Recalibrating Growth

The sessions at this year's IMA CFO Strategy Roundtable in Jodhpur covered a wide range of themes, from macroeconomics and geopolitics to credit and capital markets. This conclusions paper is the original, full-length record of those discussions, capturing each session in complete analytical detail rather than in summary form.

Each session has been written up in depth, tracing the speaker's full argument, the evidence and data points underpinning it, and its practical implications for business leaders. The intent is to preserve the substance and nuance of the room, so that readers who were not present can engage with the discussions as they actually unfolded, not as a condensed version of them.

This paper is the primary and complete record, and we hope it serves as a lasting and useful reference for the conversations that shaped this year's roundtable.

. The New World Chaos: What’s the cost for Indian Businesses Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Practice Head, Eurasia Group

. The US: Trade, Tariffs and the Mid-term Constraint

The India-US relationship has been dominated by negotiations over a bilateral trade agreement, but the basis for reaching a deal has weakened. India had already assembled much of the package expected to appeal to the Trump administration, including defence purchases, energy imports from the US and a commitment to increase investments in the US. The remaining issue was the trade agreement itself. Following the US Supreme Court's intervention on the legal basis for the earlier tariffs, the immediate tariff environment has become more manageable for India as the proposed move to Section 301 requires a lengthy investigative process. India therefore has an incentive to wait rather than make further concessions while the legal process runs its course.

The November mid-term elections add another constraint. The House of Representatives is expected to shift to Democratic control, while the Senate results are more difficult to predict. A Democratic House would have significant scope to launch investigations into the Trump administration, potentially consuming political attention and reducing its ability to pursue major policy initiatives. This creates a limited window before the elections in which the administration could choose to revisit trade negotiations. The political incentives surrounding tariffs are also increasingly tied to energy prices, particularly if sanctions on Russian oil coincide with disruption in the Gulf.

The Middle East: Containment, Hormuz and the Post-American Gulf

It is an open question whether the current US-Iran will remain contained or expand beyond the Strait of Hormuz. The US has moved away from the more ambitious objective of overthrowing the Iranian regime and from demanding the complete abandonment of nuclear enrichment. The immediate focus is on keeping Hormuz open and preventing Iranian control of the waterway. Iran, meanwhile, has calculated that it can absorb the economic damage and wait for the US political environment to change.

The Strait is therefore an economic and military pressure point. Even without its complete closure, disruption to shipping would raise insurance, freight and trade costs, while a sustained loss of supply would produce a disproportionate increase in oil prices, given that spare capacity is limited. China is also prepared to continue buying Iranian oil, creating a direct test of whether the US can sustain an economic blockade when major trading powers are unwilling to comply.

A deeper issue is the weakening of confidence in American security guarantees in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the UAE must consider how to manage Iranian power without a military intervention from Washington. The emerging Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey arrangement is essentially a loose coalition rather than a conventional alliance. Saudi Arabia's longstanding defence relationship with Pakistan provides a nuclear deterrent against Iran, while Turkey is positioning itself as a potential alternative route for trade and energy should reliance on Hormuz become less sustainable.

China: Between Normalisation and Supply-Chain Competition

The India-China relationship remains constrained by the unresolved security problem along the border, but businesses are especially concerned about the growing competition over technology and supply chains. Following the Galwan crisis, India and China began a limited process of normalisation, including the gradual return of visas and flights. However, the movement of Chinese companies and personnel into India has not followed the same path. Indian companies and multinational manufacturers have sought greater access to Chinese partners in areas such as electronics, EVs and batteries, while China has imposed increasingly stringent restrictions on exports, technology transfers and the movement of Chinese technical personnel.

This suggests a shift from managing political normalisation to managing strategic dependence. India has relaxed some restrictions on Chinese investment, including allowing selected joint ventures where the Indian partner remains dominant, partly because companies such as Apple, Tata Electronics, Samsung and Foxconn require access to Chinese suppliers and expertise. At the same time, Chinese controls appear designed to prevent India from developing independent capabilities in strategically sensitive technologies. Indian engineers and executives working in areas such as batteries and electronics face greater difficulty obtaining Chinese visas, and many companies are meeting Chinese technical partners in third countries.

A broader China-plus-one strategy remains constrained by China's determination to retain industrial capacity. Electronics is the clearest area of success for India, but much of this is driven by a small number of large MNCs, particularly Apple. India's difficulty in establishing greenfield facilities, the slow implementation of PLIs and the complexity of local approvals continue to limit the country's ability to absorb supply-chain relocation at scale. Vietnam has captured a larger share of the China-plus-one opportunity, but rising wages, demographic constraints and US scrutiny of Chinese transshipment have created some space for a broader diversification towards India and other markets.

