The evolution of the role of financial leaders was at the center of the panel “From Back Office to Strategic Hub: Technology Transforming the Role of the CFO,” at the 2026 edition of the Latin America Investment Conference ( LAIC ), an event promoted by UBS BB Investment Bank that brought together investors, political and business leaders in São Paulo to discuss economic trends in Latin America.
Adriana Katalan, co-CEO of ACG | PagCorp, was on stage and was able to show how the convergence between technology, data, and real-time control is profoundly changing the way companies, especially SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), manage their financial operations, bringing them closer to practices previously restricted to large corporations.
According to the executive, modern and intelligent platforms will be the norm for any finance department, regardless of company size. Intelligent platforms today are developed from three major technological pillars: cloud data, artificial intelligence, and customizable rules for financial transactions. When these pillars are integrated into a single payment and expense management platform, the finance area is freed from operational tasks and gains efficiency and intelligence to strategically contribute to business decisions.
Cloud, AI, and real-time control
The first pillar is the migration of financial data to the cloud. By centralizing receipts, invoices, transactions, expense policies, and accounting records in "cloud environments," companies began operating with structured, scalable, and integrated data. This open architecture, based on APIs, broke with the model of isolated systems and allowed the connection of finance to the entire so-called CFO Stack, encompassing ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning – integrated management software systems), accounting, reconciliation, and BI (Business Intelligence – company strategies and processes aimed at transforming data into usable insights).
The second is the possibility of practically applying artificial intelligence to large volumes of data, organized, categorized, and transformed into reports by AI tools . With all financial information gathered in a single environment, artificial intelligence has ceased to be conceptual and has begun to generate real value: automatic reading of receipts via OCR (Optical Character Recognition), intelligent expense classification, identification of behavioral patterns, detection of inconsistencies, and generation of actionable insights are real and current examples of what modern platforms can deliver. “The platform ceases to be just a means of payment or an alternative to traditional banking and becomes an intelligence system for corporate spending,” Adriana highlighted.
The third pillar represented a true turning point: controlling transactions before they occur, at the moment of authorization. The old "spend now and check later" model gave way to control at the source, with configurable expense rules and policies that act before the transaction is completed. Limit management is now done in real time, in an integrated and intelligent way, allowing restrictions to be defined by type of expense, establishment category, time, location, employee profile, or budget. If the rule is not met, the transaction is simply not authorized.
In this context, the expense policy ceases to be a static document, dependent on subsequent validations, and begins to operate as pre-configured code, automatically applied by the system. All this in a no-code model, which eliminates technical complexity and does not require heavy implementation investments.
Democratizing evolution
For Adriana, one of the biggest impacts of this evolution is the democratization of financial practices, previously exclusive to large companies. Cash discipline, governance, and data-driven management have always existed in large organizations, but they depended on complex structures, robust teams, and cumbersome processes. “Today, SMEs don't need to copy the large company's process. They can use technology that already has this logic embedded,” the executive explained.
Cash management, for example, no longer depends on spreadsheets and manual controls and becomes structured within the system itself, with hierarchically organized accounts, budgets by area or project, and multiple cards linked to these structures. Governance, in turn, moves beyond post-transaction verification and begins to operate in two phases: first, at the time of the transaction, preventing certain operations from occurring outside of company policy, and second, after the transaction, using AI to ensure compliance with the company's spending policy, validating that it was properly classified and verified.
Finally, the intensive use of data eliminates the need for dedicated BI teams, as reports, dashboards, and insights are now integrated into the platform, customizable, and generated natively.
This change allows small businesses to operate with the same level of technological sophistication as large organizations, without increasing the complexity of their day-to-day operations. "The difference isn't in the technology, but in the level of use," Adriana summarized.
Another central point of the panel was the impact of technology on the CFO's routine and the role of SME leaders. According to Adriana, the biggest bottleneck is not a lack of strategic vision, but a lack of time. Without adequate tools, finance professionals are stuck with operational tasks such as expense verification, collecting receipts, and correcting errors.
By automating these steps and incorporating intelligence into the transaction itself, technology eliminates rework and frees up the finance team for strategic activities. Cards already linked to cost centers, rules defined before spending, and receipts that automatically enter the structured workflow drastically reduce manual effort. With real-time data, the CFO stops reacting to the past and starts anticipating scenarios, analyzing trends, and planning cash flow with greater precision.
“I like to give the example of video production companies. We work with many of them. They found in our platform a way to solve many of the payment problems they had. They now have tools to allow a very large number of payments to be made simultaneously by different people in the organization, observing strict rules and complying immediately, without reports and slips, without the need for proof through reports. Today they can create a treasury for each event, for each production, for each set. They can issue cards managing limits in real time. And everything is interconnected on the platform, with the possibility of reimbursement with invoices, reports and everything else they need,” exemplified the co-CEO of PagCorp.
Future and sustainable growth
Looking at the trends that will shape the coming years, Adriana Katalan highlighted that they all converge on the same point: a financial ecosystem based on real-time information, organized with artificial intelligence. New money tracks make transactions faster, shorten financial cycles, and expand the circulation and interoperability of data.
In this scenario, a less visible but highly transformative layer gains relevance: processing with programmable authorization. Sophisticated rules at the transaction level create a richer and more contextualized database, which enhances the use of AI to identify deviations, anticipate cash flow pressures, and optimize costs. “Without AI, real-time data becomes noise. With AI, it becomes decision-making capability,” stated the co-CEO of ACG | PagCorp.
According to Adriana, the challenge lies in balancing autonomy and control. “Sustainable growth in this new ecosystem doesn't just come from new forms of payment or more data. It comes from the combination of three factors: real-time information, intelligence to interpret that information, and business rules embedded in the processing infrastructure itself. The competitive advantage then becomes the company's ability to transform that speed into control and decision-making,” the executive concluded.
