What CFOs Are Thankful For: A 2025 Reflection on Transformation and Resilience

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How finance leaders have navigated unprecedented challenges in payments, fraud, and automation in 2025 and what industry data reveals about the shifts reshaping AP operations

As we approach Thanksgiving 2025, the finance profession has every reason to reflect with both gratitude and clear-eyed perspective. This has been a year of paradoxes: accelerating digital transformation amid economic uncertainty, rising fraud sophistication countered by advancing AI defenses, and mounting operational pressures met with breakthrough automation capabilities.

The data tells the story. According to the 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 79% of organizations experienced actual or attempted payment fraud in 2024, a number that would alarm any CFO. Simultaneously, Gartner reports that 59% of finance leaders are now deploying AI in their operations, creating new defenses against evolving threats.

The Year That Tested Everything

The 2025 payments landscape demanded resilience from finance leaders. Globally, the picture is similar. Deloitte's Central Europe CFO Survey captured the prevailing sentiment: three out of four CFOs said 2025 was not the time to take on more balance sheet risk. Yet avoiding risk entirely wasn't an option—standing still meant falling behind competitors who were modernizing their payment operations.

The fraud statistics paint a sobering picture of what finance teams faced this year. The AFP survey revealed that 63% of fraud attempts came through Business Email Compromise (BEC), with VIPRE's Q2 2024 Email Threat Report documenting that 40% of BEC emails are now AI-generated—making them increasingly difficult to detect through traditional means.

79%of organizations experienced payment fraud attempts in 2024; 63%of fraud came through Business Email Compromise.

Meanwhile, 46% of finance leaders reported that cybersecurity and fraud prevention became new responsibilities they took on in 2025—expanding the CFO's remit in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

What the Data Reveals About Transformation

Against this challenging backdrop, finance leaders who invested in comprehensive payment transformation found reasons for gratitude. The PrimeRevenue CFO Trend Report documented that companies automating accounts payable achieved:

• 60% lower costs
• 90% fewer errors
• 250% faster approvals

These aren't incremental improvements—they represent fundamental shifts in how AP departments operate. And the benefits extended beyond efficiency gains. Organizations implementing AI-powered fraud prevention systems reported up to 40% improvement in fraud detection accuracy while achieving up to 70% reduction in false positives (based on studies by ACI Worldwide and IBM), enabling legitimate payments to flow faster while threats were blocked more effectively.

The Strategic Value Beyond Cost Savings

What separates transformative implementations from mere technology upgrades is the recognition that payment modernization delivers value far beyond direct cost reduction. Organizations that achieved true transformation in 2025 reported benefits across multiple dimensions:

Enhanced Security Posture

With fraud attempts at record levels, AI-powered predictive prevention became not just a nice-to-have but a business necessity. Finance leaders managing enterprise-scale operations report that advanced prevention systems catch threats before money moves, eliminating the exhausting cycle of fraud investigation and recovery attempts that dominated previous years.

Reclaimed Strategic Capacity

When AP teams no longer spend weekends processing check runs or manually tracking supplier enrollment status, that capacity redirects to higher-value work. The shift from "managing tool limitations" to "managing strategic opportunities" represents one of 2025's most significant operational gains.

Real-Time Visibility and Control

Modern platforms provide complete, real-time views of entire supplier networks—who's enrolled, preferred payment methods, potential risk factors, and fraud risk profiles across the entire payment ecosystem. This visibility enables faster, more confident decision-making at every level of the organization.

Strengthened Supplier Relationships

Organizations that pay vendors faster and more securely than competitors become preferred customers. Finance leaders report this translates to better payment terms, priority service during supply chain disruptions, and partnership opportunities that simply weren't available with slower, less reliable payment processes.

Demonstrated Executive Leadership

Walking into board meetings with quantified evidence of AI-powered threat detection, declining false positive rates, and improving operational efficiency while fraud attempts are blocked demonstrates strategic leadership—building the credibility that matters when seeking board support for other strategic initiatives.

The Investment That Keeps Delivering

IDC's research projects that by 2030, every dollar invested in AI will generate an additional $4.90 in value. Finance leaders experiencing this compound value creation in 2025 are building advantages that will extend well into the next decade—advantages their competitors still relying on legacy payment processes cannot easily replicate.

$4.90projected value return for every $1 invested in AI by 2030 (IDC)

The organizations most grateful for their payment transformation in 2025 consistently emphasize that ROI extends far beyond the first year. Direct fraud prevention savings are substantial, but the operational efficiency gains, faster supplier payments, reduced processing costs, and strategic advantages keep compounding quarter after quarter.

Looking Forward: Gratitude as Strategic Mindset

What the data and real-world experiences of 2025 reveal is that gratitude in finance isn't just a Thanksgiving sentiment—it's a strategic mindset. Being thankful for transformation accomplished doesn't mean being satisfied with current state. It means recognizing progress while remaining committed to continuous improvement. It means celebrating wins while preparing for next challenges. It means being grateful for capable technology partners while pushing for even more value.

The finance leaders who thrived in 2025 weren't necessarily those with the easiest paths or the most resources. They were the ones who looked at unprecedented challenges—rising fraud, economic uncertainty, expanding responsibilities—and chose comprehensive transformation over incremental fixes. Who recognized that this year's chaotic payments landscape demanded bold responses, not piecemeal solutions. Who built fraud-resistant, AI-powered, strategically valuable payment operations instead of simply upgrading their fraud detection software.

The Path Forward

As we gather for Thanksgiving, the message from the finance front lines is clear: the organizations that will thrive in 2026 and beyond are those that treat this moment not as a finish line, but as a checkpoint on a continuous transformation journey.

The challenges aren't disappearing. Fraud sophistication will continue advancing. Economic uncertainty will persist. Stakeholder expectations for finance leadership will keep rising. But the capabilities built in 2025—AI-powered fraud prevention, automated payment operations, real-time visibility, strengthened supplier relationships—create foundations for sustainable competitive advantage.

That's what finance leaders are truly thankful for this Thanksgiving: not just solving 2025's problems, but building capabilities that position their organizations to win in whatever 2026 brings.

Transform Your AP Operations from Cost Center to Strategic Advantage

Finexio's AI-powered AP Payments as a Service platform helps CFOs build fraud-resistant operations that deliver measurable ROI while enhancing operational efficiency.

Learn how leading organizations are staying ahead of evolving threats and building payment operations that compound value quarter after quarter. to schedule a strategic consultation on transforming your fraud prevention capabilities based on the latest threat intelligence.

Give your organization something to be grateful for: payment infrastructure that creates competitive advantage quarter after quarter.  Contact Finexio to discover how leading finance teams transformed their AP operations in 2025 and why they're heading into 2026 with confidence.