China's trade surplus also remains difficult to rebalance because export capacity is tied to domestic employment and industrial policy. Rather than allowing manufacturing activity to migrate, as other Asian economies did, China has automated production and maintained its position across a wide range of industries. Its leverage also extends beyond physical products to certification, technology and critical minerals. India will need to build alternative sources of supply and develop its own technological and certification capabilities in order to spur trade diversification.

Economic Security and the Search for Strategic Partners

India's approach is centred on economic security and a wider network of middle-power partnerships. Japan is the most important of these relationships, particularly in areas where both countries seek greater independence from China and cannot fully rely on the US. Japanese and Indian firms are working together to transfer capabilities in areas such as solar manufacturing, critical minerals and other specialised technologies, while Japanese institutions are increasingly willing to provide capital and risk-sharing support for Indian projects.

Europe is a second key partner. The India-EU trade agreement is being approached primarily as a mechanism for expanding trade and investment, with wider cooperation expected around technology and defence. France is particularly important in aerospace and defence, including potential cooperation on the engines and intellectual property required for India's next-generation fighter programme. Canada, meanwhile, is emerging as another potential source of investment, technology and critical minerals, supported by the scale of Canadian pension-fund investment already present in India.

Implication for Indian Business

Business decisions involving supply chains, technology, energy and market access are rife with geopolitical exposure. China is likely to remain a competitor even as trade and investment links persist. The US remains indispensable but less predictable. Japan, Europe and other middle powers will become more important sources of technology, capital and supply-chain alternatives. The overall environment allows for greater strategic flexibility but also requires Indian businesses to operate across a more fragmented system of trade rules, technology controls, sanctions and investment restrictions. The principal business requirement is to build enough diversification and strategic flexibility to respond as relationships and constraints change.

. Beyond the Rearview Mirror: Moving from Hindsight to High-Velocity Foresight Sanket Deodhar, Country Head and Managing Director, Anaplan India

. Corporate planning built around annual budgets and static scenario models assume a world that no longer exists. Geopolitical shocks, tariff swings and supply disruptions now compress decision cycles that once ran in months into weeks. Finance functions that still spend most of their capacity reconciling historical data cannot keep up. This session examined how connected planning and artificial intelligence are reshaping the CFO's mandate, from a custodian of past performance to an architect of forward-looking strategy.

The Great Inversion of the Finance Function

According to Anaplan India’s research, only 17% of finance team capacity typically goes toward forward-looking strategy work, with the remainder consumed in reconciling and validating historical data. This imbalance took shape in an era when markets moved slowly enough for annual operating plans and static budgets to hold for a full cycle. Foreign exchange rates were broadly stable, demand was predictable and supply chains carried few surprises, so a plan built once a year could reasonably guide decisions through to the next one.

The scale and frequency of CFO decision-making have grown sharply since. Global research puts the value of decisions a CFO makes in a typical week at roughly ten times what it was a decade ago, moving from about $100 mn to ~$1 bn. Static annual planning cannot support either such volume or such speed. Finance now requires a continuous assessment of working capital, margin and supply exposure rather than periodic reviews, with capacity shifting from historical reporting toward scenario modelling and forward guidance to the board.

Probabilistic Forecasts, Deterministic Constraints

The clear distinction between probabilistic and deterministic artificial intelligence is central to how finance should use the technology. Demand forecasting is inherently probabilistic – an estimate with a stated confidence range rather than a fixed number. Left on its own it remains theoretical. Value emerges only when such forecasts are reconciled with deterministic constraints, such as material availability, production capacity and financial limits, producing executable plans, rather than ones that merely describe possibilities.

Such reconciliation requires organisations to close the ‘silo’ tax: the cost, in time and misalignment, of sales, supply chain and finance functions operating on separate data and separate assumptions. A shared data model that keeps these functions synchronised removes what can be described as ‘liquidity blindness’, i.e., the gap between the cash and margin position finance believes it holds and the real-time reality of the business. Without it, a shift in sales in one region cannot be traced instantly to its margin impact, and corrective measures then tend to lag.

Agility over False Precision

Connected planning can make an organisation agile enough to identify which levers, whether marketing spend, capital expenditure or working capital, can absorb a shock, rather than simply predict it in advance. Excel will remain part of the daily functioning of finance teams, but the objective is to route a bulk of decisions currently locked inside individual spreadsheets back into a shared system where leadership can see and act on them. Most CapEx overruns trace back to strategic plans that are disconnected from annual operating plans, leaving no mechanism to track progress against long-term capacity goals.

The aim today is to shorten the distance between a shock occurring and a considered response reaching the board. Finance leaders should consider treating connected data and scenario capability as a standing operating discipline instead of an annual planning exercise. They must also trade the comfort of a single forecast for the ability to move before the numbers are confirmed.

. The World Through 2029 Adit Jain, Editorial Director, IMA India

. The rules-based international order constructed after WWII is giving way to a world of negotiated access to markets, technology, energy and security in which no single power sets the terms. What matters most for businesses today is knowing which risks dominate, and repositioning accordingly before the ‘music’ stops.

