Finance teams face increasing pressure to deliver faster, more accurate insights. Finance isn’t alone, either. Chief information officers (CIOs) are also under the microscope, tasked with building agile platforms that balance governance and innovation.

According to OneStream’s Finance 2035 research, investors reward organizations where the chief financial officer (CFO) acts as a strategic growth driver. Unified data and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision-making are essential to that role. In other words, CIOs must put themselves at the heart of finance transformation.

But when it comes to such a transformation, how are CIOs approaching it? What do they care about? And how can OneStream help enable them?

Let’s break down the actionable priorities and solutions.

CIO Priorities: What Matters Most

Based on our own findings and industry research, CIOs evaluating finance transformation platforms consistently focus on these core priorities:

Solution consolidation
Data governance and accuracy
Enterprise integration
Scalability and cloud flexibility
Security and compliance
Support for innovation, particularly with AI and machine learning (ML)

Let’s explore each priority, including the risks of neglecting the priorities and how OneStream delivers.

1. Solution Consolidation: Reducing Complexity

The Challenge:

Legacy finance architectures are often a patchwork of point solutions, each with its own data model, integration layer, and support requirements. This fragmentation drives up costs, complicates governance, and slows innovation.

Why It Matters:

Vendor sprawl and tool fragmentation are top barriers to digital transformation, leading to higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and increased risk of integration failures.

How OneStream Helps:

OneStream unifies close, consolidation, planning, reporting, reconciliations, and financial and operational data analysis on a single extensible platform. With the all-in-one platform, finance can reduce moving parts, simplify procurement, and ensure consistent governance as needs evolve. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on OneStream found that organizations retiring five legacy tools achieved a 90% reduction in run costs by year 3.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should map their current finance tool landscape and quantify the cost, risk, and support burden of each. This baseline will build a business case for tool consolidation.

2. Data Governance & Accuracy: Building Trust

The Challenge:

Finance teams need a single source of truth with clear data lineage, auditability, and policy controls. Otherwise, fragmented systems create conflicting definitions and reconciliation headaches.

Actionable Tip:

Poor data governance leads to compliance failures and financial misstatements and must therefore be a priority for IT.

How OneStream Helps:

OneStream provides a staged data pipeline with validations, mapping visibility, drill-down/back to source, audit reports, and workflow-based certification. Since every number is traceable to its origin, governance and auditability are robustly supported.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should require vendors to demonstrate live drill-back from reported figures to originating journals, showing who changed what, when, and why. Through such requirements, maturity in governance quickly surfaces.

3. Enterprise Integration: Connecting the Dots

The Challenge:

Finance platforms must integrate seamlessly with ERP, HCM, CRM, BI, and operational systems. Otherwise, poor integration leads to shadow IT, data silos, and manual workarounds.

Why It Matters:

Many digital transformation failures stem from integration challenges.

How OneStream Helps:

OneStream not only offers direct connectors and APIs, but also enables drill-back to journal/transaction. In addition, Power BI integration patterns ensure analytics are unified across the enterprise.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should verify both initial and perpetual integration. To verify, CIOs can ask for references and case studies demonstrating successful integration with your core systems.

4. Scalability & Cloud Flexibility: Future-Proofing Finance

The Challenge:

Finance transformation must support global performance, elastic capacity, and a clear modernization path. Comparatively, legacy systems often struggle to scale or adapt to new business models.

Why It Matters:

Cloud-native architectures are essential for agility and resilience in volatile markets.

How OneStream Helps:

Built on Microsoft Azure, OneStream offers elastic scalability, global availability, and a modernization path aligned with enterprise cloud strategies. OneStream is available on Azure Marketplace, simplifying procurement and enabling organizations to leverage Azure Consumption Credits.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should align finance transformation with broader cloud migration strategies, ensuring platforms can scale as business needs evolve.

5. Security & Compliance: Protecting the Enterprise

The Challenge:

Due to being highly sensitive, finance data is subject to strict regulatory requirements (GDPR, SOX, NIS2, FedRAMP). Security breaches or compliance failures can be catastrophic.

Why It Matters:

IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report finds that the average cost of a data breach in finance is $6.08 million.

