Every CFO operates two financial infrastructures.
There's the one you govern: your ERP, general ledger, financial planning and reporting systems, all properly architected, audited, and controlled. Then there's the one you depend on but can't see: the thousands of Excel models calculating reserves, processing journal entries, reconciling treasury positions, and producing management reports.
This second infrastructure moves millions of dollars daily. But it exists outside your financial controls, system architecture, and audit frameworks. And until it's brought into the transformation conversation, even the most ambitious modernization agendas will underdeliver.
That's the argument this article makes — grounded in EY's 2025 global survey of insurance CFOs and informed by what we see working with finance teams at Coherent.
EY's 2025 Global Insurance CFO Study, based on in-depth conversations with 21 CFOs across global markets, frames finance transformation around six paradoxes:
These tensions are real, and the broader EY research underscores their weight.
Nearly half (47%) of CFOs cited increasing competition as the top disruptive force ahead. Three-quarters said macroeconomic uncertainty had reduced their confidence about the future. But it's the third paradox — upgrade and sustain — that gets closest to the structural problem most finance transformation programs miss.
As one CFO in the study put it: of all the functions in an organization, transforming finance is probably the least understood. That's not just a leadership challenge. It's a visibility problem. The actual mechanics of finance operations — the formulas, manual handoffs, and embedded logic that hundreds of people touch every month — are often invisible to the people trying to change them.
The scale of this hidden layer is hard to appreciate until you look. It's not uncommon for hundreds of spreadsheets to feed a single monthly close process, each with its own formulas, assumptions, and manual handoffs. Daily liquidity reporting might depend on dozens of interconnected Excel models spread across multiple teams, with embedded VBA that only a handful of people understand. Management reporting packages often source data from models that haven't been reviewed in over a year.
These spreadsheets exist because they work. They're flexible, fast to build, and they reflect years of accumulated domain expertise from actuaries, analysts, and finance professionals who understand the business deeply. The problem isn't the tool.
It's the lack of visibility into the full picture:
This is the gap that sits beneath every paradox EY identified.
You can commit to doing more for less, upgrading your toolset, and upskilling your teams. But if the foundational layer of your finance operations remains unmapped and ungoverned, you're building on ground you can't verify.
There's a dimension EY's study touches on but doesn't fully develop: regulatory pressure around off-system data is accelerating faster than most transformation timelines can match.
SOX and IFRS 17 both place strict requirements on data integrity, model governance, and the auditability of financial calculations. Those requirements don't distinguish between logic that lives in your enterprise systems and logic that lives in an uncontrolled spreadsheet on someone's desktop. The standard is the same. The gap in controls is not. And frameworks like DORA in Europe and CPS 230 in Australia are extending similar expectations to operational resilience, making this a global trend rather than a jurisdictional exception.
For insurance CFOs, this creates a bind. The accounting standards demand rigorous traceability. But many of the calculations they govern are running in spreadsheets with no version control, no approval workflows, and no audit trail beyond whatever the last person remembered to document. That's not a future risk — it's a current exposure.
EY's own recommendation for navigating the upgrade-and-sustain paradox points in a specific direction: new tools should add capabilities to existing systems via interfaces users are familiar with, and legacy technology can be "wrappered" with new features where full replacement is unrealistic. That's the design principle behind the Coherent platform.
Coherent is built around a specific sequence for addressing this infrastructure gap: see it, govern it, deploy it. Each step builds on the one before, and none of them require finance teams to abandon the tools or expertise they already trust.
Start by seeing what you have. Coherent Insights scans Excel files across teams and systems to map the full estate — surfacing dependencies, complexity, ownership patterns, VBA risks, and sensitive data exposure. The output answers questions CFOs can rarely answer today: how many spreadsheets touch my financial close? Which models would cause a restatement if they failed? Where are the single-person dependencies that create fragility at the worst possible time? With that picture, transformation planning shifts from guesswork to evidence-based prioritization — and CFOs can direct investment where it will actually reduce risk and accelerate the close.
Then govern it without forcing a platform change. Coherent Control applies version control, maker-checker workflows, audit trails, and change tracking directly on top of existing Excel-based processes. Teams keep working where their expertise lives, but every change is logged, every approval is enforced, and every formula modification is traceable. The business impact is direct: fewer audit findings, faster regulatory response, and a control framework that covers the off-system processes where journal entries, treasury reconciliations, and regulatory reports are actually assembled. For CFOs who've spent cycles explaining spreadsheet-related control gaps to auditors, this closes that conversation.
Then make governed logic deployable. Coherent Spark converts Excel models into production-ready APIs that integrate with downstream systems across the insurance technology stack. The result is a shorter close cycle, fewer reconciliation errors, and models that can be reused across business lines instead of rebuilt from scratch. Finance professionals who were spending their time maintaining manual processes can shift toward variance analysis, scenario modeling, and strategic business partnering. That's the shift from cost center to value creator that most transformation programs promise but struggle to deliver.
The progression matters because it respects how finance actually works. Excel is where domain expertise lives. The goal isn't to replace it — it's to make that expertise visible, governed, and scalable across the enterprise.
EY's study concludes with a call for a multi-dimensional operating model that addresses service delivery, people, process, technology, data, and governance as an integrated system. That's the right destination. The six paradoxes they name are real, and resolving them requires more than incremental improvements to any one dimension.
Where you start determines how quickly you get there.
CFOs who begin by understanding their actual financial infrastructure — not just the systems on the architecture diagrams, but the spreadsheet layer where the real work happens — will make better decisions about what to automate, what to govern, and where to invest. They'll move faster, with less risk and fewer false starts.
The opportunity isn't just to manage the spreadsheet estate. It's to turn it into a governed, connected part of your financial architecture — one that shortens your close, strengthens your controls, frees your best people for higher-value work, and gives the board the confidence in the numbers that every CFO is ultimately accountable for.