There comes a point in the majority of high-growth businesses where shipping new features isn’t the constraint anymore; unit economics, cash flow, and the allocation of capital are. These become the levers that determine performance, efficiency, and the pace of growth.
That puts finance at the center of the story. And the role is evolving from reporting outcomes to influencing the decisions that drive them.
Yet our new research, conducted in partnership with research house, Wakefield, shows a clear tension between ambition and reality.
We found that 71% of finance leads at mid-market and enterprise companies in the US and UK spend at least a quarter of their time on manual financial tasks. While 73% use between one and five separate software tools to manage their work.
In other words, finance is ready to operate at the center of the business. The infrastructure around it hasn’t caught up.
Why strategic finance is emerging as a new discipline
Forty-four percent of finance leaders say their work still leans operational, while only 35% say it leans strategic.
Many told us they want deeper involvement in planning, prioritization, and business decisions, but they’re often pulled back into the mechanics of keeping the numbers aligned.
This is where strategic finance is emerging as a distinct discipline: one that doesn’t just report performance, but understands the economics behind decisions and helps teams evaluate tradeoffs with clarity.
Jonathan de Groot, VP of Strategic Finance at Easol, who I interviewed recently during The Primer Showcase, describes this shift clearly: “Finance moved away from reporting the past to thinking about the future. We’re a financial partner to every team,” he says. “There is no function in the company who has a wider view on how the company is functioning.”
At Easol, this shows up in how his team supports Product with ROI modelling, works with Marketing to understand customer acquisition cost (CAC), laon to value (LTV), and payback, and partners with leadership to evaluate growth opportunities. It’s finance as an active participant in shaping value, not just tracking it.
Disconnected systems keep finance stuck in the weeds
Many leaders in our research want this same level of involvement, and pointed to the same constraints holding them back: fragmentation.
Workflows stretch across disconnected tools and spreadsheets, making it harder to answer even basic performance questions. Nearly half (48%) of finance leaders say consolidating data from multiple systems is one of their biggest challenges.
Leaders in our research said these siloed systems slow forecasting, limit visibility, and add friction to critical decisions.
“Take Reconcilation, for example,” says Jonathan. “Anyone working in finance has been there, working with multiple tools that don’t talk to each other and showing you different versions of the truth. As a result, you’re left spending all your time questioning the data and trying to fix issues rather than focusing on the insights that live within your data.”
What starts as an operational frustration quickly becomes a strategic problem.
Fragmentation hides real financial leakage, and FX is one of the areas where those losses are both common and often underestimated.
From our own work with merchants, we know many businesses don’t have a clear view of how much they lose to FX fees and unfavorable rates. Our research echoes this: most finance leaders estimate annual FX losses in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, with up to 11% losing more than $250,000 a year.
For a function trying to improve margins, cited by 38% as their biggest strategic opportunity, this kind of hidden leakage erodes impact before initiatives even begin.
And this is the gap we’re solving for. With products like Reconciliation—which helps merchants standardize their reporting across payment methods and PSPs—and Global Accounts—which helps merchants cut and control their FX costs—we’re unifying fragmented finance workflows so teams can reduce costs, trust their data, and operate as strategic partners across the business.
Strong foundations turn finance into a strategic partner
As finance takes on a broader remit, leaders are beginning to influence the product experience itself. One third of leaders said customer experience is an area where they add the most value, reflecting a shift in how financial features, pricing design, and payment flows influence the product journey.
“Finance can bring real value inside the product,” Jonathan notes. “You can add features that improve the customer experience and also increase the take rate.”
This broader influence requires finance to balance two responsibilities at once.
Jonathan describes this using a simple model of defence and offence. Defence protects the fundamentals, such as controlling avoidable costs, reducing revenue leakage, and keeping the economics of the business predictable. Offence focuses on creating new value through embedded financial features, take-rate improvements, and product changes that strengthen margins over time.
But this balance is only possible when the foundations are strong. Jonathan explains that Easol can operate this way because its systems are connected and the operational load has already been reduced, giving the team the bandwidth to focus on higher-value work.
It’s time for finance to steer what’s next
Based on our research, finance wants to influence strategy, improve margins and help teams make better decisions. But to do this effectively, they need systems that unify payments, data and financial workflows in one place.
This need for unified infrastructure is why companies turn to Primer. By syncing payments, data, and financial workflows, Primer gives finance teams the clarity they need to support decisions with accuracy rather than approximation.
Finance should not be looking backward, it should be steering what’s next.
Watch The Primer Showcase to learn more about how we're solving for finance leaders.
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