In yesteryear’s era, defined by cheap money, globalized supply chains and predictable demand curves, financial leadership was largely about squeezing inefficiencies out of a system designed to scale. The name of the game for the CFO mandate was to optimize.
But new findings from the January edition of The 2026 Certainty Project by PYMNTS Intelligence showed that era is ending. Across industries, CFOs are being forced into a fundamentally different role that is less concerned with optimization and more focused on absorption.
Trade policy whiplash, geopolitical fragmentation, inflationary aftershocks, labor instability and rapid technological disruption have converged to create a business environment where uncertainty itself has become a defining operating condition rather than a temporary phase.
The CFOs surveyed reported that they are operating in an environment where the range of possible outcomes has widened so dramatically that traditional forecasting models have lost much of their predictive power.
Rather than anchoring decisions to a single expected future, finance leaders are now managing portfolios of possible futures, many of which are mutually incompatible. Tariffs may rise or fall, supply chains may stabilize or fracture further, while consumer demand may rebound or retrench.
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In this context, the CFO’s role has expanded from optimizing financial performance within known constraints to ensuring the organization can withstand shocks it cannot fully anticipate.
When the Real Risk Is Learning to Live Without Growth
In volatile environments, the cost of being wrong can exceed the opportunity cost of moving too slowly. It is against this backdrop that liquidity, flexibility and reversibility have become the new gold standard for CFOs, per the report. Capital that can be redeployed quickly is worth more than capital that is perfectly optimized for a single scenario.
Among the insights to emerge from the data is not that growth is slowing, but that expectations around growth are being reset. For a subset of firms surveyed, particularly those operating under sustained uncertainty, the baseline assumption that next year must be bigger than this year is eroding.
Firms experiencing low levels of uncertainty expect revenue growth in the year ahead, according to the report. Those facing high uncertainty, by contrast, are more pessimistic, with many bracing for flat or declining revenues.
One of the clearest dividing lines in the data runs between goods-producing sectors and services-based industries. Manufacturers and other goods firms reported higher levels of uncertainty, driven largely by exposure to tariffs, global logistics and input cost volatility. Services firms, particularly those rooted in domestic demand such as healthcare and education, reported comparatively lower, and in some cases declining, uncertainty.
Read the report: How Business Uncertainty Is Forcing a New CFO Playbook
For CFOs, sectoral context increasingly defines what “best practice” even means. The playbook for a global manufacturer navigating trade uncertainty bears little resemblance to that of a domestically focused services provider, yet both are responding to the same underlying shift where uncertainty is not an anomaly but a feature.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report data showed that firms reporting high uncertainty are less likely to commit to large-scale expansions or transformative technology overhauls. Instead, they are channeling resources into areas that improve adaptability, such as supply chain diversification, incremental automation and systems that enhance real-time visibility into cash flow and demand.
The danger is not that some companies will grow more slowly in a given year. The danger is that an entire cohort of firms may internalize stagnation as normal. Once that happens, defensive behavior becomes self-reinforcing. Over time, the absence of growth expectations can become a structural constraint, not just a cyclical one.
The companies that navigate this moment successfully may not be those that chase growth at all costs, nor those that retreat entirely into defensiveness, but those that learn how to balance ambition with adaptability and are guided, increasingly, by CFOs who understand that resilience is now a form of strategy.
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