At DPW Amsterdam, leaders from Swisscom and ING described a finance-procurement model built around earlier involvement, stronger market insight and automation that pushes both functions closer to the business.
Procurement earns a different place with finance when it changes the decisions available to the business before a purchase is made.
In DPW Amsterdam 2026‘s session “Why Procurement Is Moving Up the CFO Agenda,” Michaela Mayrhofer, Group CPO and Finance Transformation Lead at Swisscom; Valentina Fanni, CFO of Technology and Operations at ING; and moderator Chris Sawchuk of The Hackett Group examined what procurement can contribute when finance is deciding where the company should invest, how it should respond to change and which options it has available.
Their discussion moved well beyond savings and sourcing performance. Procurement’s advantage increasingly comes from the information it can bring into those decisions.
Procurement Can Widen the Decision Set
Mayrhofer drew a distinction between having data and being able to use it to change a decision.
She described a current Swisscom initiative in which procurement combined internal data with market intelligence, compliance considerations and risk information. That work expanded what had appeared to be a single viable path into a broader set of validated options for the business. Procurement’s contribution was to increase the company’s room to maneuver.
Procurement’s role expands when that information enters the process before the business has settled on a course of action. Market knowledge can then influence which path the company chooses, as well as the commercial terms it secures.
Mayrhofer described the procurement leader as something closer to a coach: provide the relevant information, guide the business and challenge assumptions constructively, while leaving accountability for the final decision where it belongs.
For CFOs, procurement can expose choices that would otherwise remain outside the financial discussion.
Finance and Procurement Need to Meet Earlier
Fanni has occupied both seats. She moved from finance into procurement, served as CPO at Allianz and became ING’s CFO of Technology and Operations in May 2026. From that vantage point, she argued that the two functions could make much better use of each other.
Her argument starts earlier in the planning cycle.
Finance can bring procurement into planning, budgeting and multi-year planning while requirements and investment choices remain open. Procurement, in turn, contributes a view of suppliers, markets and developments outside the company that can strengthen finance’s ability to look ahead. Finance brings its own authority and mechanisms for influencing business owners.
Together, those capabilities give finance and procurement a broader role in steering the business.
Fanni connected this closer partnership to a business environment where leaders have to interpret incomplete signals and make judgments about what conditions could look like several years from now. Experience across functions, companies, markets and countries helps leaders recognize those signals and understand what they may mean.
Supplier information, market conditions and risk signals can inform planning well before a negotiation begins. They become inputs to the plan instead of evidence consulted after it has already been set.
Value Creation Challenges the Functional Model
Bringing finance and procurement together earlier also exposes an organizational problem: companies are still largely designed around functions, while much of the work that creates value crosses several of them.
Mayrhofer, who also leads finance transformation at Swisscom, described the difficulty of moving from functional optimization to an end-to-end view. The vision is relatively easy to agree with. Execution becomes much harder when changing the process also changes someone’s mandate, responsibilities or sphere of influence.
Organizational change becomes one of the hardest parts of the work because process redesign eventually reaches individual roles, authority and accountability.
Fanni described work at her previous company to integrate the broader source-to-pay process across procurement, finance, risk, security, legal and other functions. She discussed a prototype developed in that earlier role. At ING, she and the new CTO were beginning to discuss how a closer partnership could work.
A shared process still needs distinct accountabilities. Procurement can coordinate the commercial decision and bring supplier evidence into it. Risk, security and legal specialists retain their own judgments; the appropriate business owner must remain accountable for the resulting commitment. Removing a handoff should make that responsibility easier to exercise.
Optimizing each function independently can preserve friction across the full process. A better procurement metric or a more efficient finance activity has limited value if the business still has to navigate disconnected decisions, systems and approvals from one department to the next.
Authority also matters before an AI purchase is made. HFS Research and DPW’s procurement AI readiness survey reports that 18% of the 150 procurement executives surveyed owned AI vendor decisions, and 7% had a permanent place in AI strategy. Early involvement needs an agreed mandate if procurement’s advice is to influence the investment.
AI Raises the Value of Judgment
Automation is also changing which procurement skills carry the most value.
Mayrhofer expects many traditional procurement activities, including parts of category management, strategy development and negotiation, to become increasingly automated. As more of that work can be handled by technology, procurement professionals need to contribute more through their understanding of the business.
Her prescription was to understand the company’s value chains more deeply: what makes its products successful, how its markets work and what its data can reveal about the decisions ahead. That extends category expertise into product and investment discussions, where a supply constraint or emerging alternative can change the business case.
AI can make far more of procurement’s accumulated data usable. Mayrhofer described the shift as moving from “somebody who’s buying better” to “somebody who’s enabling better decision making.”
Category knowledge gains value when it can be connected to a business decision. A procurement professional who understands a supplier market, an emerging constraint or a commercial tradeoff can use that expertise to influence product, investment and planning choices instead of applying it only during sourcing.
Human Judgment Still Shapes the Negotiation
Fanni was more cautious about extending automation all the way through procurement.
AI can collect information, prepare negotiations and help develop strategies. She argued that negotiations still depend on capabilities that current systems cannot fully reproduce: emotional intelligence, intuition, timing and the ability to read another person’s response.
Even the order in which issues are raised can affect a negotiation. So can recognizing what a counterpart cares about at a particular moment and adjusting accordingly.
Fanni framed procurement as a combination of “art and science.” Much of the science can increasingly be handled by agents. The human part becomes more important as routine work consumes less of the professional’s time.
Procurement automation should therefore change the discussion about skills as well as headcount or efficiency. As machines take on more repeatable work, expertise, judgment and the ability to influence complex decisions carry more of the value.
By 2030 the Boundary May Matter Less
Asked to look ahead to 2030, both leaders described a future in which finance and procurement become harder to separate.
Mayrhofer expects finance organizations to become smaller, more focused and more embedded in the business as automation reduces the effort devoted to reporting, controlling and other routine activities. Fanni similarly expects both functions to move further toward strategic work as automatable tasks disappear.
Their vision puts value creation ahead of the size or status of either function. Finance and procurement increasingly contribute through their combined ability to give the business better information, more options and stronger judgment.
That direction also explains why procurement is moving higher on the CFO agenda.
Procurement can bring outside market information into planning, identify options the business has not considered, connect commercial decisions to risk and use automation to free people for work that requires judgment.
Savings remain part of the job. Procurement’s broader contribution is helping the company make better decisions.
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