Cycle Risk as the CFO's Central Task

Risk comes in two forms, and each requires a different response. In an upturn, the dominant risk is underinvestment. Capacity takes 18-36 months to build, and businesses that fail to commit early will cede market share to competitors who do. Everything downstream, be it talent, distribution or channel relationships, follows from lost market share – which is really the hardest consequence to reverse. In a downturn, the dominant risk is overextension. The instinct to slash costs uniformly, particularly when driven by an HQ mandate disconnected from local market conditions, removes the wrong people and creates precisely the environment that sends high performers elsewhere.

Goldman Sachs offers the most striking example of how to steady the ship during a downturn. Leading up to the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, the bank's leadership stayed ahead of the pack by listening carefully for signs of ebbing investor excitement. It moved decisively to liquidate bond positions before the rest of the market grasped what was happening. Being first, being smart and being willing to ignore the conventional wisdom proved to be three decisive variables. However, it is important to remember that the right strategy in one cycle is consistently the wrong strategy in another, and companies that navigate successfully are those that shed the previous guidelines early enough to write a new one.

From Rules to Free-fall: The New Order

The next business cycle will not be shaped by demand conditions or interest rates. Instead, armed conflict, sanctions, tariffs, energy-supply disruptions and political misalignment will be the dominant variables to consider over the next 3-5 years. The geopolitical system is moving from a stable, American-anchored framework to one of managed disorder. Conflicts persist in Ukraine and the Middle East, but so far, the major powers involved continue to pull back before the situation goes entirely out of hand.

A ‘managed disorder’ scenario is the central forecast today, and it runs through 2029 at a minimum. No fundamental realignment is possible before a change in the American administration, and even the November midterms will not materially shift the US foreign policy equation. The White House retains full authority over trade enforcement, sanctions, immigration regulation and the bulk of what constitutes foreign policy regardless of how the Congressional elections go.

The alternate global scenario of ‘escalating fragmentation’ – which would involve deepening geopolitical confrontation and could entail sustained energy shocks, high inflation, and broadening sanctions – is a potential but distinctly lower-probability risk, at around a one-in-four chance.

Gulf Endgames and the Energy Variable

In the Gulf, the current reality is a fragile truce. This has allowed the major players to resume investment in limited volumes. Armed containment, wider regional escalation and internal regime stress remain the possible forward paths from here. A regime change scenario is more plausible in Bahrain (a Sunni monarchy governing a majority Shia population) than in Iran, where American pressure has done what it consistently does: shore up the regime by giving the population something to rally against.

In a managed disorder scenario, oil will hold in the $80–100 range with elevated volatility. Escalation, particularly a Hormuz disruption, could spike up prices further; a 5% supply shortfall would produce a price response far exceeding 5% because of how thin the market's elasticity runs under conditions of physical scarcity. Shipping insurance, route-length premiums and trade cost inflation will have a compounding effect on prices.

Europe: Reform, Stagnation or Fiscal Rupture

Europe's main concern is not the risk of NATO imploding, but that the American security guarantee is less automatic and more transactional than ever. A ‘frozen confrontation’, involving ceasefire or a static front without full settlement, is the most likely path ahead. The two alternative scenarios are renewed Russian pressure beyond Ukraine and a genuine move toward European strategic autonomy, built around a French-German-Polish-British core. Economically, European stagnation, incremental reform with growth near 1%, is the most likely path. A reform dividend from capital-markets, energy and regulatory liberalisation is the second most likely scenario. Full-scale fiscal rupture, where defence and welfare costs collide and test weaker sovereigns, is the least likely but still a very real possibility. For business, Europe remains a large, wealthy market, but increasingly one where regulation, security and subsidy policy decide competitiveness, with German fiscal execution, French political stability and the strength of nationalist parties the variables worth watching.

East Asia: China's Slowdown, Japan's Rise and Taiwan's Tail Risk

The base case for China is one of gradual stabilisation. While property prices will remain stressed, and construction activity will be constrained, at a broad level, the system will hold. A more immediate concern is excess capacity. With domestic demand having collapsed in the property bust, Chinese manufacturers are dumping chemicals, ships, cars and electronics across the globe. In turn, this has triggered retaliatory tariffs that will lead to further, worldwide supply chain reorganisation. A coercive strategy towards Taiwan, involving blockade exercises, cyber pressure or near-invasion will remain the smallest but most consequential tail risk. If this scenario materialises, the immediate impact on the global economy will be semiconductor disruption and an abrupt capital-market repricing

Japan is shifting from a low-profile global economic power to a more consequential security, technology and capital partner, with defence and dual-use investment rising and supply-chain diversification attracting FDI. It is however, constrained by an ageing, labour-scarce economy and high public debt. The wider Asian system will not divide neatly into two blocs. Regardless, South Korea will stay central to semiconductors, ASEAN will gain assembly and logistics investment, Taiwan will remain the largest single tail-risk in the system and India will become a balancing market and partner.

