Gone are the days of a backwards-looking CFO tasked with capturing past performance. Today’s CFOs are being called on to be future-focused strategic leaders who have a lot more responsibility—and expectations—than just crunching the numbers.

“The CFO of 20 years ago—or 15 years ago—was helping you look out the rearview mirror of your car,” said Ben Kessler, CFO and COO of 66Degrees, a Google Cloud computing advisory company headquartered in Chicago. “Now, it’s more about scaling and growing a business than it is just doing accounting activities.”

Changes and disruptions have rocked the business world at a dizzying pace over the last 10 years. Accelerating technological advances, worsening climate change, widening global inequality—not to mention a global pandemic, a ground war in Ukraine, and a looming recession—have made the world a lot more unstable.

And all this uncertainty and upheaval has helped to radically change the role of the CFO.

“The CFO is going to handle more business-oriented duties…than we’ve ever seen before,” Josh Crist, co-managing partner at Crist Kolder Associates, a boutique search firm that focuses on CFO and direct-report placement, told CFO Brew. The firm publishes an annual report on executive turnover in Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies. “We are essentially bringing on a CFO that doesn’t have the deep technical knowledge that you saw CFOs have 10–15 years ago.”

Instead, companies are hiring versatile CFOs with a deep understanding of, and broad experience with, multiple parts of a business—not just finance, according to a recent Deloitte CFO Insights report.

An April survey by McKinsey found that not only is the CFO’s role expanding, but they’re taking on responsibilities once considered part of the purview of a company’s CEO or COO.

“The message to finance professionals is that the breadth of skills required, the knowledge base you can gain, the types of roles you should aspire to play—that canvas is broader today than it ever was,” Ankur Agrawal, McKinsey partner, wrote in the study.

So amid all the disruption, and in addition to their traditional responsibilities of tending to their company’s financial health, CFOs are also driving digital transformations and becoming the organizational shepherds of data.