&A models that survive due diligence.

1. The Business Translator, Commercially fluent finance partners embedded with sales, product, or operations. They translate P&L mechanics into operating decisions. Microsoft's CFO Amy Hood has built one of the largest such cohorts in tech, roughly 40% of Microsoft's finance organization sits outside corporate, embedded in Azure, Gaming, LinkedIn, and other business units.

1. The Controls & Trust Specialist, In a CSRDCSRDEU directive requiring large companies to report standardized, audited sustainability data alongside financial results.View full definition →, Pillar TwoPillar TwoOECD-backed rules imposing a 15% minimum effective tax rate on large multinational groups, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.View full definition →, and SEC climate-disclosure world, technical accounting, tax structuring, and ESGESGA framework for measuring a company on environmental, social and governance factors, used by investors, regulators and buyers to judge non-financial performance.View full definition → assurance expertise is not optional. The narrative that controllership is a "back office" function is dangerously obsolete.

The mistake most CFOs make is hiring all three archetypes through the same recruiting funnel, evaluating them against the same competencies, and then wondering why their team is mediocre at all three.

Development frameworks that actually compound

Hiring well is necessary but insufficient. The CFOs who build durable finance functions are obsessive about development, and they treat it as a capital allocation decision, not an HR program.

The 70-20-10 model, refined for finance

The classic 70-20-10 development model (70% on-the-job, 20% coaching/mentoring, 10% formal learning) has been adopted at finance functions across JPMorgan, Unilever, and Shell. But the version that works in finance specifically has a critical refinement: the 70% must include deliberate rotation across the diamond. A senior FP&AFP&AThe finance function that builds budgets, forecasts and analysis to guide business decisions and connect strategy to numbers.View full definition → leader who has never closed a set of books, or a controller who has never sat in a pricing meeting, will eventually plateau as a CFO candidate.

At Unilever, CFO Fernando Fernandez (who took the CEO role in March 2025 after his predecessor Graeme Pitkethly retired) institutionalized this through what the company calls "finance passport" rotations, typically 18-to-24-month assignments across controllership, FP&A, treasury, and a business unit before age 40. Of Unilever's current top 50 finance leaders, 44 have completed at least three such rotations.

Building a learning cadence

The most underrated practice in elite finance functions is a weekly or biweekly technical teach-in, typically 45 minutes, where a team member presents on a deep topic: a new accounting standard interpretation, a modeling technique, a competitor's earnings call dissection. Stripe's finance team, under CFO Steffan Tomlinson, runs these religiously. The compound effect over three years is enormous: a 40-person team that holds 50 sessions a year creates 600 hours of peer-developed technical content, far more relevant than any external training vendor could provide.

Stretch assignments as the real development tool

Promotions are lagging indicators. Stretch assignments are the actual development mechanism. The best CFOs maintain a mental, or, increasingly, literal, inventory of high-visibility projects they can assign:

• Leading a piece of the annual investor day
• Building the model for a contemplated acquisition
• Owning the OECD Pillar Two implementation workstream
• Designing the AI use-case prioritization for the finance function
• Presenting a single slide to the audit committee

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's CFO since 2015, is known internally for using audit committee presentations as a development tool, junior directors are routinely asked to present specific topics, with Olsavsky in the room as backup rather than as primary presenter. The exposure is career-defining. The retention impact is measurable.

Retention: the math is brutal, and most cfos ignore it

Replacing a high-performing finance professional costs, by SHRM's 2025 benchmarks, between 1.5x and 2.5x annual salary when you include recruiting fees, ramp time, knowledge loss, and project delays. For a $250,000 senior FP&A director, that's $375,000 to $625,000. Lose four in a year, and you've spent the equivalent of an entire team's compensation budget on churn.

And yet, the post-COVID labor market for finance talent remains structurally tight. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 data shows financial analyst openings exceeding qualified candidates by roughly 28%. CPACPACost Per Acquisition: the total cost to generate one customer or conversion, computed by dividing total spend by the number of acquisitions.View full definition → pipeline collapse, first-time CPA exam candidates fell from 72,000 in 2016 to under 30,000 in 2024, has made experienced controllers and technical accountants particularly scarce. The leverage in this market sits with the employee, not the employer.

The three retention levers that actually work

Compensation matters, but it is table stakes, not differentiator. The CFOs who win the retention war pull three other levers:

1. Career Path Transparency. Top performers leave when they can't see the next two roles. The best finance functions publish, internally, a competency map for every role and the specific experiences required to move up. Adobe's finance organization, under CFO Dan Durn, runs a quarterly "career architecture review" with every director-and-above, with documented next-role criteria.

2. Manager Quality. Gallup's repeated finding that "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" applies in finance with particular force, because the work is dense, deadline-driven, and easily mismanaged. Promote brilliant analysts to manager roles without training, and you create both a bad manager and a frustrated team. Invest in manager development as aggressively as you invest in technical development.

3. Mission and Visibility. Finance professionals, especially high performers under 40, increasingly want to know that their work matters. The CFO who can credibly say "your model drove the $400 million capital reallocation we announced last quarter" retains better than the CFO whose team produces reports that disappear into a void. Ruth Porat was famous at Alphabet for personally writing to analysts whose work she had used in board materials. The note took her 90 seconds. The loyalty it produced lasted years.

Building the bench: succession as a core CFO responsibility

The final mark of a world-class finance team is whether it can survive the departure of its CFO. By that measure, most finance functions are fragile.

A 2024 Russell Reynolds study of Fortune 500 CFO transitions between 2019 and 2024 found that only 38% of new CFOs were internal promotions, meaning 62% of the time, the sitting CFO had not built (or had not retained) a credible internal successor. That is a damning indictment of succession discipline.

The CFOs who do this well treat succession as a continuous activity, not an event. They identify two-to-three potential successors five years out, expose them deliberately to board members and analysts, and give them the assignments, investor day leadership, major M&A integration, audit committee presentations, that build the resume an external search would otherwise be needed to find.

When Ruth Porat moved into the President & CIO role at Alphabet in 2024, Anat Ashkenazi (recruited from Eli Lilly) was named CFO, an external hire, notably. The decision sparked debate inside Alphabet about whether the bench had been deep enough. The honest answer, even at one of the best-resourced finance functions in the world, was that it could have been deeper. This is the standard. It is hard, even for the best.

The CFO's action checklist

Monday morning, the work begins:

1. Audit your team against the three archetypes. Map every senior finance professional to Quant Architect, Business Translator, or Controls & Trust Specialist. Where are you over-indexed? Where dangerously thin? Your next three hires should close the gap, not replicate your comfort zone.

1. Calendar four hours per week on talent, and defend them. Block recurring time for 1:1s with high-potentials, stretch-assignment design, and succession reviews. If your calendar doesn't reflect that talent is your top priority, your team knows it isn't.

1. Launch a biweekly technical teach-in within 30 days. Rotate the presenter. Make it peer-led. The compound effect on team capability over 24 months will exceed any external training investment you could make at the same cost.

1. Publish a competency map and next-role criteria for every director-and-above role. Career path opacity is the single most fixable retention problem in finance. The fix costs you a week of effort and pays back for years.

1. Name your two successors, to yourself, in writing, today. Then design the next twelve months of their development against the gap between what they have done and what your board would need to see. If you cannot name two candidates, that is the most important problem in your function, and no one else is going to solve it for you.

The CFOs who build great teams don't do so by accident, and they don't do so in their spare time. They do it because they understand a truth that