India's Horizon: Rupee, Inflation and Corporate Exposure

For Indian businesses, a managed disorder scenario will mean persistent imported inflation, interest rate pressures and annual rupee depreciation of ~4%. The exchange rate is likely to drift towards 112/$ by 2029 in the base case, and closer to 123/$ under an escalatory scenario. Yet, unlike in the past, today it is capital outflows, not the current account deficit, that is driving down the rupee. A change in the tax treatment of foreign capital gains has turned what used to be a positive monthly flow into a persistent negative one, and it is this exit of capital that has pushed India's overall balance of payments into negative territory after a long gap.

The opportunities of this environment will manifest across six key factors. Energy will see greater volatility, so hedges, inventories and optionality will regain value. Supply chains will duplicate critical nodes rather than optimise purely for landed cost. Trade will see tariffs, subsidies, rules of origin and bilateral bargains proliferate. Capital flows and credit premia will increasingly favour politically trusted markets over merely cheap ones. Technology will bring competing standards, export controls and data regimes. Defence spending will become more sustained and less cyclical. Finance functions do not necessarily need to be able to predict every shock. Rather, they should aim to shorten the time between signal, decision and cash-flow response, enabling their companies to be better-placed to succeed.

Geopolitical instability is not a new phenomenon in terms of corporate planning, but it has become the primary variable rather than a side issue. CXOs who continue to plan around demand, interest rates and capacity alone will find themselves consistently surprised by the sequence in which events unfold. Those who instead build geopolitical risk assessment into cycle analysis as a first-order input will be better positioned to make early calls, whether on fresh investments, cost cutting, or measures to protect market share.

. The Decisive Moment: Capital Allocation in Complex Indian Markets Amrita Agarwal, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Social and Economic Progress

. Global business conditions have become less predictable since 2018. Foreign investment has weakened, tariffs have risen, demographic pressures have intensified and AI has begun reshaping established industries. India has gained from certain aspects of this disruption, but weaknesses in domestic demand, corporate investment and financial-market depth complicate its growth outlook. This session examined where Indian enterprises are actually allocating capital, where balance sheets are under strain and what a more decisive capital allocation strategy would require of the CFO function.

The End of a Stable Global Order

Between 1990 and roughly 2018, expanding trade, multilateral institutions and relatively open capital flows gave companies a more predictable international environment, although liberalisation remained uneven across countries. Since then, global FDI has weakened and tariff barriers have returned at a scale not seen in decades. Falling fertility and ageing populations are also changing consumption and savings patterns across major economies. AI, meanwhile, is disrupting established service industries. Governments are confronting these shifts with historically high debt after an extended period of low interest rates. With rates now higher, the eventual adjustment could prove either inflationary or deflationary.

At the same time, this disruption has created openings for India. China-plus-one is real, but companies are diversifying production rather than replacing China outright. India must compete with Vietnam, Mexico and other alternative manufacturing locations for this investment. AI is putting pressure on parts of India’s IT services industry while making more sophisticated work possible in other areas. Companies should plan for continued volatility rather than assume a return to the pre-2018 environment.

Cracks in the Domestic Growth Story

India’s growth narrative relies heavily on domestic consumption, but several trends raise questions about its durability. Fertility rates have fallen sharply over the past two decades, particularly in the southern states, reducing the prospective growth of younger consumer cohorts. A more immediate pressure point is household finances. Retail lending has expanded rapidly over the past 5 years, while household savings have not kept pace with the rise in debt. Unemployment among educated people aged 20-30 also remains elevated, constraining income growth and discretionary demand.

Corporate behaviour points to similar caution. Investment as a share of corporate activity has declined steadily since 2011 and has yet to recover. At the same time, Indian companies are distributing more of their earnings through dividends than at any point in recent history. Viewed together, these trends suggest that many companies prefer returning capital to shareholders over taking on the risks associated with domestic reinvestment. This may provide investors with higher immediate returns, but it also reflects limited corporate conviction about committing capital to longer-term capacity.

A Financial System Too Shallow for the Task

India’s financial system remains dominated by banks, while its corporate bond market lacks the depth, liquidity and range of instruments available in several comparable emerging markets. Long-tenor and sub-investment-grade issuance remains scarce, secondary-market trading is limited, and instruments such as credit default swaps see little use. Priority-sector rules require banks to direct about 40% of adjusted net bank credit toward specified categories, reducing their discretion over a substantial part of the lending book. This can constrain the availability and raise the cost of credit for other borrowers.

