Global corporate finance leaders enter the second half of 2026 facing the most complex operating environment of the post-pandemic era, requiring them to balance cost management, technology investments, and capital distribution against a backdrop of global instability and renewable energy uncertainty.
At the center of that uncertainty is the Strait of Hormuz. Normally the pipeline for about 20% of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, the crisis has remained closed since the outbreak of war in the Middle East in late February.
The conflict added a new layer of shock to an already fragile environment due to volatile costs, reduced demand, and declining consumer confidence.
The results of business finance experts are specific and critical, forcing groups into defensive mode: saving money, deferring capital investments, and stress-testing portfolios against long-term disruptions in the country.
Macro Shocks Add Stress
Cost pressures had already been raised before the war, and they continue to rise. According to ACCA and the IMA Global Economic Conditions Survey (GECS), further increases may reflect some early effects of rising energy and other commodity prices since the outbreak of hostilities in the Persian Gulf. Among the CFOs surveyed, the percentage of reported increases in operating expenses decreased slightly in the first quarter of 2026, but remains high by historical standards.
Confidence in all financial groups, on the other hand, fell sharply in the first quarter, taking the peak previously seen at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. As the GECS survey was conducted in the first half of March, the outbreak of enemies would have been a major factor affecting the sentiment, due to the economic slowdown and other energy outbreaks. property.
Materials and energy are the immediate concerns, according to the findings of an Allianz Trade survey of 6,000 companies across 13 major economies: 60% say they are worried about supply disruptions and rising prices, with concerns leading in Vietnam, Poland, the UK and the US.
One result of the shock caused by the war is that businesses are holding more inventory, adding to the demand for cash at the same time prices fall less than expected, if at all.
Without Hedging
When it comes to continuing preparedness in the coming months, Naresh Aggarwal, associate director, Policy and Technology at the Association of Corporate Treasurers, says the framework is simple: “plan for the worst, hope for the best.” In practice, this means larger, more dedicated credit facilities, more use of derivatives, and longer fixed-term maturities.
The effects of the war extend beyond the energy, transportation, and chemical production sectors. Alex Ashby, group treasurer at WPP, says the ongoing volatility has led to significant changes at the global media company.
“Political instability has led us to strengthen our focus on foreign exchange risk management,” he notes. “We have invested heavily in training across the organization to increase capacity and accountability and introduced new monitoring and reporting so that FX exposures and results are regularly reviewed at senior and board level. Along with regular liquidity stress tests, this ensures that risks are identified early, decisions are made close to the underlying exposure, and we remain agile as conditions change.”
The world is always more connected, says Raphael Savalle, CFO at Montblanc, so shocks travel fast and wide. Businesses no longer operate in a world where companies can remove volatility with hedges, but where operating models must be built to support it.
“This is not ending; if anything, it is increasing,” he said. “The butterfly effect, times 10. The key is to maintain a long-term strategic direction while also building discipline in the way you operate – what I call flexible P&L management, or flexible resource allocation – and still keep an eye out every day for risks that may not seem important at first but turn out to be important, because of the way the world is connected.”
What impact will this level of uncertainty have on the day-to-day in the coming months? Beyond a formal process of information exchange, it requires confidence to not be transparent about these less obvious risks.
Re-examining the Tech Arsenal
The challenges of the coming months are also causing some companies to review their technology needs. ERP systems are still the backbone of business finance, but their robustness is fueling the need for smarter, more flexible tools to scale.
Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platforms are emerging as a viable competitor, says Armand Angeli, AI and automation expert and vice president of Digital Transformation and AI Group at DFCG, a French network of CFOs, expanding its scope beyond finance to cover sales, purchasing, and logistics.
Major ERP transformation projects are stalling as companies grapple with legacy integration, Angeli says; combining old and new without abandoning existing investments remains a major challenge.
“We can't just leave ERP,” he said. “We have to build bridges or APIs between AI tools and all ERPs. So the question becomes, How do you build these bridges? It's not easy.” Although ERPs are not flexible, they are still important tools, “considered by experts, CFOs.”
While major ERP providers are working to embed AI into their offerings, corporate users are taking different routes, depending on individual perspective and budget. In fact, the adoption of AI by corporate finance teams is proceeding with great caution.
