Beyond the numbers: What really drives sustainable performance? Insights from Kate Akery.

Three perspectives from CFO Kate Akery on business partnership, perspective, and the people behind performance.

Finance has always had a clear remit: manage financial performance, control risk, report the numbers. But as businesses grow more complex, more shaped by technology and more dependent on decisions taken under uncertainty, that remit is widening.

The question is no longer whether Finance can produce accurate numbers. It is whether those numbers help the organisation understand its business, make better decisions and build performance that lasts.

Kate Akery, CFO France and France Market Unit Finance Leader at Brink’s, brings a perspective shaped by twenty years in Finance leadership across complex, multinational organisations. Today she leads Finance for Brink’s France, a €0.5 billion business spanning 53 agencies, while supporting transformation, growth and operational change.

Her experience points to three things that increasingly define strong Finance leadership: the ability to act as a true business partner, the value of perspective from beyond one’s own industry, and the recognition that behind every performance metric there are people.

Finance as a business partner

Finance is still widely seen as a reporting function, Kate challenges that definition directly:

“The misconception is that the purpose of Finance is closing the books and reporting the results. Numbers and data serve as a means of understanding business performance.”

For her, the role of Finance begins where reporting ends.

Her own career illustrates that broader role. At Collins Aerospace, she moved into Commercial Finance leadership for a $1.2 billion division, with responsibility spanning growth, margin expansion, pricing, bids, proposals and investment appraisals.

“As a business partner, Finance provides insights that help businesses identify and qualify risks and develop initiatives that support long-term sustainable growth.”

The distinction matters. Numbers can tell a business what is happening; they rarely explain why, or what should happen next. That requires understanding the business behind the numbers, the risks and opportunities it faces, and the decisions that will shape it. Finance creates far more value as part of the decision than as the function reporting its outcome.

Perspective: the value of starting again

Kate’s career illustrates a second dimension of executive value: perspective.

After nineteen years building her career in Aerospace & Defense, she chose to leave, moving into an entirely different industry with Brink’s France. The decision was deliberate: a way to broaden her industry lens and build the operational range that supports broader leadership. She is candid about the cost too, leaving an environment where she had built experience and credibility to start again with a new industry, a new business and a new team.

What makes the move telling is not the shift from Aerospace & Defense to Cash Logistics itself. It is what the decision says about experience.

Deep industry knowledge gives an executive context: the business model, the drivers of performance, the risks specific to that world. Experience across different contexts gives something else,  perspective. A leader entering a new industry may not know all its established assumptions, but can bring the range to recognise patterns, challenge them, and ask different questions.

It is a balance between depth and distance. Experience gives you expertise. Perspective comes from knowing that the way things are done is not the only way they can be done.

The people behind performance

For a Finance leader, performance is naturally measured in financial and operational terms. What stands out in Kate’s is how often she brings the conversation back to people.

Asked what keeps her awake at night, her answer is not a financial metric:

“The wellbeing of my team is my top priority.”

She describes her team as an inspiration, particularly their ability to carry multiple critical projects while still delivering business as usual.

That focus on people shapes how she thinks about operational performance, too. She talks about creating structure to reduce chaos and empower people, cutting the time lost to non-value-added firefighting. The aim is not simply a more efficient organisation, but one where people have the clarity and capacity to focus on what matters.

For Kate, that rests on trust, communication, involvement and empathy:

“To be successful, you must start by connecting with your team, take them on the journey and involve them in finding the solutions. That is how you build engagement & trust.”

So people and performance are not separate conversations. No team sustainably delivers transformation just because the strategy is sound or the numbers are clear. People need to understand the direction, feel part of the solution, trust their leadership and have the capacity to execute. Sustainable performance is not only something leaders measure, it is something they create the conditions for.

Beyond the numbers

Kate’s perspective points to a broader shift in what senior leadership requires.

Finance still needs financial discipline. Data still matters. Industry expertise is still valuable. But none of these creates value in isolation. The contribution comes from connecting them: understanding the business behind the numbers, bringing perspective when familiar assumptions need challenging, and creating the conditions for people to turn strategy into execution.

The three reinforce one another. Business partnership gives Finance a hand in shaping decisions. Perspective helps leaders question what they think they already know. And people are the ones who turn strategy into performance.

For Finance leaders, that points further toward business partnership. For executives more broadly, it raises a sharper question about experience itself:

Are we using our expertise simply to provide better answers  or to ask better questions, see different perspectives, and create the conditions for people to perform?

That is where the real value lies. Beyond the numbers.