Crist|Kolder’s 18.3% CFO Turnover Is a Succession Failure
Crist|Kolder’s projected 18.3% CFO turnover is not a talent-market story. If your CFO quits and the business wobbles, you built a one-person finance function.
If your CFO quits tomorrow and the business wobbles, don’t blame them. You built a company with only one adult who understands the money.
That is not a finance problem. It is a leadership failure with a spreadsheet taped to it.
Crist|Kolder Associates projects CFO turnover at America’s biggest public companies will hit 18.3% in 2026—above the 10-year average of 16%, and the highest level since 2019. Its mid-year analysis covers 665 companies across the Fortune 500 and S&P 500. ([fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/cfo-turnover-americas-largest-companies-on-pace-hit-18-3-percent-highest-since-pandemic/))
People will call this a talent-market trend, an AI story, a retirement wave, or just the normal churn of corporate life. Bits of that are true. But the useful lesson for founders, operators and boards is more uncomfortable: plenty of businesses have treated the CFO job as bookkeeping plus investor relations, then discovered it is actually the control tower for capital allocation, operating discipline, risk, systems and succession.
The CFO seat has become a pressure cooker
The modern CFO is expected to do the old job—close the books, protect cash, keep lenders and auditors happy—while also helping decide where AI money goes, whether acquisitions make sense, which products deserve more capital, where margins are leaking and how the company explains itself to markets. That is a hell of a lot more than counting beans.
Scott Simmons, co-managing partner at Crist|Kolder, put it simply: the demands of the job keep expanding. Fortune’s reporting points to retirements, turnarounds and AI initiatives as contributors to the churn. ([fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/cfo-turnover-americas-largest-companies-on-pace-hit-18-3-percent-highest-since-pandemic/))
Have a look at the moves. AT&T’s Pascal Desroches, CFO since 2021, plans to retire on December 31, 2026. Jennifer Biry, a 20-year AT&T finance veteran who most recently served as McAfee’s CFO and COO, became deputy CFO on July 6 and is set to take the top finance job on January 1, 2027. ([fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/cfo-turnover-americas-largest-companies-on-pace-hit-18-3-percent-highest-since-pandemic/))
That is how a grown-up transition looks: a named successor, runway before handover, institutional knowledge, and a CEO publicly signalling that the new person understands both the team and the operating model. AT&T chairman and CEO John Stankey said the company was executing a deliberate transition and expected continuity, not a drama-filled scramble. ([investors.att.com](https://investors.att.com/2Q26-earnings-prepared-remarks.aspx?utm_source=openai))
Compare that with the usual smaller-company playbook. CFO resigns. The CEO says they are “grateful for their contribution.” The controller gets an interim title. Everyone assures staff it is business as usual. Then, three months later, the company realises no one knows which customer contracts are dodgy, which projects were funded by optimism rather than cash, or why the forecast was always mysteriously rosy.
I have seen versions of this. Founders love revenue because revenue feels like winning. They tolerate a finance function that tells them the numbers eventually. Then the market tightens, a key person leaves, or a big bet needs funding, and suddenly “eventually” is not good enough.
The number that should worry boards: 4.5 years
The projected 18.3% turnover rate is the headline. The more interesting number is 4.5 years: that is the average tenure for a sitting CFO in the 2026 data. Newly appointed CFOs are also getting younger, with an average age projected at 48 versus 52 in 2025. Only about 25% of newly appointed CFOs came directly from another sitting CFO role. ([fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/cfo-turnover-americas-largest-companies-on-pace-hit-18-3-percent-highest-since-pandemic/))
Translation: companies are increasingly filling one of their most consequential jobs with people who may have less prior time in the exact chair.
That is not automatically bad. In fact, I’d rather back a sharp internal finance leader who knows the customer, product, economics and cultural landmines than parachute in a polished external CFO who spends six months learning where the toilets are.
But it does mean the old boardroom fantasy—wait until the incumbent gives notice, then hire a battle-hardened veteran to fix everything—has become even more expensive and less realistic.
