Tackling CFO priorities for 2025

Revamp business spend management for efficient growth

Optimizing financial operations is essential to help avoid having your burn rate go up with costs spiraling out of control. According to Gartner, a top concern of many CFOs is how to reduce costs without impeding growth. As you explore cost cutting strategies, look closely at your processes for expense management.

Have your existing tools, procedures and policies for managing business expenses kept pace with your organization’s growth? Are you still struggling to control who can spend and how much? Still hassling with expense reports and hours of manual reconciliation?

I’ve seen these challenges derail productivity and drive up costs for clients. To maximize efficiency and control over spend, a commercial card program with advanced capabilities tailored for your business can give you strategic advantages, such as:

• Precise spend control to better manage growth. A scalable card program with a robust travel and expense management platform makes it easy to issue and manage physical and virtual credit cards. It enables you to set custom policies and limits for business travel, SaaS apps, supplies, and anything else. And with integrated travel booking, teams can use cards to book with policy-approved vendors. With the right card, finance staff can track spending in real time, expedite reconciliation, and save themselves a ton of time.
• Automation to refocus time where it adds more value. Reduce manual work by automating approval routing, auto-assign business expense categories so spend is coded properly, and auto-sync card activity to your ERP or accounting software.
• Save time with mobile expense reporting. Enabling teams to submit expenses and receipts via mobile app has huge benefits. It eliminates time-consuming manual reporting, automates a real-time flow of data to close the books faster, and gives your CFO actionable insights on spending patterns.

Phase out reliance on checks for cost-efficient payments

Even as paper checks are becoming obsolete, many companies may still be paying by check for various supply chain vendors. However, CFOs are now prioritizing the need to replace check usage with more cost-efficient payments.

Compared with a digital payment that might cost less than $0.50 cents and less than a minute’s time, processing each check often ranges from $4 to $20, notes a PYMNTS Intelligence report.

Start engaging your suppliers to pay using your company card. By consolidating vendor payables on one card, you may be able to negotiate better rates or take advantage of discounts for early payment. It can also position you to capture revenue share from card spend.

Fill finance expertise gaps using alternative strategies

For many CFOs, resolving talent gaps is a top priority, and also a top challenge. It can be difficult to find people with the right financial expertise as well as the agility to work well in a large, fast-growth business. Yet you may be able to cover those needs by capitalizing on alternative resources.

For example, with a commercial card solution that automates time-consuming manual tasks, you can free up existing staff to focus on more strategic work. Even better, choose a banking partner that has unique expertise with innovation economy companies.

Dedicated advisors who really understand your industry and evolving needs can help you optimize your card program and spend policies. Now is the time to identify cost-cutting opportunities and look around the curve to proactively solve problems.

As the bank for the innovation economy, SVB is committed to helping you succeed. Our commercial card solutions are tailored to help you streamline payments and expense management at scale.