How CFOs Rewrote the Playbook on Supply Chain Risk This Year

Throughout 2025, President Donald Trump’s tariffs increasingly served as a stress test for enterprise agility, making real-time data fundamental to decision-making, enabling CFOs to rethink procurement as a lever for operational resilience, and helping finance and procurement work together to map out supply chains in real time.

Suppliers faced tighter credit, while buyers demanded faster fulfillment and greater transparency, often simultaneously. Chief financial officers, no longer confined to capital allocation and reporting, stepped into this environment as function leaders increasingly responsible for the architecture of supply chains themselves.

Many finance teams began treating critical suppliers the way they once treated major customers or investment portfolios. CFOs asked questions that would have been unusual five years ago: How leveraged is this supplier? How sensitive is their margin to tariffs or fuel costs? What percentage of their inputs come from politically exposed regions?

By the end of 2025 a clear pattern had emerged, as tracked by PYMNTS Intelligence: The most effective CFOs did not try to eliminate uncertainty but accepted it as a constant. Their focus shifted to designing systems, contracts and relationships that could bend without breaking.

Read more: What 2025 Taught CFOs About Cash, Control and Resilience 

CFOs Choose Resilience Over Optimization

CFOs in 2025 were not merely stewards of capital; they were architects of adaptability. A PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Revising the Roadmap: How Tariffs Are Transforming CFOs’ Strategic Planning” found nearly 3 in 4 chief financial officers changed their investment strategy this year.

After all, against a backdrop of uncertainty, the lowest-cost solution was no longer the best solution if it failed under stress. Supplier contracts evolved accordingly. Rather than locking in the lowest possible price, CFOs increasingly prioritized continuity clauses and shared-risk mechanisms.

In the June CAIO Report, “The Enterprise Reset: Tariffs, Uncertainty and the Limits of Operational Response,” PYMNTS Intelligence found 60% of firms reported that they are addressing today’s tariff-induced challenges through tighter partner coordination, smarter sourcing contract terms, more dynamic price modeling and greater alignment between finance and procurement functions.

What changed in 2025 wasn’t only the level of disruption; it was the granularity. Risk didn’t arrive as a single shock. It showed up as constraint stacking: a port delay colliding with a quality hold; a supplier’s labor shortage coinciding with a currency swing; a compliance change landing mid-contract cycle.

The practical implication was that finance teams got more sophisticated about quantifying risk in ways the organization could act on, particularly around the availability and actionality of payments and payments data.

“It used to be an educational process just explaining what digitizing payments meant,” Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards told PYMNTS this year. “Now we see CFOs and treasurers wanting to optimize it. They want to know, ‘How can we make these processes even more economically attractive?’”

Read also: B2B Payments Enter Their Trust-Building Era 

The Data Shift Making Supply Chains More Agile

The next frontier of supply chain resilience is already emerging, and it looks like one built atop deeper tier visibility, better risk signals and faster contract cycles that evolve as conditions change.

In 2025, many CFOs realized that the biggest supply-chain weakness wasn’t geographic concentration or lack of alternates. It was the company’s own inconsistency: fragmented contracts, uneven terms, poor visibility into tier-two and tier-three suppliers and an inability to enforce what was already on paper.

“There’s technology that can help, but it really depends on the industry,” Matt Carey, senior vice president, office of the CFO at FIS, told PYMNTS earlier this year. “If I’m a computer manufacturer and I have a bunch of chips on order from my suppliers, I can’t just change my chip supplier overnight.”

“If I have visibility into my working capital, I can negotiate better agreements and pre-buy materials like aluminum or steel,” Carey added. “If you don’t have a centralized view of your financials, it’s tough to negotiate with an upper hand.”

Trade finance also moved from the periphery to the core of supply chain strategy. CFOs expanded the use of supply chain finance programs, dynamic discounting and bank-backed guarantees, not primarily to optimize days payable outstanding, but to stabilize suppliers under stress.

“A payment might be due in 30 days, but the buyer might typically pay in 45 or 60,” Boost Payment Solutions CEO Dean Leavitt told PYMNTS this year. “If suppliers can get paid at day 30 for agreeing to accept commercial cards or other digital solutions, they do it. That gives them a working capital advantage.”

Still, as 2026 nears, there is still work to be done across the bulk of the B2B landscape around payments modernization. According to “Virtual Mobility: How Mobile Virtual Cards Elevate B2B Payments,” done in collaboration with WEX, almost 73% of businesses have yet to automate supplier payments, significantly limiting their ability to gain a comprehensive view of money movement.