Artificial intelligence is rewriting how companies run their processes. Trade wars, and the other kind, are keeping markets unsettled. Sustainability requirements are forcing strategies and priorities to be reopened. The list of things a chief financial officer has to hold in view keeps getting longer and less tidy. Forbes Italia has picked out the fifty in this country it judges to be managing that best, published in alphabetical order rather than ranked.
The selection cuts across the whole economy rather than clustering in one sector. Financial services are well represented, with Cristiano Borean at Generali, Edoardo Ginevra at Banco Bpm, Laura Restelli at Cnp Assurances Italia, Massimo Luvié at Reale Mutua and Raffaella Tessari at Cherry Bank. Manufacturing and industry bring Antonio Picca Piccon at Ferrari, Mauro Barani at Interpump Group, Stefano Severi at Fincantieri NextTech, Vincenzo Maragliano at Feralpi, Roberta Boccazzi at Smeg and Marco Tagliapietra at Burgo.
Consumer names and design run through it too: Francesco Mele at Campari, Michele Melotti at Safilo, Iacopo Martini at Damiani, Elisabetta Scotti at Flos B&B Italia, Laura Tognazzo at Morellato, Marcello Treglia at Moleskine, Alberto Zocchi at Lindt and Sprüngli, Marco Deotto at Unieuro and Gianluca Monaco at Gruppo Montenegro. Healthcare and pharmaceuticals appear through Gianluca Capuano at Synlab Italia, Henrike Hartemink at Novartis Italia, Matteo Riva at Aurora Biofarma and Alberto Villa at Doc Pharma, while technology and services bring Stefano Beretta at Technoprobe, Giorgio Ceredi at Expert.ai, Francesco Pagliarini at Kyndryl, Christian De Felice at Almaviva and Valentina Ficaio at The Adecco Group.
The individual paths tell you what the job now asks for. Capuano read economics at Luiss in Rome, started in audit and consulting and built a finance career across healthcare, pharma and services at Abbott, AbbVie and Johnson and Johnson before Synlab. Hartemink is Dutch, has more than twenty years in pharmaceuticals, food and ingredients, and has held finance leadership at country, regional, global and group level across the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Italy. Since 2024 she has run finance for a Novartis operation in Italy that combines commercial activity, production sites, clinical trials and around two thousand staff.
Two others show the same widening. Maurizio Turci has been at Italmatch Chemicals since 1997 and is now group chief financial officer and general manager, having steered a global expansion that involved sixteen acquisitions and a bond issue, with change management, corporate integration, digitalisation and sustainability folded into the finance remit. Roberta Negri at Teha Group has more than twenty five years in administration, finance and control, and describes work that runs to organisational and financial transformation, governance and planning systems, and operating models built for efficiency over the medium and long term.
Raffaella Tessari's brief at Cherry Bank is the clearest illustration of how far the role has stretched. She has been chief financial officer since the bank was founded in 2021, following it through incorporation and transformation, and now coordinates a finance area that takes in accounting and reporting, planning and management control, supervisory reporting, treasury and finance, tax, sustainability and procurement. Sustainability and procurement sitting in the same portfolio as supervisory reporting is not what the title meant a decade ago.