Cost-cutting may have eased, but modern finance leadership now faces a deeper challenge: shaping behaviour, trust and control in fast-moving European organisations.

Over the past year, I have found myself thinking more deliberately about what modern finance leadership really requires, because although the headlines are calmer than they were during the crisis years, the underlying tension has not disappeared.

Very few are still talking about emergency cost-cutting, as that phase feels largely behind us, but what has replaced it is in some ways more complex.

What I hear instead are questions about control, visibility and predictability, and, sotto voce, about why those things feel harder to achieve than they should in organisations that are, on paper at least, well run.

At the same time, I hear something similar from my own teams, which is perhaps why this shift feels less theoretical to me and more personal.

Marketing today moves at a completely different speed than it did even five years ago, with decisions made much quicker, the pace feeling more frenetic, plans shifting mid-quarter and new tools appearing and being adopted in weeks rather than years, all while teams are expected to respond in real time to what’s happening in the market.

When I looked at Soldo’s Spend Index, which draws on spend data from tens of thousands of European companies, it confirmed something I was already noticing in my own teams.

The issue isn’t really where money is going, but how it is being spent.

Most company spend today isn’t driven by a few large strategic decisions but by thousands of small ones — subscriptions, tools, experiments and small extensions of something that seems useful in the moment.

Individually they make sense, yet collectively they begin to make control feel different, less about single approvals and more about patterns of behaviour.

Day-to-day operational spend now makes up the majority of transactions, and departmental and recurring spend continues to grow, especially around software and services that quickly become part of “how work gets done.”

I see this dynamic every day in my own organisation.

Recently, one of my team members identified a way to dramatically speed up a workflow that our field marketers were struggling with, and although it wasn’t in a roadmap or a budget line, it came directly from frustration in the field.

Acting on it meant increasing the use of one of our AI tools and therefore spending a little more, a little sooner than planned.

The impact was immediate, productivity improved, time was saved, and in the end it was simply the right decision.

What struck me, though, is that once that kind of spend is embedded it is hard to unwind, not because it is wasteful but because it becomes behavioural and quietly turns into part of how the team operates.

And that, to me, is where the real change is taking place.

As a CMO, this feels very familiar to me because marketing went through a similar transition years ago, as we decentralised, adopted SaaS almost everywhere and allowed decisions to move closer to the people doing the work rather than keeping them with central gatekeepers.

At first, the instinct was to tighten approvals by adding more checkpoints and introducing more forms, but that approach never really solved the underlying problem.

What ultimately helped was redesigning how decisions were made in the first place.

Finance is now facing a similar structural evolution, only at a much larger scale.

When spend is fast, frequent and distributed across teams, reviewing it afterwards rarely creates confidence and more often creates friction.

Many CFOs have told me that month-end now feels less like understanding performance and more like reconciling surprises, which is both operationally frustrating and culturally draining.

That, in my view, is not a discipline issue but a mismatch between modern spending behaviour and legacy control models.

In Europe especially, we tend to think in terms of stewardship, trust and long-term responsibility, and our boards and regulators expect transparency just as employees expect fairness and customers expect integrity.

Finance sits at the centre of all of that responsibility, which is precisely why modern finance leadership today carries expectations that go far beyond reporting and control.

Which is why I don’t think the next phase of finance leadership is about saying “no” more often, but about designing systems where the right behaviour becomes the easy behaviour.

That means clear rules upfront, visible ownership and spend that is understandable as it happens rather than weeks later.

From the outside, this can look like a tooling discussion, but in reality it is a leadership one.

Finance is no longer just governing budgets; it is being asked to shape behaviour at scale, and if we get this right it has the potential not only to reduce friction and surprise, but to strengthen trust across the organisation in a way that no cost-cutting programme ever could.