In brief
- AI adoption in finance has nearly doubled in two years but nearly 65% of CFOs lack confidence in realizing meaningful value.
- 80% of finance leaders struggle to keep pace with rising pay expectations, while 62% face challenges hiring for open roles.
- 96% of CFOs rely on at least one third-party F&A provider, up from 79% the prior year, as organizations look outward to fill capability and execution gaps.
- Demand for end-to-end FAO providers also tops 2026 finance and accounting outsourcing trends — organizations are favoring hybrid, multi-location providers that combine advisory, digital enablement, and execution for AI-enabled finance.
Finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) has long been part of enterprise operating models, but heading into 2026, its role is evolving. CFOs are no longer relying on third-party partners solely for operational efficiency or significant cost savings. The latest finance and accounting outsourcing trends show they’re turning to FAO to support broader finance transformation amid rising technology demands, talent constraints, and execution gaps.
As investment in AI, automation, and analytics increase, delivery models are shifting in parallel. Tech-enabled nearshoring to Latin America is accelerating as finance leaders prioritize real-time collaboration, cultural alignment, and faster digital adoption, while hybrid models that blend nearshore, offshore, and digital platforms are becoming the standard for resilience, scalability, and control.
At the same time, expectations of finance and accounting services partners are rising. CFOs want more than transactional processing; they’re seeking partners that unify strategy, technology, and operational execution to elevate finance into a more strategic, insight-driven function.
Based on our market research and experience supporting organizations as the nearshore FAO leader, we’ve identified five key trends in finance and accounting outsourcing shaping 2026 and beyond. Read on to explore these FAO trends.
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For a deeper dive, download the full report, 2026 Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Trends, to see how AI, tech-enabled nearshoring, and evolving operating models are redefining how finance work gets done.
1. CFOs turn to outsourcing to accelerate AI adoption
As finance teams move beyond rule-based automation, CFO priorities are shifting toward practical, scalable AI — including agentic automation that combines reasoning, orchestration, and human-in-the-loop governance to improve accuracy, decision-making, and ROI. AI adoption in finance has nearly doubled in two years (Gartner 2025 CFO Priorities), signaling growing momentum toward AI-enabled finance operations.
As adoption scales, CFO focus is narrowing on areas where speed, accuracy, and decision quality matter most. Finance operations now rank as the top technology enablement priority, according to Grant Thornton’s 2025 Shift Your Tech Strategy report, alongside continued emphasis on forecast accuracy and real-time, data-driven decisioning.
Despite rising investment, execution challenges persist. Nearly two-thirds of CFOs still lack confidence in their ability to realize AI value, as misaligned strategies, digital skills gaps, and legacy systems slow progress (Gartner’s 2026 CFO Agenda). These barriers are even more pronounced with Agentic AI, where governance, auditability, and control remain critical hurdles in regulated finance environments.
To close these gaps, organizations are increasingly using outsourcing to accelerate AI adoption. More than 80% of finance organizations already leverage or plan to leverage outsourcing to access AI technology, skilled professionals, and scalable expertise without heavy upfront investment (Deloitte).
Outsourcing is also emerging as a self-funding transformation strategy, enabling CFOs to reinvest a portion of labor savings into AI, automation, and digital capabilities.
CFOs now expect FAO providers to embed AI, automation, and analytics directly into managed financial operations, repositioning outsourcing from a cost-saving lever to a strategic enabler of future-ready finance, according to Everest Group’s 2025 FAO PEAK Matrix®. Rather than building capabilities from scratch, finance leaders are partnering with F&A outsourcing providers that bring proven platforms, governance models, and execution roadmaps to scale AI across AP, AR, FP&A, and core accounting functions heading into 2026.
2. Nearshoring evolves from a location choice to a capability strategy
Ongoing finance talent shortages are forcing CFOs to rethink not just where work is done, but how it gets done. Robert Half’s 2026 FAO Salary Trends report shows that 62% of finance leaders struggle to hire accountants, with the talent shortage already driving delays and increased compliance risk.
