The FP&A Trends Webinar, held on April 2nd, brought together industry leaders to unveil the top 5 FP&A trends for 2025. Through expert insights and practical perspectives, the session focused on transforming emerging trends into actionable strategies that elevate decision-making and operational outcomes.
The 5 pillars of future-ready FP&A
A recent FP&A Trends white paper identifies five key trends that will define FP&A success in 2025 and beyond.
1. Integrated FP&A
Transitioning from static annual planning to dynamic, real-time planning spanning functions, departments, and geographies.
2. Data-Driven Mastery
Unlocking the power of data to identify business drivers, sharpen forecasts, and support agile scenario planning.
3. Transformative Business Partnering
Leveraging technology to enable strategic collaboration between finance and the broader organisation, ensuring insights lead to measurable action.
4. AI Empowerment
Empowering teams with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to boost productivity and enhance data-driven decision-making across all levels.
5. ESG Integration
Embedding sustainability and social impact into financial planning and strategic priorities — making ESG a core lens through which decisions are evaluated.
Agile FP&A in action: PJT Partners’ strategic vision for 2025
Joshua Baker, Senior Vice President at PJT Partners, opened the session by sharing how the firm is redefining FP&A through agility, innovation, and tight alignment with business operations. For PJT, FP&A is more than a support function — it is a strategic enabler. The firm’s 2025 roadmap aligns with the five pillars of agile FP&A.
Key transformation areas
Operational Alignment: PJT is modernising its end-to-end expense processes to improve visibility, control, and efficiency.
Data as a Competitive Advantage: Partnering with leadership to build a disciplined framework to govern, produce, and leverage client data.
Business Enablement: Real-time scenario modelling, feedback tools, and performance tracking enable better decisions across business units.
AI Adoption: Evaluating AI to enhance core tools, partner with best-in-class vendors, and develop custom AI agents.
Sustainability and Inclusion: Diversity and ESG principles deeply embedded in planning culture.
Just one quarter into 2025, PJT has seen enhanced data accuracy in forecasts, faster deeper management reporting, improved cost accountability and control, and progress in integrating compensation and equity planning with master data tools.
Technology and AI empowering FP&A: Anaplan’s perspective
In the second keynote, Iver van der Zand, VP of Product Management at Anaplan, explored how technology and AI are revolutionising FP&A. Emerging market trends include Connected Planning — unifying financial, demand, workforce, and capacity planning — and Accelerated Deployment, where budget constraints and the need for speed are driving demand for out-of-the-box planning applications.
CFOs increasingly demand all-in-one solutions that integrate planning, actuals, and forecasting in a single platform. Iver emphasised that 60% of the time in planning projects is spent preparing data — connecting, transforming, and loading it. Reducing that share is one of the highest-leverage investments a finance function can make.
Our take
What connects the themes from both keynotes is the shift from FP&A as a reporting function to FP&A as an operating system. Static annual planning cycles, fragmented data pipelines, and manual reporting are being replaced by continuous, connected, and increasingly AI-augmented workflows. Firms that execute this shift well — not firms that merely discuss it — will separate meaningfully from peers over the next 18 to 24 months.
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