Patient capital is similarly constrained. Pension assets exceed 100% of GDP in the US; in India, the figure is below 25%, and government borrowing crowds out much of what domestic pension and insurance capital does exist. The result is a system that channels most financing through floating-rate bank credit rather than the fixed-rate, longer-duration instruments that capital-intensive and export-oriented businesses need. India's capital gains tax regime has changed 5 times over the past 20 years, against effectively no change in comparable major economies over the same period, and commercial dispute resolution can take upward of a decade to conclude. Businesses operating in this environment carry a higher cost of capital than global peers, independent of their own creditworthiness.

Concentration Risk and the Competitiveness Gap

Indian companies, listed and unlisted, remain strongly oriented toward the domestic market. Forex earnings as a share of total corporate income rose steadily between 1990 and 2013 as firms expanded their export capabilities, but progress has since stalled. Outside pharmaceuticals, IT services and selected segments of electronics manufacturing, few Indian sectors generate a substantial share of their revenue internationally. Export growth in pharmaceuticals and IT services has also slowed over the past five years compared with the preceding decade. The domestic market may offer lower execution risk and quicker returns, but sustained dependence on it limits the international experience companies need to compete at scale.

The resulting difference in corporate scale is substantial. China’s representation in the Forbes Global 2000 rose from 43 companies in 2003 to 340 in 2026, while India’s count increased from roughly 20 to 64. The average market capitalisation of a BSE 500 company is about one-fifteenth that of an S&P 500 company and Indian companies collectively account for less than 5% of global corporate profits. Companies which have closed this gap typically built scale and operating capability in their domestic markets before adapting those strengths for international customers. Indian companies will need to approach international expansion as a deliberate source of scale and capability, rather than treating exports as a residual outlet for domestic production.

The CFO as Strategic Capital Allocator

The CFO’s role extends beyond control, reporting and compliance. An effective CFO function can be described as the company’s ‘internal Wall Street’: it determines how much financial flexibility the business retains and where capital is deployed. This requires two disciplines. First, the financing structure must preserve sufficient liquidity, borrowing capacity and maturity flexibility for the company to respond when conditions change. Second, investments must be assessed over an appropriate time horizon, including when strategically necessary expenditure weighs on near-term P&L performance.

Achieving this flexibility may require companies to broaden their sources of capital. External commercial borrowings, offshore bonds and private credit can provide alternatives to domestic bank lending, although their currency, refinancing and covenant risks must be assessed carefully. Companies should build relationships with international debt and equity investors before a transaction makes those relationships urgent. Outward investment can also help companies acquire market access, technology and operating experience that would take longer to build internally. Financing alone, however, is insufficient. Companies need boards with relevant international experience and talent capable of operating across markets and cultures. CFOs should also conduct regular reviews of existing investments, stop funding persistently underperforming projects and redirect capital toward priorities with stronger strategic and financial justification.

A critical test is whether the CFO can move capital when the evidence changes. New projects usually face scrutiny, while established ones often retain funding through inertia and internal sponsorship. Regularly withdrawing capital from weak investments creates room for new priorities without allowing the balance sheet to expand by default. In a more volatile and expensive operating environment, that discipline will matter as much as the ability to identify the next investment.

. From Financial Stewardship to Enterprise Judgement B Santhanam, Former CEO, Saint Gobain Asia Pacific

. The CFO’s role has broadened considerably over the past 15 years. Financial stewardship remains fundamental, with reporting, controls, cash, funding, capital structure and investor confidence still central to the function. However, the scope of the role has accumulated around that foundation. Strategy and value creation have become more prominent, followed by capital allocation, resilience, risk, digital transformation and now AI. The CFO, who previously only needed to answer if the organisation could afford a decision, must now also answer whether the decision creates value, how resilient the resulting position is and what the organisation may be missing.

Where Ambition Meets Economics

Finance leaders increasingly operate at the intersection between growth ambitions and financial and operational constraints. For MNCs investing in India, the challenge may be making the case for investing ahead of visible demand and building capacity before returns can be precisely forecast. For rapidly growing Indian companies, the challenge may be entering unfamiliar markets, acquiring businesses and investing in new technologies without allowing ambition to outrun the organisation's ability to manage it. Financial discipline, therefore, needs to enable ambition while ensuring that ambition does not weaken financial discipline. The CFO's role is to help distinguish boldness from recklessness and to design the guardrails that allow the organisation to move with greater freedom.

From Evaluating Strategy to Shaping it

Just as the CFO’s own role has changed, so too has the relationship between the CEO and CFO. Traditionally, the CFO was asked whether the organisation could afford a plant, acquisition or level of debt. This question gradually shifted to whether an investment would create value, then towards resilience in a period marked by Covid-19, supply-chain disruptions, geopolitical shocks, inflation and trade barriers. Today, the emerging questions are: ‘What is missing from the decision?’, ‘Which assumptions may no longer hold?’, ‘What risks are underestimated?’, ‘What opportunities are being dismissed?’ and ‘What is technology making possible beyond existing financial models?’ Finance heads need to enter strategic conversations early enough to influence the quality of the decision while retaining sufficient independence to challenge assumptions.

