The finance team isn't shrinking — it's being redefined, top to bottom
Published: 22.06.2026 | Author: Ray Nicholls | Category: Candidate Insight
Last week I chaired two roundtable discussions at the Richmond Finance Directors' Forum. The brief was the shift in finance from backward-looking accounting to forward-thinking, insight-led strategy. Around the tables sat finance leaders from across the economy — central banking, consumer goods, shipping, media, telecoms, industrials, insurance, and the charity sector. A genuinely broad cross-section, and a candid one.
I came away more hopeful than I expected. Here is why.
Every role is changing at once
The headline you read is that automation is hollowing out the bottom of the finance team. The reality around these tables was bigger and more interesting: every role in finance is changing at the same time. The entry-level positions are simply where that change is most visible.
At the top, the shift is from providing data to interpreting it. Finance leaders described becoming far more commercial and business-aligned — expected to offer an opinion, a reading, a recommendation, rather than handing over a clean set of numbers and leaving the interpretation to others. The job is no longer to report what happened; it's to say what it means and what to do about it.
In the middle, the layers are converging. There was a strong sense across both rooms that financial control and FP&A are moving closer together, working far more tightly than they used to. The old separation between the people who produce the numbers and the people who interpret them is dissolving.
And at entry level, the traditional rungs — order entry, basic processing, the transactional work people have always used to climb into the profession — are being automated away. This is the part the headlines fixate on, and it's real. But it's one edge of a whole-team transformation, not the story in itself.
The fear in the room
That entry-level shift did surface a genuine anxiety, and it was the point that made the room nod.
The instinct for data integrity — the debit-and-credit, double-entry foundation you absorb on the job, sitting beside an experienced boss — risks disappearing along with those junior roles. As one leader put it, it doesn't matter how clever the technology becomes: if the source data is poor, the output will be poor. Garbage in, garbage out. That conviction was unanimous, and it cut straight through the AI optimism. If the roles where that instinct is formed disappear, where does the next generation learn to sense when the numbers can't be trusted?
It's a serious question. But it sits inside a more hopeful picture than the headlines allow.
The reframe
Not one leader said they were hiring fewer people.
What they said was subtler. They no longer know what to call the roles.
The demand hasn't gone. The definition has. Job titles, progression routes, the very shape of a finance career are all shifting faster than companies can write the job description — and that's true from the graduate intake to the senior leadership team. The rungs on the ladder are being rearranged while people are still standing on them.
When I asked what these leaders now look for in a new hire, the answer was strikingly consistent across both sessions: intellectual curiosity. The desire to learn and adapt. Resilience. And — tellingly — no fixed preconception of what the job should be, because the function itself is changing underneath them.
Why I left more hopeful
The media narrative says finance jobs are being automated away. The room told a different story. The work is still there. The demand is still there. What's missing is the definition — businesses haven't yet worked out what they need to hire, or what to call it, as every role in the team is rewritten around commercial insight rather than data production.
That ambiguity is uncomfortable. But it isn't decline. It's transition — and it's lifting the whole function towards more valuable, more commercial, more genuinely human work.
It also points to a clear role for executive search: to be the consultative interface between a fast-changing labour market and businesses that can't yet name what they need. Helping the two meet, despite the ambiguity, is precisely the value a good search partner adds in a moment like this.
The finance career ladder isn't being taken away. It's being rebuilt, top to bottom — and the businesses that thrive will be the ones who hire for curiosity and commercial instinct now, rather than waiting for the new job titles to settle.
When did you last hire for a role that didn't quite have a title yet?
Ray Nicholls is the Founder of Pitch Hill Partners, a boutique executive search and interim management firm specialising in CFO, Finance Director, Financial Controller and FP&A placements across the UK.
The definition has changed
