WFF insights: What UK CFOs want from spend management

The World Finance Forum, which focused on real-time insights, agility, and automation, brought international finance professionals together in London. It quickly established what they all had in common: A need to ditch legacy systems and reimagine their finance operations to move faster and spend more time on strategy.

And right in the thick of it? Some of our talented Payhawk team, who presented the roundtable: Save time, increase control, and simplify spend management.

1. The finance tech gap is real

Presented by Nick Corlett, Enterprise and Mid-Market Sales Lead and Jo Miteva, Account Executive, our session tackled the all-too-familiar chaos that finance teams without Payhawk face, including:

1. Bloated tech stacks
2. Slow month-ends
3. And limited visibility

According to our report, The CFO tech gap, 93% of finance leaders believe their role has expanded, but only 35% think their current tech stack meets their needs.

Why the gap? It starts with good intentions. Take this scenario, for example: As your businesses grew, your finance team looked to solve multiple challenges and ended up onboarding multiple systems. However, this approach quickly became a case of too many siloed tools that don't talk to each other, leading to endless data entry and screen switching.

Whether it's reconciling supplier statements (which still takes up to six days for half of all finance teams) or chasing missing receipts, today's finance teams are overburdened.

One of our roundtable attendees nailed it best: "We don't need more tools — we need the right ones."

2. "Doing spend management differently" with Payhawk

Enter Payhawk.

Here, Jo jumped into an interactive Payhawk walkthrough, showing how we consolidate corporate cards (credit and debit), reimbursements, invoice management, POs, and accounting workflows — all in one platform.

The result? Less admin, more control, and native, seamless integrations with ERPs like NetSuite, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, and Xero. We even support multiple currencies, legal entities, and languages, giving global finance teams a single source of truth.

As Jo noted:

Our goal is to simplify complex finance operations. Whether you're in the UK, the US, or the EEA, at Payhawk, we do spend management differently, letting you unify and automate spend management end-to-end.

Our granular spend controls also resonated with the room, and attendees were keen to hear more about the available limit-setting and auto-controls. (For example, you can block a card automatically if an employee hasn't submitted three receipts.)

Need to set a card to only work on weekdays, in certain countries, or only with pre-approved merchants? Easy, just adjust in the platform. Want to auto-freeze cards when three receipts are missing or trigger an approval if someone books a flight over budget? Done, it takes two seconds.

At Payhawk, we give finance teams like yours the flexibility and control you’ve always wanted (and needed) — without spreadsheet pain or fiddly systems.

Use case spotlight: Carolina Einarsson, CFO at Essentia Analytics, recalls why she chose us for spend management.

"Before Payhawk, we used a couple of point solutions, excel, and a few different credit cards, but we didn't have an all-in-one centralised solution. Now we have expense data entry, credit cards, approvals, spend requests, invoice payments, and reimbursements, all in one with Payhawk."

3. Manual work? Not on our watch

One aspect of reimagining finance operations came through loud and clear: Finance leaders are done wasting time on repetitive admin. Thanks to our next-gen automation, they don’t have to.

Jo and Nick covered some of the big-ticket items that customers are enjoying this year thanks to our new innovations, including:

1. 227% faster data extraction supported by time-saving AI
2. 3.58 seconds to process an expense
3. 5M+ fields auto-extracted every month

The result? Finance teams spend less time on low-impact tasks and more time on strategy and growth. Whether it’s invoice matching, coding, or reconciling spend across entities, our AI and automation do the heavy lifting.

As one CFO put it during our WFF roundtable, “If it’s not automated, it’s not scalable.”

And at Payhawk, we understand that completely. Our automation eliminates the friction that is likely holding back your finance team, giving you the following:

• Auto-reconciliation and real-time matching
• OCR-powered data capture
• Automated approvals by spend type or threshold
• Scheduled supplier payments
• Instant policy enforcement

Find out more about automation in the short video below featuring Guy Sear, Country Director of the UK&I at Payhawk.