“If the speed of change for these tools is 100, the speed of change for individuals is 10, and for companies, it is 1,” Angeli noted.
Predictive AI, built on learnable algorithms, has gained trust as a tool for reconciliation, fraud detection, and money laundering, while productive AI is still a source of deep skepticism. Hallucinations, failure to comply, and the risk of overconfidence are obvious concerns.
“Now we're seeing more suspicious shipments, more and more repetitive payments,” Angeli said.
Agent AI will continue its meaningful deployment, he adds: “CFOs don't trust agent AI. And since research shows that false positives account for between 30% and 70% of Gen AI output, we don't trust Gen AI either. Maybe 1% or 2% of companies can say they have active agents.”
Aggarwal agrees, noting that corporate finance teams remain in the experimental phase when it comes to AI, but with a purpose. Companies mandate systematic skills development; One treasury team of his acquaintances dedicates half a day every other week to some kind of AI-related skills development or testing AI processes, he says.
Data Integrity
The key in the second half of this year, however, will be data integrity and learning which insights can actually work, Aggarwal predicts; Real agent AI is the story of 2027.
“The word I hear the most in these circles is trust: trusted data, trusted algorithms, trusted results, trusted use of outputs,” he said. Going forward, the deep cultural question of when and when to take a human out of the loop will be difficult to avoid as, perhaps, AI systems accumulate error-free records.
Progress may be slow for now, but Gartner estimates that CFOs who get the right deployment of AI could unlock an additional 10 points by 2029. It won't be the pilots alone who bring benefits, however; benefits will come from managing technology as a portfolio. Three-quarters of CFOs are already increasing technology budgets for 2026, the research firm finds, with nearly half increasing them by 10% or more.
Measuring the return on investment is difficult for many AI-based projects, however, and will continue to be so this year, Angeli predicts: “We know that we should use AI and we hope for a financial ROI in the future, but many companies have not seen it yet.”
Another aspect of the technical challenge linked to the wider development of the country, says Savalle of Montblanc, is digital sovereignty, or the ability of the nation to control, protect, and control all its infrastructure: in accordance with its laws, but also with its strategic interests. Different ways of managing this technology and the data associated with it have deepened the political competition between the US, China, and the EU, according to the World Economic Forum.
“Many governments are now insisting that data centers stay within their boundaries,” warns Savalle, “and increasingly, they're looking at software dependencies more broadly: not just AI, but email systems, video conferencing tools, the whole stack. As a CFO, you have to think about what that means for your IT architecture.” Under these circumstances, is the old desire for a global ERP still valid in the next five years? He's not so sure.
Permanent Contingency Thinking
Whether it is a physical war or a digital conflict, geopolitical risk forces the financial profession into a state of perpetual emergency thinking. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is an extreme case, but it remains within a pattern that has become familiar to CFOs and treasurers. The collapse of the post-Covid supply chain, the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on energy and goods, the disruption of the Red Sea in 2024-25 – each treasury group was forced to rethink the risks of others, liquidity buffers, exposure to FX, and financing of the supply chain.
The exception to this is that financial leaders no longer take it for granted.
Aggarwal sees the restructuring of the wider world as structural rather than cyclical, and doubts even a change in the US administration could reverse it: “The genie is out of the bottle using trade as a means of imposing sovereignty.” Looking ahead, he foresees continued pressure on the financial profession to operate against a challenging environment.
“What I understand from my CFO network is that there is no going back,” Savalle noted. “This is the new normal, and, if anything, it's going to continue and expand. So the question is how you adapt your operating model. Make sure you get that feedback process and keep an open mind, because you're going into an uncharted territory. Things used to work in a certain world order. This is changing.”
For corporate finance leaders, the priority is no longer waiting for stability to return, but operating effectively when there is none. Although maintaining a long-term strategy is important, so the reconsideration of some ideas of the working model of a country divided into regional blocs is questionable. That can include maintaining high liquidity, diversifying supply chains geographically, stress-testing cash flow forecasts against energy price conditions, and investing in planning and forecasting tools that allow the organization to model disruptions quickly.
For a business finance professional, these are no longer crisis measures, but fundamental.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
The post CFOs Confront a Fractured World Order appeared first on Global Finance magazine.