One indication of this shift is the changing nature of Board and investor conversations. As companies become more complex, questions directed at the CFO increasingly extend beyond financial performance and they are consequently expected to explain the economics behind strategic choices and the risks and capabilities that determine whether those choices can succeed.

For example, at L&T , investor discussions previously centred on orders, margins, execution, working capital, cash and debt. Over time, the conversation expanded to capital allocation, portfolio choices, asset monetisation and returns, followed by geographical exposure, new businesses, geopolitical risk and technology. Discussions around data centres, for example, required an assessment of which business model L&T should pursue rather than simply an explanation of financial performance. Similarly, at Titan , the earlier focus was on growth and the building of categories, brands, channels and distribution. The financial narrative subsequently incorporated margins, cash generation and return on capital, while the current environment requires growth to be considered alongside international expansion, gold prices, regulation, geopolitics and resilience.

5 Imperatives for the CFO of 2030

The evolving role points towards five imperatives: disciplined ambition, responsible speed, independent partnership, digital-to-agentic transformation and making ambition credible. Financial stewardship remains the foundation beneath them.

Disciplined ambition: Understand when prudence means protecting capital and when it means investing ahead of demand. In a mature business, value may come from restructuring, productivity, working capital and returning capital, while in a rapidly growing market the greater risk may be investing too little or too late. The CFO needs to assess the ROI as well as the capabilities and options it creates and the cost of waiting for greater certainty.

Responsible speed: Requires the establishment of governance systems and controls that scale with growth without turning every decision into another approval process. As revenues, geographies and businesses expand, risk systems must keep pace while authority remains clear. The objective is to create guardrails that allow faster movement without allowing ambition to outrun control.

Independent partnership: Includes loyalty to the enterprise, partnership with the CEO and transparency with the Board. The CFO needs sufficient closeness to influence decisions while retaining the independence to challenge assumptions and bring uncomfortable information into the room early.

Digital to agentic transformation : Reconciliation, closing, reporting, forecasting, working-capital monitoring, controls and audit preparation are increasingly amenable to AI and agents. The opportunity extends to redesigning workflows, decision rights and controls, including determining what an agent can execute autonomously, where human intervention is required and how accountability will be maintained.

Making ambition credible: As companies expand into new geographies, pursue acquisitions, adopt new technologies or invest ahead of demand, investors, lenders and global headquarters face their own uncertainty. The Finance head needs to explain what is known and unknown, which assumptions underpin the decision, what the downside is, what guardrails are in place and what would cause the organisation to change course. Credibility comes from demonstrating that management understands the uncertainty it is choosing to take.

The Shift Towards Enterprise Judgement

As AI makes forecasts faster, variance analysis more automated and scenarios easier to generate, the CFO's comparative advantage increasingly lies in interpretation, challenge, choice and accountability. More information does not automatically produce better decisions. Finance leaders need to examine the assumptions behind the analysis, identify what the data may not capture, assess whether historical information remains relevant and determine whether an apparently optimal answer is consistent with strategy, values and risk appetite. Financial stewardship remains the foundation, but technology can reduce the amount of human intelligence required to produce information and create greater capacity for judgement about when to invest, accelerate, challenge, stop or introduce guardrails. The CFO of 2030 therefore moves from explaining the past towards helping the enterprise make better choices about an uncertain future.

. Rethinking Corporate Treasury: From Risk Management to Value Creation Vikas Agrawal, Head - Treasury Solutions, 360 ONE Wealth

. Corporate treasury has traditionally been a function limited largely to fixed deposits and a narrow range of short-term instruments. Any positive return would be counted as a good one, with little scrutiny over all the opportunities available. Treasurers now have access to a broader financial ecosystem which allows them to assess credit and market risk and have access to liquidity. Therefore, treasury must determine whether surplus cash is being deployed efficiently without compromising capital protection.

Discipline, Not Speculation

Value creation comes primarily from better internal decisions rather than taking greater financial risk or external factors. The first discipline is cash-flow forecasting. Understanding when and how much surplus cash will be needed allows investments to be matched to specific obligations. Reliable forecasts allow investments to be matched with expected outflows, while poor forecasting forces companies to hold excessive liquidity or sacrifice returns unnecessarily.

The second discipline is learning from the options not taken. Treasury decisions usually involve several alternatives across bank deposits, debt mutual funds, bonds, commercial paper, certificates of deposit and other instruments. Once one option is selected, the others are often forgotten. Tracking those alternatives over time creates a feedback loop that allows treasury teams to understand whether a decision worked, why it worked and whether the same logic should be applied again.