How OneStream Helps:

OneStream delivers enterprise-grade security with encryption, single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control (RBAC), and compliance audits (SOC 1/2, ISO 27001). In addition, the platform meets GDPR, NIS2, and FedRAMP requirements.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should request current SOC/ISO reports and verify encryption standards in transit and at rest. By doing so, CIOs can ensure the platform supports policy automation and audit trails.

6. Support for Innovation (AI/ML): Enabling Smarter Finance

The Challenge:

AI and ML are reshaping finance, but shadow AI and unmanaged models create risk. Thus, CIOs need governed, explainable AI with finance-grade data.

Why It Matters:

Explainability and governance are critical for AI adoption in finance.

How OneStream Helps:

In OneStream, SensibleAI™ solutions embedded within workflows and models enable governed, explainable AI without custom code or external ML stacks. Real-world case studies (e.g., Endeavour Energy) show how AI-driven forecasting improved accuracy by 4% and reduced cycle times by 99.7% — all while maintaining IT governance.

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should pilot AI-enabled forecasting or scenario modeling in a controlled environment, ensuring IT retains governance while finance owns the workflow.

The Risk of “Status Quo” Finance Architecture

Fragmented tools drive data duplication, conflicting definitions, and reconciliation effort, creating integration risk and technical debt. Reinforced by analyst perspectives, finance teams still often struggle to shorten the close and scale AI effectively, which keeps finance reactive instead of strategic. A brittle ecosystem is expensive to operate, hard to secure, and slow to change — precisely what businesses can’t afford.

OneStream Architecture: An IT View

OneStream ingests data from ERP/HCM/CRM and operational systems via direct connections and APIs. Thus, data lands in a Stage layer for mapping, validations, and transformation with full visibility. A unified financial model also powers close, consolidation, planning, reporting, reconciliations, and dashboards, all governed by a single workflow and security model. Plus, drill-down and drill-back let users trace values to the originating source.

Why It Matters:

Lineage & auditability for every number
Single integration fabric to maintain
Policy-driven controls baked into processes
AI embedded in the same governed model

CIO Decision Toolkit: Evaluating Platforms

Before committing to any finance platform, CIOs need a structured way to separate marketing claims from measurable capabilities. The stakes are high — the wrong choice can lock in technical debt, increase integration risk, and slow down transformation.

Toolkit Criteria:

Governance and controls (SSO/MFA, RBAC, audit trails, lineage, policy automation, encryption)
Data integration and lineage (direct connectors/APIs, drill-back, stage-mapping, Power BI patterns)
Security and compliance (SOC 1/2, ISO 27001, GDPR/NIS2 posture)
Scalability and cloud fit (Azure architecture, elasticity, performance, ops tooling)
Functional unification (close, consolidation, planning, reporting, reconciliations)
AI readiness and explainability (embedded, governed AI, transparency, controls)
TCO and technical debt (vendor/integration consolidation, admin model, upgrade path)
Change and adoption (end-user workflows, Excel/Office blend, training & support)

Actionable Tip:

CIOs should ask vendors to demonstrate drill-back from a profit and loss (P&L) figure to the underlying journal in ERP, showing who changed what, when, and why.

Implementation Path: From First Win to Enterprise Scale

Every organization’s journey is unique. CIOs should thus do the following:

Start where pain is highest (e.g., consolidation and close or planning/forecasting), and integrate source systems once.
Harden governance (SSO, RBAC, audit reports, workflow certification), and codify data definitions early.
Layer in AI for forecast automation and scenario analysis once the data foundation is steady.
Extend into reconciliations, narrative reporting, or operational planning without adding new silos.

Conclusion

Today, CIOs are now co-architects of enterprise transformation. And the requirements are clear: enable finance to move faster, govern better, and innovate with confidence — all while reducing complexity and risk. With OneStream’s unified platform, all that (and more!) is possible. Finance can consolidate fragmented tools, embed governance, and deliver AI-powered insights without adding technical debt.

Ready to see what this transformation looks like in action?

Explore how to deliver a secure, scalable, and future-ready finance platform that's built for IT and finance to win together with our free CIO guide.