4. Control, accountability, and user-friendly design

Next, Leanne Dowling from Payhawk customer i-media shared (unprompted) how their team ditched paper expense management entirely.

Leanne shared how they moved to a no-exceptions policy and now block cards for non-Payhawk compliance, saying: "It's my favourite feature. Sales teams hate it — but it works!"

Another roundtable participant explained how hard it is to maintain finance operations when key staff leave, uncovering the importance of an easy-to-use, automated system like ours:

If the person who built the system leaves, all the knowledge leaves with them. That's why we need something intuitive and easy to manage.

We also discussed accounts payable automation, with several attendees sharing pain points around manual invoice matching and payment scheduling.

Jo demonstrated how we flag due invoices in Payhawk, automate approvals, and offer cash flow reporting that's not just exportable but actually useful — for monthly meetings, leadership presentations, etc.

The attendees shared how much they liked the idea of flexibility in building custom workflows and eliminating repetitive tasks in Payhawk. One finance leader even described, "I just want to stop producing the same reports every month and actually focus on solving problems."

That desire to move from reactive to strategic work came up again and again. Nick agreed and described how finance teams should be functioning in today's climate:

Finance teams shouldn't be bottlenecks. They should be enablers of growth. But too often, they're stuck reconciling statements and piecing together data from disconnected tools.

5. Customer impact: From frustration to transformation

At Payhawk, we're here to change your finance operations forever. With real-time spend visibility, automated reconciliation, and dynamic policy controls, finance teams approx' five hours per employee per month on admin tasks.

We're also proud to be recognised in 2025 by Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice for Procurement and AP excellence — and to rank as a G2 Grid Leader across spend, expense, invoice, and AP management categories.

Use case spotlight: Logistics giant, Discordia 4X'd their productivity thanks to automation via our easy-to-use spend management solution.

Tsvetomir Uzunov, CFO at Discordia, said:

We've boosted employee productivity by over four times and expect an even greater impact as our fleet grows. Payhawk's automation has significantly cut processing time and reduced the errors that came with manual expense handling.

6. Global finance operations, sustainability, currencies, and more

With many attendees on a fast growth trajectory, they were keen to hear about international capabilities to support expansion ambitions.

Here, Jo and Nick presented some of the ways you could tick all your multi-entity management boxes with Payhawk:

1. Tackling global processes with local differences? Sync Payhawk with your ERP to pull in tax rates automatically and avoid errors
2. Use our multi-entity management settings to apply rules across multiple entities in one go
3. Build custom repeatable workflows to support smooth expansion
4. Eliminate FX by offering multi-currency corporate cards and restricting usage by region

Use case spotlight: Fast-growing international jewellery brand Astrid & Miyu, uses us to manage to spend across their omnichannel retail presences across multiple countries. Stephen Wilkinson, Finance and Operations Director at Astrid & Miyu says:

Payhawk’s multi-entity management and multi-currency support are particularly critical for a business like ours, which manages operations across four countries and counting. Previously, country-specific platforms or card providers made cost tracking fragmented. But with Payhawk, these challenges disappeared!

Carbon tracking was another hot topic. Jo explained how our integration with Lune allows businesses to track Scope 3 emissions across spend categories. “It’s not about chasing the impossible,” Jo said. “It’s about being responsible with spend and understanding your impact to make the right decisions for your business and ambitions.”

7. The path forward: Change made simple

Throughout the session, it became clear that change is hard for many companies, maybe yours — especially when it comes to expanding finance operations. But with a consolidated platform that’s intuitive to use and powerful under the hood (and connects to important systems like your ERP and HRIS), teams don’t have to choose between control and efficiency.

As one roundtable attendee said:

People won’t change unless the new way is dramatically better. Payhawk is.

Ready to take these learnings onboard and simplify spend management at your company? See what finance teams across the UK and beyond are raving about. Book your personalised demo today and discover how to take time back, boost control, and scale with confidence.