The better approach is to build a bench before you need it. Not a succession slide shown once a year to the board, either. A real bench. Someone who can run cash forecasting. Someone who can explain margin movement without a 45-page deck. Someone who has sat in on lender conversations. Someone who can tell the CEO “no” without needing three weeks to build courage.
That person may not be your next CFO. But if you do not have at least one person who could credibly cover 70% of the role for 90 days, you have a key-person risk pretending to be an org chart.
This is not just a CFO problem
The overlooked angle is that finance churn exposes every fuzzy decision the CEO has been allowed to avoid.
A mediocre CEO can hide behind a brilliant CFO for years. The CFO quietly cleans up pricing, catches silly hires, blocks vanity acquisitions, nags people to collect receivables and keeps the bank comfortable. They become the company’s unofficial adult supervision.
Then they leave. And the business does not merely lose a finance executive; it loses the operating system that made the founder’s instincts look more disciplined than they were.
That is why the strongest CFOs are often irritating. They ask whether the customer will really pay. They ask who owns the metric. They ask what happens if growth comes in 20% below plan. They ask whether “strategic” is just code for “we want it but cannot make the spreadsheet work.”
Good. You should want that.
If your leadership team sees finance as the department that slows everyone down, you have probably trained the business to confuse speed with progress. There is nothing fast about charging into a bad decision, then spending 18 months fixing it.
The contrarian view: don’t hire a CFO to make you look serious
A lot of founders hire their first serious CFO too late. Just as many hire one for the wrong reason.
They want a famous name before a fundraise. They want someone who can charm public-market investors even though the business has not earned the right to go public. They want the LinkedIn announcement: “We are thrilled to welcome…” You know the one.
That is decorative leadership. It is expensive and usually obvious.
Hire the CFO your next stage requires, not the one that flatters your ego. If you are a $10 million business with cash conversion problems, you may need a brutal operator who can install weekly cash discipline more than you need a former mega-cap finance executive. If you are buying competitors, you need someone who can model integration risk and hold deal teams accountable after the champagne is gone. If you are spending heavily on AI, you need someone who can separate useful automation from shiny-object capex.
And boards: stop treating the CFO succession discussion as a compliance ritual. Ask one direct question: If this person vanished for six months, what would break first?
The answer tells you whether the risk is financial reporting, capital access, forecasting, customer contracts, pricing, tax, M&A or basic management information. Then fix that specific weakness—not the generic one.
What this means for you
You do not need a Fortune 500 finance department to act like an adult about succession. You need a few habits, starting this week.
1. Make the numbers portable. Every key forecast, covenant, cash plan, pricing model and board metric should have an owner and a documented process. If it only lives in one executive’s head—or one very clever Excel file—you do not own it.
2. Give one finance lieutenant real exposure. Let them present a section at the board meeting. Put them in the bank call. Make them defend a forecast to the CEO. You are not developing confidence through courses; you are developing judgement through reps.
3. Run a 90-day absence test. Write down what fails if your CFO is unavailable tomorrow. Be precise. “Finance gets messy” is useless. “We cannot validate inventory margin by channel” is something you can repair.
4. Stop rewarding optimism without accuracy. Track forecast accuracy by leader. Misses happen. Repeated unexplained misses are not bad luck; they are either poor judgement, weak systems or a culture where telling the truth is punished.
5. Make your CFO part of growth, not the clean-up crew. Bring finance into product, pricing and hiring decisions before the cheque is written. Their job is not to kill ambition. Their job is to stop ambition becoming an expensive hobby.
The 18.3% turnover figure is not interesting because it tells us more CFOs are changing jobs. It matters because it reveals how many companies are discovering, in real time, that a finance leader is not an accessory.
Build the bench now. Make the information portable. Let finance challenge you before the market does.
That is less glamorous than announcing a superstar hire. It is also how you stay alive long enough to deserve one.