CFOs chasing cost transparency need a common language business can understand

Cost transparency and strategic influence don’t move together automatically.

A CFO can gain more say in shaping technology strategy and still struggle to see clearly where the money is going.

Andre Freilinger, senior finance executive and former CFO, Technology at Westpac, spoke with ADAPT’s Content Lead, Justina Uy, to discuss the framework he built to bring transparency to a $1.5 billion technology base, the real constraints behind transformation budgets, and what’s stayed hard about leading a finance function across three decades.

At CFO Edge in Sydney on 17 November, Andre joins David Walker, former Group CTO at Westpac and DBS, in front of 150+ finance leaders for a fireside chat unpacking how to build on existing foundations to measure AI’s value and what a genuinely trusted CFO-CIO partnership looks like.

Key takeaways:

• A shared framework, not more data, is what bridges business and technology complexity, and it’s what strategic influence alone doesn’t deliver.
• Funding is rarely the real constraint. Organisational capacity to absorb change matters more, and protected spend goes to regulatory and risk commitments first.
• Keeping up with a growing CFO remit comes down to breadth of experience, and to anchoring on what isn’t changing rather than chasing what is.

Building the five drivers of technology cost

Cost transparency was already a priority when Andre stepped into the CFO Technology role, but earlier attempts had lacked the sponsorship and tooling to stick.

He started with IT service costing, attributing every cost component to a service so the business could see its share of technology spend and what was driving it.

That worked at a business level, but with more than a thousand service lines at Westpac, it couldn’t roll up into a board-level view.

That gap led to the five drivers framework: technology cost as price times quantity, broken down into inflation, productivity, and two types of growth, organic and inorganic, with AI investment sitting inside the inorganic growth driver.

Benchmarking unit cost against best in class shows the maximum supply-side opportunity, while any remaining gap points to an oversized technology footprint on the demand side.

The framework let Andre and his team have a consistent, repeatable conversation about where investment was going and what it would cost to offset.

Why influence over strategy doesn’t guarantee cost visibility

ADAPT’s research found only 15% of CFOs rate their technology department as effective on cost transparency, even as most are now co-building tech strategy.

For Andre, the disconnect comes down to complexity.

Technology isn’t core to most businesses, so it stays hard to understand no matter how close a CFO sits to the strategy table.

What closed the gap at Westpac wasn’t more access, it was translating a long list of technical jargon into five drivers everyone, business and technology alike, could use as a shared anchor point for every investment conversation.

What actually limits transformation budgets

Funding constraints were a constant across Andre’s Westpac years, and ADAPT’s research still finds funding topping the list of barriers for finance leaders even as their remit grows. Andre’s experience points to a different limiting factor.

Westpac has had years where the full budget went unspent despite business leaders describing funding as tight, because the real constraint was organisational capacity, people, subject matter experts, and the ability to digest change.

Within any funding envelope, protected spend goes first to non-negotiables, regulatory commitments and risks outside appetite.

What’s left becomes discretionary, and deciding where to point it means weighing not just potential return but whether the receiving business area can actually absorb that much change without stalling.

Building breadth over a 30 year career

Asked what’s stayed hard about leading a finance function across a Nordic conglomerate, a wine importer, and one of Australia’s largest banks, Andre points to the widening scope of the CFO role itself.

Technology’s growing reach into every part of the business, paired with faster cycle times, keeps raising what’s expected of finance leaders.

His answer has been breadth, deliberately exposing himself to different industries, geographies, and disciplines rather than specialising narrowly.

He sees the same logic applying to AI, learning what’s working elsewhere rather than waiting to master it in isolation.

Start with what isn’t changing

Andre’s closing advice for CFOs navigating AI’s scale and pace is to resist starting with what’s shifting.

He points to identifying what stays true about a business and its function regardless of the wave of change moving through it.

That anchor point makes it easier to see clearly what does need attention, and to prioritise accordingly, rather than trying to process every shift in the landscape at once.