Tom Hood opened the SC&H & Oracle EPM Summit on August 20, 2026 at Oracle’s Reston, VA office with a look at where finance is headed and what it means for finance teams.
92% of your company’s value doesn’t show up on your balance sheet. Finance built its work around the numbers it could measure, and now automation is taking over a lot of that work. Now, every finance team is asking what to do next.
At the SC&H & Oracle EPM Summit, Tom Hood, Managing Director at SC&H, shared five trends that guide finance leaders on where to go from here:
1. The CFO is becoming a chief value officer
Is the CFO’s job protecting value, or helping to ignite and grow it? The “chief value officer” title may never be official, but it’s where the role is headed.
Tom recently attended the Future of Finance Summit, where the CEO of UPS shared that in 1975, roughly 83% of an organization’s value was measured on the balance sheet. Today, with that no longer being the case, most of a company’s value is now in the intangibles including:
- Culture
- Human capital
- Brand value
- Customer retention
This shift has a practical consequence for anyone running an EPM platform. Most of what finance measures today is financial or adjacent to financial. Moving up the value chain means determining how intangibles can be brought into the planning and decision-making process going forward.
2. The narrative matters as much as the numbers
Talking about the numbers is one thing, but constructing the story around them is arguably more important now.
As data and processes get streamlined by EPM solutions, what matters more is being able to explain what they mean for the organization.
That’s especially true for the intangibles. They don’t show up as a line on a balance sheet and are hard to put a dollar figure on, so the numbers alone can’t tell the story. The narrative has to.
3. Governance is critical and hard to justify
Scaling AI takes continuous controls and a human in the loop. Everyone in a room full of EPM practitioners agrees governance is necessary. However, it can be hard to justify the ROI on it. So, again, linking the intangibles and narrative here is crucial.
If you can’t articulate a dollar amount on governance, what you can do is build the narrative around why it matters to you and your team. That’s often what drives some of these solutions forward internally.
4. The bottleneck is behavior
AI transformation is a human behavior problem, not a tech problem. The technology is here, but the hard part is getting people moving in the same direction and bought into why.
It sounds simple, but that’s exactly why it gets overlooked. Once a large transformation is underway and you have all the tools in place, it’s easy to lose sight of whether your team understands why the change is happening and where it leaves them.
5. From CF“NO” to CF“KNOW”
Finance and accounting professionals are fiscally responsible by nature. Questioning numbers and pushing back is our instinct. The shift is toward being a co-pilot, not a budget police, and a problem solver, not a problem identifier.
This is where everything comes together. Redirecting that instinct toward understanding the narrative, the intangibles, and how the pieces fit, then moving into a more consultative role.
Many finance leaders are already there. The work now is bringing that mindset down through the team and the rest of the organization.
Why transformations stall
So, why do people resist? Often, it comes down to what they know about their own work.
AICPA’s Reimagining Finance’s white paper breaks finance into four components that stay the same no matter what happens to the technology. It starts with hindsight, curating information and then turning it into insight about what already happened. From there, it influences decisions and impacts where the organization goes, like where to deploy capital or how to optimize operations, tariffs, and shipping.
Finance spends about 80% of its time looking backward, gathering information and explaining what already happened. The other 20% goes to influencing decisions and shaping where the company heads.
But automation now targets that 80%, and that’s where a lot of the resistance comes from. People can see what they’re giving up, and nobody has told them what fills the gap.
Giving people a reimagined version of their own role is what will create successful transformations and help build buy-in.
From tech stack to value stack
Everyone’s running a different combination of ERP, data solutions, and EPM. Tom says that the tech stack is turning into the value stack, the core engine driving value through the organization.
Where do we go from here
His closing challenge works for any finance team. Look at your own environment:
- Where does your data live?
- Where do your EPM solutions sit, and what are they solving?
- Where else could you take them, and what would you be doing next?
Rethinking what your EPM environment could be doing? Talk to our team about where you stand.
Speakers
Tom Hood, Managing Director, Advisory & Transformation, SC&H
