Xavier Gardiès shares his vision of current and future developments in the transformation of finance functions.
Finance Forward, the event that brought the corporate finance ecosystem together
On June 24, 2025, Finance Forward, organized by Micropole and Talan at the Musée National de la Marine in Paris, brought together over 150 decision-makers and finance function experts. The aim was to create a forum for constructive exchange between peers, to decipher the major transformation challenges facing finance departments up to 2030.
A morning of keynotes, round tables, conferences and workshops explored themes at the heart of the function's challenges: modernizing technological tools, adapting to new regulations, performance management, strategic data exploitation, and the growing role ofartificial intelligence.
Participants were able to discover the technological solutions of our partners, including Anaplan, Board, Informatica, Jedox, Oracle, Pigment and Sage.
At this morning's event, Xavier Gardiès, Senior Partner Finance & Technology Transformation at Micropole, shared his vision of a finance function in the throes of change.
A turning point for the finance function
For Xavier Gardiès, the finance function is at a turning point in its history. On the one hand, many technological solutions are reaching the end of their lifecycle, forcing a massive renewal of tools. On the other, regulatory pressure is increasing, in an unstable macroeconomic context.
These combined factors are driving finance departments to redefine their management doctrines and invest in new, more agile and better integrated technological architectures. The challenge is not just a technical one: it's also about equipping teams with greater capabilities to manage performance and meet regulatory constraints, while meeting the strategic expectations of management committees.
Regulations: constraints or opportunities?
The tightening of regulatory requirements, often perceived as a constraint, nevertheless represents a dual reality. On the one hand, it mobilizes budgets and time on unplanned projects, altering CFOs' agendas.
But Xavier Gardiès emphasizes the possibility of transforming this obligation into a lever for improvement. Compliance then becomes an opportunity to review processes, improve the reliability and quality of data, and optimize decision-making. In short, while compliance is inevitable, the potential benefits are real when approached with a long-term vision.
Over the next 5 years, we're going to continue with the current trend, notably around the use of data and data quality; but also around the fact that the finance function is increasingly involved across the company, in order to manage financial and non-financial data.
Artificial Intelligence: already a reality... but not at all levels
In the interview, Xavier distinguishes three dimensions of AI:
- Generative AI, already widely adopted in the finance function, notably to improve productivity and facilitate certain workstation tasks.
- Classic" AI(data science, machine learning), based on tried-and-tested use cases that have been deployed in the sector for several years. Highly accessible, these use cases are already in production and providing value.
- AI applied to decision-making and the exploitation of complex data, still not very accessible today, due to a lack of technological maturity.
The conclusion is clear: while AI is already an operational tool for certain missions, its potential remains largely unexplored in the field of advanced steering and strategic decision-making.
Tomorrow's finance department: a decision-making department
Over the next five years, Xavier Gardiès predicts an acceleration in a trend that has already begun since the health crisis: the rise of the finance function in cross-functional corporate management.
Finance departments will have to manage both financial and non-financial data, play a leading role in data quality and exploitation, and develop their own technologies autonomously. The horizon that lies ahead is that of a "decision-making department", capable of providing executives with reliable, rapid and strategic information.
One word sums it up: "rocker".
When asked which word would best define tomorrow's finance, Xavier chose "bascule". A term that reflects both the pivotal nature of the current period and the unique opportunity for finance departments to redefine their role, methods and tools.
