Finance leaders are not converging on a shared understanding when it comes to open finance.
According to a Paystand study, this gap itself is a signal worth acting on, considering that familiarity splits into roughly comparable bands rather than clustering at either end.
With this at hand, the office of the CFO is headed to various directions.
Such include:
CFOs will increasingly treat cash flow visibility as strategic infrastructure. It can be expected that finance leaders will place greater value on understanding and controlling liquidity than on accelerating individual transactions. As a result, it is forecasted that future investment decisions lean to favor payment infrastructure that improves financial visibility first, with gains in efficiency, payment speed, and cost optimisation following as a consequence of better-informed financial operations.
AI will make payment infrastructure—not workflows—the center of finance automation. As AI becomes embedded across the Office of the CFO, its effectiveness will depend less on automating individual tasks and more on accessing accurate, real-time financial data. Finance leaders are expected to increasingly invest in payment infrastructure that embeds reconciliation, settlement, and cash visibility into the transaction itself, allowing AI to monitor, validate, and optimise financial operations rather than simply accelerate manual processes.
As the regulatory landscape matures, infrastructure quality will become the key differentiator. Finance leaders are unlikely to base long-term payment decisions on individual regulatory milestones alone. Instead, organisations are tipped to increasingly favor infrastructure that demonstrates strong compliance, comprehensive auditability, and transparent, resilient payment controls. As regulation becomes more defined, these capabilities will position businesses to adapt with confidence rather than react to each policy update.
The next generation of finance technology will compete on measurable business outcomes, not technological sophistication. As payment infrastructure matures, it is expected that CFOs will place less value on the novelty of
underlying technologies and more on their ability to deliver quantifiable improvements to financial performance. Platforms that can consistently demonstrate faster cash conversion, lower operating costs, stronger working capital, and greater financial visibility will separate themselves from those that lead primarily with technical architecture.
Intelligent finance will emerge from the convergence of AI and modern payment infrastructure. Finance leaders are to evaluate AI and payment infrastructure as complementary investments rather than competing priorities. AI will increasingly become the decision layer while modern payment infrastructure becomes the execution layer, providing the real-time, auditable financial data needed to act with confidence. Organisations that combine both capabilities will move beyond automating individual tasks toward building finance functions that are increasingly predictive, autonomous, and adaptive.
