A CFO who spends her days asking better questions rather than saying no. A finance chief whose team can be forced to change course overnight because of a geopolitical event on the other side of the world. Those were two of the pictures on the table on 22 September, when Paperjam Club brought four CFOs to EY Luxembourg for an evening on how finance leaders are steering growth and transformation in an uncertain world. Finologee and EY Luxembourg were joint lead partners for the event.

After welcoming words from Alban Aubrée, EY Luxembourg’s country managing partner, Nicolas Bannier, the firm’s COO, moderated a conversation with Florent Albert (CFO, Edmond de Rothschild Europe), Lisa Pataki (CFO, SES), Maxim Straus (EVP and CFO, Cargolux Airlines International) and Maria João (fractional CFO, Monnett Social), spanning private banking, global infrastructure, aviation and high-growth technology.

Photo credits: Paperjam

Highlights from the conversation

The panel agreed the CFO’s remit keeps expanding, into risk, technology, geopolitics and value allocation, without the core job of controllership and cash management going anywhere. Several panellists described the role shifting from gatekeeper to strategic partner, with personal accountability rising just as fast as the scope.

On risk, the consensus was that resilience gets built before a crisis, not during one: cash discipline and contingency planning in good times, so a business can still invest selectively when conditions turn.

AI drew the sharpest pushback on a common assumption. Rather than a straightforward cost story, the panel framed it as an investment with its own cost, dependency and lifecycle, one that raises real questions of governance, data control and, in regulated sectors, how far a proof of concept can scale.

The conversation closed on Luxembourg’s own competitiveness: wage indexation and its effect on hiring decisions, and a regulatory burden that is real but sits alongside genuine strengths, the fund ecosystem, post-Brexit positioning and the country’s credit rating among them. Asked for one piece of advice for a future CFO, all four speakers landed on some form of the same word: curiosity.

Closing remarks: Luxembourg’s ecosystem

Finologee’s CSO, Jonathan Prince, had the honour of closing the evening. Jonathan picked up on a line from Nicolas about Luxembourg’s “DNA”, and what he saw looking at the stage and the room around it:

“We have the financial services, we have the corporate giants, and we have the startups. That’s the country in miniature. And around all of us: the government and the regulators who set the terms, then the people who make those terms workable, advisors like EY, and toolmakers like Finologee, giving organisations the means to thrive inside that framework rather than just exist in it. Concretely, for us that means giving a finance team one place to see its cash across every bank it works with, move money under the rules it has set for itself, and show an auditor exactly what happened and why, without adding a new layer of complexity every time the business grows.”

Jonathan Prince, CSO and co-founder of Finologee 

Where FinologeeBKO fits

That closing line is also a fair description of what the Banking Orchestrator does, and it speaks to more than the audit point alone. The panel’s resilience theme, cash discipline and contingency planning built before a crisis rather than during one, is a liquidity question as much as a governance one.

For a finance team juggling several banking relationships, cash visibility usually means a round of separate portals before anyone can say what the group actually holds. Finologee’s Banking Orchestrator (FinologeeBKO) brings statements, balances and payments from every bank into one workflow, connecting through Finologee’s own banking infrastructure rather than requiring a CFO’s team to set up and maintain SWIFT or EBICS access itself.

Payments and approvals run from that same place, with signatory rights and four-eyes controls defined and changed inside the platform rather than bank by bank. Every payment and every reconciliation leaves a structured, exportable trail, the kind an internal or external auditor can follow without a separate reconstruction exercise. Idle balances can be pooled and put to work through rule-based sweeping instead of sitting flat across scattered accounts, so contingency planning starts from one liquidity view rather than a portal-by-portal check.

None of this replaces a bank, an ERP or a treasury management system. It sits above the banking relationships a CFO’s team already has, so what changes is not who the business banks with, but how much of that manual, portal-by-portal work still has to be done by hand.

Read more on FinologeeBKO for corporates and institutions: https://finologee.com/bko-for-corporates/

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