As hiring challenges intensify and execution gaps grow across core finance processes, organizations are thus looking beyond traditional hiring models to build more resilient delivery strategies.
Nearshoring is becoming the go-to model for judgment-intensive, high-touch, and time-sensitive finance work that requires real-time collaboration. Latin America is leading this shift, with finance services embedded across core functions at higher rates than global averages, reflecting its expanding role in end-to-end finance delivery.
Everest Group’s 2025 State of the FAO Market report highlights LATAM as a key driver of future FAO growth, as finance leaders are drawn to the region for its proximity, shared time zones, cultural alignment, agility, and access to skilled finance talent that operates as an extension of internal teams. Lower attrition compared to offshore and domestic markets further supports delivery consistency and performance.
Momentum is accelerating into 2026. LATAM is now the fastest-growing FAO region, outpacing overall market growth, with 96% of organizations planning to maintain or expand their footprint, according to The State of the GBS and Outsourcing Industry in Latin America report by SSON Research & Analytics and Auxis. Advanced finance activities such as vendor management, credit and deductions, audit support, and FP&A are also already being performed at scale.
As expectations rise, nearshoring is no longer viewed as an execution-only model. CFOs increasingly expect providers to deliver technology enablement and transformation alongside service delivery (Deloitte’s 2025 GBS Survey). CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent Report ranks Latin America among the world’s top emerging tech talent markets, reinforcing its role as a highly tech-enabled finance hub.
As a result, tech-enabled nearshoring is evolving from a location strategy into a capability strategy — enabling faster AI adoption, improved cycle times, reduced operational risk, and stronger alignment across the finance and accounting value chain.
3. Hybrid operating models become the new FAO standard
As remote work becomes the norm, CFOs are more comfortable collaborating across geographies and outsourcing finance operations. But rising complexity, talent shortages, digital expectations, and geopolitical uncertainty are exposing the limits of single-location, labor arbitrage-driven outsourcing models.
While offshore delivery still offers cost efficiency and scale for high-volume, standardized work, the rigid structures and extreme cost reduction focus common in traditional offshore markets can limit agility and collaboration — making it harder to support judgment-intensive, insight-driven processes.
In response, organizations are adopting hybrid operating models that combine in-house teams, nearshore delivery, offshore scale, and digital platforms into a more resilient, flexible ecosystem. This approach allows CFOs to dynamically rebalance work based on talent availability, evolving business needs, and geopolitical or operational risk.
Heading into 2026, hybrid models are becoming a core FAO trend. Finance leaders are pairing offshore efficiency for transactional work with nearshore advantages for complex, time-sensitive, or high-touch activities — reflecting a shift from transactional outsourcing to integrated, high-performance delivery.
Research reinforces this shift. Tholons predicts that by the end of 2026, 50% of organizations are expected to adopt hybrid sourcing models that include nearshoring as they prioritize agility and resilience. The SSON/Auxis report also found 65% of organizations exploring Latin America are doing so to complement or expand existing Asia operations.
This shift is already playing out in practice. After initially outsourcing to Asia, a leading healthcare provider added nearshore delivery to support more complex, judgment-intensive revenue cycle work — improving collaboration and turnaround while preserving offshore scale for transactional processes.
Hybrid delivery is also becoming more distributed within regions, with multiple locations used to expand access to specialized talent and reduce risk. Quality providers leverage advanced digital platforms such as UiPath and Microsoft to tie these models together, providing orchestration, governance, and visibility across locations through AI, automation, analytics, and emerging agentic technologies.
For CFOs, hybrid operating models represent more than a sourcing change — they enable more resilient, collaborative, and digitally-enabled finance operations that are future-ready, while reducing dependence on any single geography.
4. FAO analytics moves to real-time decision support
Finance leaders are under growing pressure to move beyond retrospective financial reporting and deliver real-time, predictive insights that support decisions as work happens. CFOs are embedding analytics directly into daily finance operations to anticipate risk, flag anomalies, and optimize performance across cash flow, Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), financial forecasting, and cost-to-serve.
