The Audit Committee

While AC members expressed broad satisfaction with how they are kept informed, this does not translate into comfort with a purely periodic model of engagement. ACs are seeking more frequent and more continuous updates than many CFOs currently provide, reflecting a preference for earlier orientation rather than periodic reassurance (see figure below).

The AC expectation is also very specific: timeline and transparency go hand in hand. CFOs are expected to present facts as they are – even with incomplete information – so the AC can guide early rather than react late. Importantly, ACs described this as collaborative oversight rather than fault-finding: the objective is to surface and frame issues early, not to assign blame after the fact.

AC members seek more continuous updates than is currently delivered

Quarterly meetings alone are often not sufficient to surface emerging risks early enough. What AC members are looking for is not more reporting, but greater continuity of context: a clearer sense of what is evolving between meetings, what management is watching closely, and where assumptions may be shifting.

In practice, these touchpoints take predictable forms, including pre-AC discussions, ad hoc calls, and short check-ins when risk indicators move. Such interactions help reduce the risk of surprises by ensuring that what eventually appears in formal papers is rarely the first time the issue has been raised.

This is also where the special relationship between the CFO and AC Chair comes into play. The AC Chair is often the first recipient of the CFO’s early signal, while the full committee usually receives the more formalised view later. This helps explain why ACs may perceive interaction with the CFOs as more frequent than CFOs themselves do: AC Chairs may count these “in-between” touchpoints as oversight, while CFOs tend to count only meetings in the formal calendar with the entire AC. What looks like a perception gap is, in practice, where monitoring happens (see figure below).

Marked difference in perception of the frequency of interactions between ACs and CFOs

The ‘no surprises’ expectation is being sharpened by a scrutiny environment that ACs experience more directly than management often does. AC members report heightened scrutiny following recent corporate scandals, while many CFOs believe expectations have remained the same or even decreased, suggesting that CFOs may not be fully pricing in how much the scrutiny bar has shifted (see figure below).

This difference is less about disagreement than proximity. CFOs remain closer to the formal mechanics of reporting – calendars, templates, and compliance routines – which may feel largely unchanged. ACs, by contrast, sit closer to where scrutiny is applied: disclosure judgement, control failures, and reputational consequences. In that environment, good enough information delivered on time can still be experienced as too late if it arrives only after options have narrowed.

ACs report more scrutiny following recent scandals, but CFOs believe expectations have not increased

What makes the CFO’s conduit role non-trivial is not simply translation. Rather, it is the need to calibrate what to surface, when, with how much context, and with what emphasis across multiple stakeholders. This matters because AC members place sharply different importance on CFO communication depending on the topic (see figure below).

The implication, therefore, is not a risk of CFO underperformance, but a risk of miscalibration. The conduit role fails less because information is absent, and more because mental models are different. While, CFOs experience stakeholder communication as a manageable portfolio, ACs experience it as uneven risk terrain – where certain topics carry immediate consequences if surfaced late or framed weakly.

ACs place differing importance on CFO communication for different topics, while CFOs report manageable challenges balancing stakeholder communication across all topics

Even when timing and emphasis are well-calibrated, the conduit role can still break down if the CFO cannot remain objective – particularly when internal narratives diverge. This is one area where AC expectations are explicit: objectivity is expected even where the CFO’s perspective differs from other C-suite peers.

From the CFO’s perspective, this expectation is not necessarily perceived as prohibitively difficult (see figure below). But in practice, objectivity must be exercised without destabilising the leadership team. This is where the conduit role intersects with two relational realities: respect for the CEO, and power distance between the AC and CFO.

Ultimately, objectivity is most effective when it is paired with the right sequencing: the CFO keeps the CEO aligned, while preserving the ability to surface principled differences to the AC early enough for governance.

CFOs are expected to act objectively even if they hold different views from the rest of the C-suite – and are adept at doing so

Trust between ACs and CFOs is generally strong – and notably symmetric. Where a modest gap appears, however, is in how the quality of interactions is experienced. This distinction suggests that while the relationship has a strong trust foundation, CFOs experience the conduit role as more effortful and exposed than AC members do (see figure below).

ACs often experience trust as governance sufficiency – whether they feel equipped to challenge, decide, and sign off without surprises. CFOs experience trust through the responsibility of being the conduit: translating strategy, calibrating what to surface, preserving CEO alignment, protecting directors, and remaining accountable for what ultimately flows into the financials and disclosures. The gap is therefore not a trust deficit, but a difference in lived experience.

High quality of interactions between CFO and AC, with modest perception gap

For many ACs, assurance is moving from being outcome-focused (“Are the numbers right?”) to being mechanism-focused (“Do we understand how the numbers are produced, and where failure points could sit?”) (see figure below). Visibility, in this sense, is not a tour of systems; it is a basis for assurance. CFOs, for their part, describe the trade-offs required to provide that visibility as manageable but nonetheless real.

The message is not that visibility cannot be provided, but that it is work, and that it competes with other demands. The most effective CFOs therefore do more than report outcomes; they convert visibility into something the AC can tangibly and viscerally understand.

Alongside systems visibility, ACs also look to whistleblowing and independent reporting channels as critical early-signal mechanisms. Here, their role is not only as a sentinel that receives escalation, but as a sleuth that tests credibility and pursues substance when the signal is weak, ambiguous, or uncomfortable.

