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Glite Dictionary
chief financial officer

chief financial officer

15 3.4
A senior manager who looks after a company's money, makes budgets, and prepares financial reports
  • noun
  • /ʧif faɪˈnænʃəl ˈɔfɪsər/
translation icon : director financiero
  • The 46-year-old Fix joined the port as chief financial officer in 2008.
  • former chief financial officer
  • vice president and chief financial officer
  • chief financial officer and president

So I'm the secretary Treasurer, which is the chief financial officer of the AFLCIO.

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Examples

  • Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend, Diana Taylor, was once LIPA's chief financial officer.

    Blog text (11)

  • You were the chief financial officer at Miramax.

    She Said (2022)

  • Key leadership positions include a chief executive officer, chief academic officer, chief financial officer, and chief student affairs officer.

    Academic text (2007)

  • Important roles, to be sure, but still not the same as directors, chief financial officers or chief executives.

  • For reasons known only to accountants and chief financial officers, the big guys at headquarters decided not to run the contest a second year.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • By way of example, a few weeks ago we had a manufacturing problem, and I called in my production manager and my chief financial officer, and we discussed it.

    Academic text (1990)

  • Victoria D. Harker is the chief financial officer of Gannett Co. Inc., a large newspaper company.

    Blog text (30)

  • The final Commissioner was J. Wilson Newman, chief financial officer and former president of Dun & Bradstreet.

    Academic text (2017)

  • Kristin Sherman was the chief financial officer at Marcadia Biotech.

    Blog text (31)

  • Her husband earns six figures as a chief financial officer at a large corporation.

Synonyms

CFO
vschief financial officer
30 4.6

A senior manager who manages a company's money, plans budgets, and reports results

is a senior executive who handles budgeting and approves expenditures

How Senior

minister of finance
  • Formal
72 4.2
chief financial officer
15 3.4
controller
  • US
8 4.3
accountant
212 2.7
bookkeeper
24 3.2

Surface Forms

chief financial officer singular
chief financial officers plural

Morphology

chief + financial + officer

The meaning is directly compositional: 'chief' (primary) + 'financial' (relating to money) + 'officer' (an organizational post) together clearly point to the senior person responsible for a company's finances. This is a common, cross-linguistic noun-phrase construction, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words should be able to infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

Chief financial officer comes from the words chief, meaning leader, financial, meaning about 'money', and officer, meaning an official person. So it pictures one person 'in charge' of a company's 'money', which is why the title means the top manager who looks after the company's finances.