Forecast accuracy remains a top CFO priority, underscoring the shift toward forward-looking analytics, according to Gartner’s 2026 CFO Agenda. But success now depends as much on operating models as on analytics tools themselves. Real-time insights only create value when finance teams can interpret signals and act immediately.
To meet this need, CFOs are adopting FAO models that combine always-on analytics with digitally skilled finance teams available during U.S. business hours to support exception handling and rapid course correction. Leading providers embed dashboards, predictive models, anomaly detection, and process mining into execution — enabling faster exception handling, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
Analytics maturity is advancing rapidly, with more than half of shared services organizations now operating at interpretive, predictive, or prescriptive levels, according to SSON’s 2025 State of the Shared Services & Outsourcing Industry Global Market Report. Core finance processes such as procure-to-pay and order-to-cash are already seeing significant gains, reinforcing analytics’ role as a performance driver, not just a reporting tool.
For CFOs, real-time analytics is now central to resilience and performance. As Everest Group’s 2025 FAO PEAK Matrix notes, leading providers are shifting from execution-led outsourcing to insight-driven managed services — enabling organizations to move from month-end reporting to continuous insight loops that drive faster decisions, more accurate forecasts, and stronger control across the finance value chain.
5. Accounting firms redraw the FAO competitive landscape
The FAO market is undergoing a structural shift as leading accounting firms expand beyond audit, tax, and advisory into operated finance services, accelerating consolidation across the landscape.
As finance processes become more complex and intertwined with AI, automation, and analytics, CFOs are increasingly prioritizing partners that can operate finance end to end, reducing the need to coordinate fragmented advisory, technology, and delivery vendors.
Industry research from ISG and Everest Group reflects this convergence, highlighting a shift toward integrated managed services where advisory and digital capabilities are embedded directly into ongoing operations.
Recent market moves like Grant Thorton joining forces with Auxis reinforce the trend, as accounting firms build delivery backbones to complement advisory strength — responding to CFO demand for partners that can modernize processes, embed AI and automation, and operate finance at scale.
The shift is accelerating among mid-market organizations, where rising complexity and limited access to digital and analytics talent are driving outsourcing adoption. With smaller but more strategic footprints, these buyers favor partners that offer enterprise-grade capabilities with the flexibility to deliver customized, end-to-end solutions (Everest Group: Accounting firms’ foray into F&A managed services).
Taken together, this is not a temporary change. It represents a fundamental realignment of FAO toward outcome-driven, tech-enabled delivery, expanding CFO choice and enabling faster, more accountable finance operations across both the mid-market and enterprises.
Get the full 2026 Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Trends report
As finance organizations head into 2026, outsourcing is no longer just a cost lever. CFOs are under pressure to modernize finance operations, scale AI and automation, strengthen governance, and deliver faster, insight-driven decisions — often without the time, talent, or infrastructure to do it alone.
This shift is driving demand for tech-enabled FAO models that consolidate strategy, digital enablement, and execution under a single operating framework. When paired with AI and automation, nearshoring becomes a capability strategy, enabling faster transformation, stronger risk diversification, and sustained performance.
Success, however, depends on FAO partners that can integrate talent, technology, and execution into a single, accountable framework. Auxis, now part of Grant Thornton U.S., brings that model to life, helping organizations scale AI, strengthen governance, and operate finance functions with speed, resilience, and measurable impact.
Download the 2026 Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Trends report for an in-depth look at how FAO is being redefined and what it means for finance leaders seeking real value.
Inside the report, you’ll discover:
- How CFOs are using outsourcing to accelerate AI adoption and improve outcomes
- Why tech-enabled nearshoring is becoming central to modern finance delivery
- How hybrid operating models are reshaping resilience and scalability
- The shift from transactional outsourcing to insight-driven, outcome-based FAO
- What the evolving provider landscape means for mid-market and enterprise organizations
Ready to modernize your finance operations? Schedule a consultation with our FAO experts or visit our resource center to explore more finance and accounting outsourcing insights and success stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
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