AC members place extremely high importance on visibility into finance systems and processes

Assurance and visibility only work if the audience can interpret what they are seeing. AC members express strong confidence in the CFO’s industry knowledge, while CFOs are less uniformly confident in their AC’s industry understanding. The message is not that ACs are 'weak', but that CFOs often feel they must carry an additional translation burden when the committee’s domain fluency varies (see figure below).

In such a setting, ‘visibility’ can still be misunderstood: the CFO may provide transparency, and still need to invest time explaining why a risk is material, how an exposure behaves, and what good looks like in that sector.

This burden may also extend below the CFO. Where finance teams lack enough business context to recognise anomalies, challenge operational narratives, and link movements in the numbers back to underlying drivers, the CFO becomes the default interpreter and quality-control layer – bridging not only between management and the AC, but also between business reality and finance output within the finance function itself.

AC members express higher confidence in CFO industry knowledge than CFOs do in AC industry knowledge

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are not new headlines, but they are still an emerging assurance area. For ACs, maturity in this area remains developing: ACs are not starting from zero, but many are still building the confidence needed to challenge AI-related assumptions, assess control design, and ask the right questions as AI outputs begin to influence reporting, monitoring, or decision support (see figure below).

The expectation is not for CFOs to become technical experts, but to understand where these technologies are being used in finance and assurance, what risks they introduce, and what guardrails are needed to keep accountability clear. In this sense, AI adoption is a governance journey – not a technology arms race – even as ACs are increasingly scanning for the assurance uplift that AI and automation can deliver.

CFOs, for their part, often describe AI as still nascent in their organisations – something to create awareness about, control through guardrails, or sequence behind foundational systems work. The divergence is therefore less about whether AI matters, and more about how quickly it can move from awareness into practical assurance uplift.

AC members acknowledge developing maturity of understanding across all domains of AI and automation

As assurance topics become more complex, the CFO’s ability to deliver assurance increasingly depends on whether the AC is willing and able to enable, not only oversee. This includes guidance on disclosure responsibilities, access to external expertise, specialist capability, and foundational investment.

This matters because complex issues – such as cybersecurity, AI governance, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) methodologies – rarely resolve through internal discussions alone. They require external specialist support and/or structured training to keep governance defensible. From the CFO’s perspective, the gap is not only about intent, but also whether the AC will actively enable access to expertise and resources when issues move beyond the organisation’s in-house capabilities.

Perceived AC advocacy is markedly weaker on technology enhancements. Stronger systems, better integration, and automation often underpin stronger visibility, better controls, and more resilient finance operations. Yet these investments compete with other priorities, and their benefits often show up as reduced risk rather than immediate revenue. This is where AC advocacy matters: progress often depends on board-level support to unlock the budgets, specialist support, and organisational buy-in required to deliver stronger assurance (see figure below).

CFOs desire greater advocacy from the AC across all domains, especially technology enhancements

If assurance is about avoiding surprises, then bench strength must be part of assurance. CFO succession is one of the few governance risks that is entirely foreseeable, yet still not consistently owned on the AC agenda. The issue appears to be less about practical difficulty than agenda ownership: profiling key finance team members and capabilities is not hard for the CFO, but it is not always prioritised by the AC (see figure below).

The lack of prioritisation appears to be partly structural and partly relational. Succession planning typically sits with the Nominating Committee, Remuneration Committee, or equivalent, and the AC may not always feel it has explicit remit. At the same time, succession can feel personal, and some ACs are cautious about raising it directly with the CFO – especially in Southeast Asian cultures.

Even so, this should not mean that the AC has no role. The AC is often well placed to opine on finance bench strength, control leadership, and whether the CFO has the capability to sustain assurance outcomes. Where CFOs take the initiative and frame succession as governance resilience, the conversation becomes easier to surface and govern constructively.

ACs lack prioritisation and agenda ownership for succession planning

Against the backdrop of the latest geopolitical disruption, CFOs and AC members are broadly aligned on a single resilience agenda, even as they view it from different vantage points.

For AC members, assurance needs clustered around the core levers of financial resilience: liquidity headroom, working capital controls, and capex and portfolio decisions. For CFOs, priorities spanned multiple exposures moving in parallel: supply and logistics continuity, hedging and market exposure, scenario planning, and counterparty and credit risk.

This is less a divergence than a division of attention – CFOs track breadth across exposures, while ACs seek assurance on the levers that preserve headroom and decision quality – that together support a coordinated response.

CFOs surfaced multiple exposures in parallel, while AC members concentrate assurance on core financial and allocation levers underpinning resilience

Under disruption, pressure quickly concentrates into a small set of hard trade‑offs – and CFOs and AC members are largely oriented to the same objective: preserving resilience while maintaining decision quality.

For AC members, the focus is less on which lever to pull, and more on when to bring the hardest calls forward. Decision speed vs. controls, and balancing support for customers vs. receivables, stood out as primary concerns. For CFOs, the most frequently cited tensions centred around cash and resilience trade-offs: inventory buffers vs. cash conservation, resilience capex/opex vs. earnings, and supplier diversification vs. efficiency.

The takeaway is a highly constructive relationship: CFOs are managing the practical trade-offs as they crystallise, while AC members are signalling the decision points that benefit from early shared judgement – so the organisation can move quickly without losing coherence or control. The common agenda is therefore not more escalation, but earlier escalation on the few calls that are hardest to unwind.

Under disruption, pressure concentrates on a shared set of hard calls that are managed by CFOs and governed early with ACs