Managing Capital, Not Cash

Treasury needs to operate within a formal Investment Policy Statement that establishes the investment philosophy and defines the rules for different pools of capital. The framework should specify strategic dos and don'ts, permitted investments, portfolio metrics, asset allocation, decision-making protocols and review mechanisms. It should also establish risk parameters covering credit quality, duration, liquidity, diversification and exposure limits. The objective is to create clear guardrails, enhance accountability and prevent portfolios from drifting away from their intended objectives.

A Risk Framework for Corporate Issuers

Credit assessment should extend beyond ratings to the issuer's financial strength, business stability, parent support, profitability, cash-flow visibility and market liquidity. The framework should aggregate exposure across instruments and assess the overall strength of the corporate group.

Credit quality: AAA for long-term instruments and A1+ for short-term instruments.

Group exposure: Total exposure to any single issuer or corporate group capped at 10% of treasury surplus.

Single-issuer concentration: Exposure to an individual issuer or group kept below 7% of the overall treasury portfolio, subject to the broader 10% group limit.

Structural strength: Net worth, balance-sheet quality and parent backing assessed alongside profitability and cash-flow visibility.

Liquidity: Institutional participation and market acceptability considered as indicators of price discovery and exit potential.

Layered limits: The most conservative applicable limit determines the final permissible exposure.

This creates a repeatable checklist for evaluating safety, concentration and liquidity across bank FDs, mutual funds, CPs, NCDs, zero-coupon bonds and other treasury investments.

Beyond Familiar Instruments

Many companies continue to place surplus cash in fixed deposits, overnight funds or liquid mutual funds as these instruments are familiar and readily accessible to treasurers. Mutual funds remain useful vehicles, but they do not give the investor full control over the underlying portfolio or the timing of entry and exit. In a rising-rate environment, daily mark-to-market valuation can also reduce returns even when the underlying securities remain sound. Where cash outflows are known, direct exposure to short-tenor commercial paper or NCDs from trusted corporate groups can provide more predictable, name-specific returns. Matching the maturity to a known obligation, such as a tax payment, and holding the security to maturity can remove the mark-to-market exposure faced by mutual fund investors.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The next stage of treasury management requires greater attention to market yields. Additional returns should come from disciplined decisions and internal factors that treasury can influence instead of interest rate speculation. Liquidity should be matched to purpose: mutual funds are appropriate when liquidity is uncertain, while predictable outflows can be matched with instruments such as FDs, CPs and bonds. Scheme duration should remain within twice the investment horizon where mutual funds are used. The operating discipline should be to forecast, bucket and deploy capital according to its purpose, with regular checks and guardrails built into the process. Treasury decisions should be reviewed continuously as each cycle creates information for the next one.

The CFO plays a central role in establishing the treasury framework and defining the mandate within which investment decisions are made. Policies need to be simple enough to provide clear guidance while establishing appropriate limits around credit quality, exposure, liquidity and diversification. A harder issue is determining where caution becomes an unnecessary refusal to capture small, low-risk increments of additional yield. At scale, even modest improvements compound meaningfully. Digitisation can strengthen this model by enabling systematic monitoring of exposures, benchmarking, deviations and alternative investment choices. The broader objective is to move treasury from managing cash balances to managing capital systematically.

. Built to Hold: Leading Enterprises into the Next Decade, and Beyond Giridhar Sanjeevi, Founding Mentor, Crossmentors and Former CFO, Indian Hotels Company

. Business planning has long assumed that disruptions are temporary and normalcy eventually returns. Long term plans are therefore built mainly by extrapolating historical trends and making small adjustments to forecasts as needed. Today, however, enterprises operate at an intersection of geopolitical tensions, AI disruption, climate change, shifting consumer behaviour and macroeconomic uncertainties. These forces rarely act in isolation: inflation influences consumption, consumption shapes demand, margins, capital allocation and ultimately enterprise value.

As geopolitics and capital markets increasingly converge around enterprise value, the CFO's role and responsibility must extend beyond measuring performance and allocating capital. Safeguarding enterprise value requires finance leaders to understand how external forces are reshaping long term competitiveness and influencing strategic decisions. Taking a ‘last year + delta’ approach, rather than stress testing the assumptions that underpin them, no longer works.

The following diagnostic can help evaluate where organisations stand on the K-curve. Each of the forces places an enterprise on the upper arm of the curve where it acts as a tailwind, or the lower arm where it acts as a headwind. Five questions locate an enterprise on the curve:

Which part of the K-curve does revenue sit on?

How does growth look once post-pandemic recovery is stripped out?

Do margins require recalibration for an inflated cost environment?

Does the capital structure hold under stress?

Would the balance sheet survive a downturn?

Replacing Prediction With Preparation

The Build to Hold framework starts by distinguishing between three distinct categories: what is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain. Organisations need to optimise for what they know, hedge for what they believe and prepare for what they do not know. The challenge is that assumptions are frequently treated as facts, while genuine unknowns receive little attention until they start affecting business performance.

