What kept CFOs up at night in 2025

When you look back at 2025, you probably picture a placid lake with some soothing orchestral music playing in the background, right? Riiight?

Here’s the thing: We like to joke around.

Dumpster fires, chickens with their heads cut off, crying babies. Those kinds of images were more the mood of 2025 for many. And yet, the view from the top finance seat might’ve just looked like more of the same. After all, the phrase “a new normal” exists for a reason.

“The headwinds and tailwinds, to a great extent, are kind of the same every single year,” Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi, a cloud storage company, told CFO Brew, reflecting on challenges facing CFOs in the post-pandemic years. “There are different buckets; there are different magnitudes. But the buckets are always the same thing. It’s [the] macro environment, it’s technology, it’s people, and it’s risk.”

2025, for all its weirdness, was really no different, in Bayer’s mind. Steve Gallucci, US and global CFO program leader at Deloitte, sees things similarly, citing economic uncertainty, cyber and tech risk, and talent management as the biggest external concerns on CFOs’ minds this year. Same old, in a sense, but as the year winds down, it’s helpful to take a closer look at where some of those challenges might go from here.

Background noise. You’d be hard pressed to find a year CFOs weren’t talking about the macro environment and external economic challenges. That’s kind of, like, what they do.

In 2025, economic uncertainty dominated the narrative: We even wrote a whole series about it. But uncertainty wasn’t the only macro trend on CFOs’ lips. Within the bucket of “broader economic uncertainty,” Gallucci noted that CFOs consistently brought up related concerns, like inflation.

Take the latest from soup and snack maker Campbell’s. “[We saw] incredible inflation, both from just normal inflationary input costs, labor costs, plus a very large impact from tariffs in the quarter and throughout the majority of the year,” Todd Cunfer, the company’s CFO, said on the company’s December 9 earnings call. “Inflation, throughout the entire cost system, also was a similar amount to the tariffs for the quarter,” he added, noting “this inflation will remain for the vast majority of the year.”

Or look at comments from Ronald Sargent, interim CEO at Kroger, in the company’s December 4 earnings call, in which Sargent talked about macro uncertainty, the K-shaped economy, and inflation all in one breath.

“Macroeconomic uncertainty continues to influence customer behavior, and we’re seeing a split across income groups,” Sargent said. “Spending from higher-income households continue[s] strong, while middle-income customers are feeling increased pressure, similar to what we’ve seen from lower-income households over the past several quarters.”

“Inflation and uncertainty around government funding, combined with the pause in SNAP benefits during the final weeks of the quarter, added incremental pressure to our third quarter identical sales without fuel,” he continued.

Looking ahead to 2026, inflation chatter is unlikely to change much, Gallucci noted. “Companies [will] continue to deal with inflation. It seems to be persistent. It’s tied to capital market policy. It’s tied to a number of other things, trade policy,” he said. “I think we are going to continue into a period of uncertainty as it relates to that.”

Then there’s the pricing. 86% of CFOs polled for Deloitte’s September CFO Signals survey, which spans 200 North American CFOs of companies with at least $1 billion in revenue, said pricing “will become much more important or somewhat more important to their organization’s financial performance” in the next year. “I think that certainly ties back to…some of the pivots around trade policy and the downstream effects of that,” Gallucci said.

Back in September, we wrote about the funny wordplay at work whenever companies mentioned “targeted pricing actions,” which sure seemed like a code word for “we’re raising prices because of tariffs.” Expect more of that in 2026.

For starters, some of the same companies that mentioned “targeted pricing actions” in September are still at it.

“We have taken, as we’ve talked about, multiple waves of pricing action,” John Ghingo, president and director of Hormel Foods—which makes Spam and Planters nuts—said during the company’s December 4 earnings call.

But you don’t need to listen to earnings calls to realize CFOs have been stressed about pricing recently: 95% of CFOs Deloitte polled said “their pricing strategies have changed entirely, significantly, or somewhat over the past six months—a time frame that roughly dates to when the reciprocal tariffs were first announced.” For all we know, pricing could be the word of the year next year.

For all the headaches of 2025, there’s a perk to the whole “new normal” situation, Gallucci stressed. “As a result of having to manage through a whole slew of different challenges on many fronts, CFOs and leaders have become more resilient [and] expect the unexpected,” he said. “And I think that’s a good thing.”