- UBA Ghana Calls for Stronger CEO–CFO Partnership as Finance Moves Beyond Reporting
UBA Ghana has called on companies to build stronger partnerships between chief executive officers and chief finance officers, arguing that sustainable growth increasingly depends on combining strategic ambition with financial discipline.
Daniel Sarpong, Executive Director of UBA Ghana, said the conventional separation between a CEO who defines corporate strategy and a CFO who merely monitors the numbers was no longer suitable for businesses operating in complex and rapidly changing markets.
Speaking on behalf of UBA Ghana Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Bernard Gyebi at the third Ghana Chief Finance Officer Summit in Accra, Mr Sarpong said the modern CFO must operate as a strategic partner, adviser, challenger and navigator.
“The CEO may articulate where the organisation wants to go, but the CFO helps determine the financial pathway for getting there sustainably,” he said.
The argument reflects a wider transformation taking place within corporate finance. Finance departments were traditionally judged by their ability to prepare accounts, control expenditure, manage compliance and report historical results.
Those responsibilities remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient.
Companies now face decisions involving digital transformation, new market entry, cybersecurity, customer acquisition, artificial intelligence, volatile financing costs and increasingly demanding regulatory requirements.
Each decision carries consequences for capital, liquidity, risk and long-term returns. A finance leader who enters the discussion only after management has chosen a strategy will therefore have arrived too late.
Using UBA Ghana as an example, Mr Sarpong said the bank’s CFO was an integral member of the leadership team and participated directly in shaping strategy.
The CFO engages the managing director, executive director and other members of executive management on decisions affecting the institution’s future direction.
Finance, he said, has a seat at the table when the bank considers capital allocation, new products, customer acquisition, technology investment, expansion opportunities, cost optimisation and business growth.
This model recognises that strategy and finance are not separate corporate functions.
Every strategic decision ultimately becomes a financial decision. A new product requires capital and operating expenditure. Digital transformation involves technology costs, cybersecurity risks and uncertain future returns. Market expansion creates revenue opportunities but can also weaken liquidity or management control.
The role of the CFO is consequently not to obstruct ambition. It is to determine whether an organisation possesses the resources, risk capacity and execution discipline needed to pursue that ambition without weakening the business.
This distinction is important for Ghanaian companies operating in an environment where capital is expensive and access to long-term financing remains limited.
A poorly designed investment can lock scarce capital into an asset that does not generate sufficient returns. Rapid expansion can increase revenue while weakening cash flow. A technology project can consume substantial resources without improving the customer experience or operational efficiency.
The CFO must therefore help management distinguish between activity that enlarges the organisation and investment that genuinely increases its value.
Mr Sarpong cautioned companies against pursuing growth purely for its own sake.
At UBA Ghana, he said, decisions involving growth in the loan portfolio, expansion of digital capabilities, entry into new opportunities and the introduction of new customer propositions are assessed against several factors.
These include potential revenue, capital requirements, liquidity, risk, operating costs, customer value, regulation and long-term returns.
That approach is particularly relevant to banking.
A bank can expand its loan book rapidly and report higher interest income, but the apparent growth may eventually destroy value if borrowers cannot repay. A digital product may attract customers but fail to generate enough transactions to recover the cost of the technology.
Growth can therefore strengthen the income statement in the short term while introducing risks that appear only later.
The CFO’s responsibility is to evaluate both sides of the decision. That means testing the assumptions behind expected revenue, calculating the full cost of implementation and asking how the investment performs under less favourable conditions.
A sustainable business should be able to explain not only how much it has grown but also how that growth was financed, the risks it introduced and whether it improved long-term returns.
This is the difference between the quantity and quality of growth.
Mr Sarpong urged CFOs to move beyond explaining past financial performance and use data to influence future decisions.
“The numbers tell us what happened. Leadership must determine why it happened, what it means for the future and what we should do next,” he said.
Financial reporting is backward-looking by design. It records revenue already earned, costs already incurred and risks that may already have materialised.
Strategic finance must add a forward-looking dimension.
The CFO should help management understand what current performance reveals about future cash flow, customer behaviour, cost pressures and capital needs.
This requires more than producing forecasts. Forecasts can create a false impression of certainty when they simply extend current trends into the future.
The stronger approach is to test scenarios.
What happens to profitability if borrowing costs rise? How does a project perform if expected revenue arrives one year late? Can the company continue investing if exchange-rate movements increase the cost of imported equipment?
These questions turn accounting information into decision-making intelligence.
Finance creates greater value when it helps management identify risks before they appear in the financial statements.
