The days are long gone when a company’s finance director was an inward-looking number cruncher providing unglamorous support to a flamboyant chief executive. Now the job is a high-profile stepping stone to the top.

Thirty-one FTSE 100 companies are led by former chief financial officers (CFOs). The latest is David Nish, whose appointment as chief executive of Standard Life was announced last week.

According to Gerry Grimstone, Standard Life’s chairman: “We appointed David not because he was CFO but because he was the best available candidate after a global search — but, as our former CFO, he is a man who knows our business well.”

The importance of that was amplified by Peter Sands, who stepped up from finance director to become chief executive of Standard Chartered three years ago. He said: “Being a CFO means you have a very good grasp of the technical aspects of the business and I think a lot of businesses are increasingly technical. The complexities of accounting and financial management are very important to understand. The more the balance sheet matters, the more powerful and critical is the role of the CFO.”

The balance sheet never matters more than in a recession and the dire business climate is said to have increased the demand for financial skills and attention to detail as companies cope with refinancings and painful restructurings.

Phil Sheridan, UK managing director of Robert Half, the recruiter, said: “We are seeing across multiple sectors people with very strong finance backgrounds transition from CFO to CEO or from a finance role to a more general management position.”

Most CFOs start off with a background in accountancy and work their way up through the company’s finance function, but a measure of the job’s importance can be seen in the fact that high-flying generalists such as John Varley, Barclays’ chief executive, and Naguib Kheraj, who fills the seat at Cazenove, have done stints as Barclays’ CFO.

There are, nonetheless, obstables to be negotiated by chief financial officers seeking to rise to the top. One can be their lack of experience in running a business and any resulting doubts about their leadership skills. Suzzane Wood, head of the CFO practice at Heidrick & Struggles, the recruiters, said: “It is highly unusual for a CFO who hasn’t had business experience and who hasn’t run something to become CEO.”

Ms Wood pointed out that Mr Nish had indicated his desire to move up at ScottishPower when he switched from chief financial officer to run the infrastructure division before joining Standard Life.

Julian Roberts, another former CFO, said that his decision to run Old Mutual’s Skandia unit and the group’s need for radical restructuring had helped him to become chief executive a year ago. “Having been CFO and run a division, I had the best chance then of going through the transition into the group role. If an outsider had come in, it would have been an absolute nightmare. I knew the group well, warts and all, and was able to hit the ground running.”

Andrew Horton, who moved up to run Beazley, the Lloyd’s of London insurer, last year, said that he had been able to learn from Andrew Beazley, the former chief executive, and do “CEO-like things” as finance director. Being CFO allowed him to build more relationships, he said, than if he had been confined to running a division. “One of the reasons I had a good chance of taking over was that I knew more people in Beazley than perhaps anybody else because I got out there and talked to people,” Mr Horton said.

As pressure grows for stronger financial skills among non-executive directors, CFOs are also looking there for promotion. After 14 years in various CFO jobs, including BT and Lloyds TSB, Sir Philip Hampton became chairman of J Sainsbury in 2004 before taking on the chairmanship of Royal Bank of Scotland last year. Ms Wood said: “Since Philip Hampton, there have been a number of CFOs from listed companies who have retired earlier than 60 to pursue a non-executive career and become chairman.”

CFO is, therefore, now a route to the grandest positions in British corporate life and finance has become a path for those who decide early on that they want to be the boss. But the allure of the top job can grip even those who thought they were content to bury themselves in the numbers.

As a senior director at a FTSE 100 company put it: “Some CFOs are perfectly happy with a career structure where they become CFOs of bigger and bigger companies, but there is often a CEO waiting to burst out. These are people who by definition sit very close to the seat of power and see the attraction of being in it.”

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