A plan built around varying levels of confidence, evolving assumptions and alternative scenarios is fundamentally different from a single-future forecast. It shifts the emphasis from predicting one future to building the capacity to respond to different environments.

What separates strategic failure from strategic pivot is what organisations choose to do with uncertainty. BlackBerry failed to recognise changing consumer behaviour; Kodak underestimated the transition to digital photography. Ørsted was one of Europe’s most coal-intensive companies, responsible for a third of Denmark’s carbon emissions. In 2008, it took a bold call in pivoting from coal to offshore wind while its legacy business remained profitable. In contrast, the Teesta hydroelectric project in Sikkim illustrates the perils of discounting known climate risks. With risks evolving faster than annual planning cycle, preparation demands a new approach to materiality. By continuously updating their internal materiality matrices, organisations are better able to reassess priorities, reallocate capital and respond quickly, before emerging risks can erode enterprise value.

Protecting Value While Creating It

Growth, profitability and capital efficiency have traditionally shaped corporate strategy. In an increasingly volatile operating environment, value protection deserves equal attention. Sustained value creation depends on capturing opportunities and strengthening the organisation's ability to withstand disruption and respond when conditions change.

The best-prepared organisations follow two complementary playbooks – offensive and defensive – at once. Offensive playbooks drive growth, margin expansion and capital efficiency. Defensive playbooks focus on resilience, capital protection and risk-adjusted decision-making. Both are essential in their own way: threats can quickly become strategic opportunities and organisations that view risk solely through a defensive lens risk overlooking avenues for future growth. Rather than treating risk as a periodic review, boards need to continually reassess material risks and ask whether they are adequately reflected in strategy, capital allocation and investment decisions.

Cost of Protection Versus Exposure

Boards evaluating an unresolved risk are often asked to approve or reject a single line item, which understates the real choice. It is more useful to weigh the cost of protecting against a risk against the cost of remaining exposed to it. In this regard, the board's real decision is which of the two costs the organisation is prepared to bear . Jaguar Land Rover's decision to forgo a cyber insurance premium preceded a cyberattack that cost an estimated $2 bn. Pacific Gas and Electric's refusal to fund grid infrastructure upgrades preceded wildfire liabilities that exceeded its market capitalisation. In both cases, the cost of exposure eventually exceeded the cost of protection that was declined.

Building Capacity to Pivot

Resilience and agility are often treated as the same capability. While resilience protects the downside, agility creates the upside. Confusing the two can lead organisations to invest in the wrong places. Resilience is built around what is known while agility is built around what is believed and what remains uncertain . Without resilience, agility has no stable foundation to operate from and without agility, resilience merely holds the organisation in place.

What makes organisational capability usable under pressure is optionality: the preserved freedom to act when circumstances change. This takes three forms:

Balance sheet optionality maintains financial flexibility.

P&L optionality allows operating models to adapt as conditions change.

Information optionality ensures that decisions are driven by new evidence, rather than by assumptions, which may have expired.

In effect, optionality determines whether an organisation is in a position to shift gears whenever needed.

Narrative Credibility as Strategic Optionality

Preparing for uncertainty requires a nuanced approach to leadership communication. Investors do not expect CXOs to predict every disruption. Rather, they expect an honest assessment of emerging risks, and confidence that the organisation is prepared to respond. Transparent communication strengthens credibility; in contrast, avoiding difficult conversations can erode trust. This is narrative optionality , or the ability to engage openly with boards, investors and analysts as circumstances evolve. Organisations that preserve it retain the flexibility to revisit assumptions, explain changing priorities and build confidence in their decisions. Once lost, strategic flexibility becomes significantly harder to exercise. The experience of India's IT sector is a striking example. As AI began reshaping business models, many companies focused on growth opportunities without adequately addressing the risks confronting the industry. As those risks became more visible, investor confidence weakened sharply, heavily affecting valuation multiples and growth expectations.

Build to Hold

Disruption that proves lasting eventually forces organisations to revisit purpose alongside strategy. Purpose functions as a form of durable capital rather than a value statement and boards must consciously reaffirm or redraw when the operating environment shifts fundamentally. The response of Taj Hotels staff during the infamous November 2008 attack, acting to protect guests without being asked to, is evidence of purpose functioning as organisational capital under extreme stress, independent of formal messaging from the top. In a nutshell, Build to Hold rests on the proposition that organisations cannot control uncertainty but they can control how well they prepare for it. The hardest part about preparing for uncertainty requires convincing people to invest in outcomes they hope will never materialise; to treat preparedness as a balance sheet item rather than a contingency; and to hold that position when conditions appear stable and the pressure to redeploy capital is strongest. That, more than any framework or planning cycle, is what the CFO's evolving mandate demands.