Mr Sarpong said an effective CEO–CFO partnership must create room for constructive disagreement.
“A good CFO should not simply confirm what the CEO wants to hear,” he said.
Finance leaders may need to question investment proposals, challenge assumptions or recommend an alternative strategic direction. Such interventions should be grounded in evidence, mutual respect and a shared commitment to the organisation.
This is one of the most important governance dimensions of the CEO–CFO relationship.
A chief executive normally carries the strongest organisational authority and may be the principal advocate for a major transaction or expansion strategy. Other executives can consequently feel pressure to support the proposal.
The CFO must retain enough professional independence to test whether management’s enthusiasm is supported by realistic financial assumptions.
That challenge must not become obstruction. A CFO who rejects every proposal in the name of caution can prevent a company from investing and adapting.
The partnership works when the CEO accepts disciplined challenge and the CFO understands commercial opportunity.
Constructive tension can improve decisions by forcing both leaders to explain their assumptions, consider alternatives and agree on measurable conditions for success.
The absence of disagreement is not always evidence of alignment. It may indicate that important risks are not being discussed.
Mr Sarpong also highlighted the tension between immediate financial performance and the investments required to build future value.
Technology, people, systems, controls and institutional capabilities may not produce their full financial benefits in the same reporting period in which the costs are incurred.
A company focused excessively on quarterly profit may therefore underinvest in the foundations of future competitiveness.
The opposite danger also exists. Management can describe almost any expenditure as a strategic investment, even when the business case is weak and expected returns cannot be measured.
“Vision without financial discipline can destroy value. But financial discipline without strategic ambition can constrain growth,” Mr Sarpong said.
That formulation captures the central challenge of corporate leadership.
Vision determines where a company wants to compete. Financial discipline determines what it can afford, how risk will be controlled and whether the investment creates value.
Neither capability is sufficient on its own.
A business led only by ambition may expand beyond its financial capacity. A business governed only by cost control may protect current profits while losing relevance.
The CEO and CFO must jointly determine which short-term costs are necessary to secure long-term resilience—and which are simply poor investments presented as strategy.
Artificial intelligence, automation, advanced analytics and real-time data are expanding the CFO’s ability to influence business decisions.
Automation can reduce the time spent reconciling accounts and preparing routine reports. Advanced analytics can identify emerging cost pressures, model customer behaviour and improve cash-flow forecasting.
AI may allow finance teams to detect anomalies, test investment assumptions and generate scenarios more quickly.
These capabilities could shift the finance function from explaining what happened to anticipating what is likely to happen.
Mr Sarpong nevertheless cautioned that technology alone would not create sustainable value.
Organisations must determine how new tools improve decisions and produce measurable outcomes.
A company can purchase sophisticated software without improving forecasting. It can create dashboards that present more information without helping managers understand what action to take.
The strategic value of technology depends on the quality of the data, the controls around its use and the willingness of leaders to change their decisions when the evidence demands it.
CFOs will also need to manage the new risks created by technology, including cybersecurity, data privacy, model errors and dependence on external service providers.
Their role will expand beyond funding digital projects to assessing whether those projects are secure, governable and commercially justified.
The stronger CEO–CFO partnership advocated by UBA Ghana is ultimately about how organisations make decisions.
The CEO contributes vision, commercial ambition and enterprise leadership. The CFO contributes financial insight, disciplined challenge and clarity about risk and return.
But the boundary between the two positions is narrowing. The CEO must understand the financial consequences of strategy, while the CFO must understand the business sufficiently to help design it.
“When these capabilities are aligned, the organisation gains something much more powerful: clear vision, sound decisions, disciplined execution and sustainable value,” Mr Sarpong said.
The message is relevant beyond large banks and listed companies.
Growing Ghanaian businesses frequently reach a stage at which entrepreneurial judgement alone is no longer sufficient. Expansion brings more customers, employees, technology and financing obligations.
At that point, the quality of financial leadership can determine whether growth strengthens the institution or overwhelms it.
The CFO should not be invited merely to calculate the cost of a strategy that has already been approved. Finance must participate when the strategy is being developed, test whether its assumptions are credible and define how success will be measured.
The CEO, in turn, must create an environment in which the CFO can challenge proposals without being treated as disloyal or unambitious.
That is the deeper meaning of alignment.
It does not require both executives to agree immediately on every issue. It requires them to work from the same objective: building an organisation capable of creating value beyond the next reporting period.
For companies confronting tighter capital, technological disruption and greater uncertainty, the CEO–CFO relationship is no longer a back-office matter.
It has become one of the central determinants of whether strategy survives contact with financial reality.
