CFOs Keep Payment Complexity From Eating Into Margins

Middle market CFOs are finding that their efforts to modernize finance are being hampered by increasing complexity, according to a new report. The 2026 Certainty Project, a study by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with Fynapse, reveals that these firms often treat finance modernization as a technology upgrade, rather than a systemic issue.

As companies grow, they frequently undergo multiple significant changes, adding products or services and expanding into new markets. This growth can lead to rising transaction volumes and supplier expansion before revenue increases, creating financial complexity that can undermine the very margins growth aims to boost.

Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are adept at generating financial records but fall short in providing the real-time visibility CFOs need. The report emphasizes the importance of financial visibility to act quickly on transactions, identifying latency as the new KPI. The time between a transaction occurring and finance understanding and acting on it can lead to economic value loss and hidden costs, such as foreign exchange leakage and payment inefficiencies.

AI-driven tools can exacerbate these issues if not built on a foundation of accurate, reconciled data.

The findings suggest that CFOs prioritize cash flow forecasting, real-time reporting, manual process reduction, and data unification, but only 12% of surveyed firms consider their finance and back-office systems fully prepared for the next two years. To succeed, finance infrastructure must reduce the time between money movement and management insight, rather than merely recording more transactions.

Companies that establish real-time reconciliation, unified data, and transaction-level controls before scaling may gain a competitive edge in finance speed and operational efficiency.