Not what they say, who they hire

Everyone is talking about AI in finance. Actuals wanted to know who is actually building for it, so it looked at who companies hire.

Peter Engel, CEO of Actuals, opened Finance Unlocked with what his company sees in the market. This chapter is about Actuals' own study: it read the open finance roles of 10 of the largest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands.

The ambition is there

Deloitte asked 200 CFOs of large North American companies at the end of 2025 how they see AI. 87% expected it to be extremely or very important to their finance department in 2026.

Use is another matter. In Gartner's survey of 183 finance leaders in 2025, 59% used AI in their finance function, compared with 58% in 2024 and 37% in 2023. Adoption has levelled off.

Gartner also names what gets in the way. Through 2026, it expects organisations to abandon 60% of AI projects that are not supported by AI-ready data.

AI is an amplifier. Give it reconciled data and it magnifies your best judgment. Give it fragmented data and it magnifies your mistakes, with the same conviction.

One rule for every company

Actuals opened the live finance careers page of each company on 11 June or 10 July 2026. The 10 companies are bol, Coolblue, Picnic, Belsimpel, Wehkamp, Booking.com, Takeaway.com, Albert Heijn, HEMA and Rituals. It read more than 50 live job posts and sorted them by 6 role types.

Then Actuals put each company into 1 of 3 groups. Building the future: companies hiring for roles that build data and systems inside finance, such as finance data, finance systems, automation and reconciliation at scale. Running the present: companies hiring for roles that run the existing machine, such as administration, classic control, credit and procurement. Standing still: companies that barely hire in finance.

Actuals is open about what this is: a snapshot of public job posts, and a signal about where a company is investing right now. It is no verdict on the whole finance department. A company can have a strong base and simply not be hiring.

Who is building

2 of the 10, bol and Booking, are hiring people who bring data and systems into finance, Actuals found. 7 hire to run the present. 1 barely hires in finance at all.

At bol, the controllers in the job posts have data and reporting in their title. And there is a data analyst open specifically for finance, separate from central BI. In Actuals' reading, finance is getting its own data capacity there.

At Booking, Actuals found a product manager for AI in finance, between the classic controllers and tax roles. It also found a specialist who builds the finance systems in SAP.

Actuals adds a caveat for both. Data and reporting in a job title tell you something about the reporting side. They don't automatically tell you about the source data underneath. And at Booking, the build roles are a minority in a large finance organisation, spread across several countries.

Keeping the machine running

Coolblue had 7 finance job posts open, almost all in administration and payment processing, with 1 strategic-analytical role as the exception. Actuals calls it a strong, mature operation.

Picnic is known for building its own technology, from logistics to robotics. Yet its 3 open finance roles were classic, Actuals found: capital control, fixed-asset accounting and a junior associate. Actuals calls Picnic "the biggest latent leap" in the study: few companies could modernise finance as fast as Picnic, if it turned that engineering strength inward.

Takeaway.com invests in planning and process systems, such as Anaplan and automation in record to report. Actuals sees that as tooling on top of the numbers, rather than work on the data layer underneath. Belsimpel and Rituals build data capacity too, Actuals found, but on the commercial or product side, not inside finance. Albert Heijn and HEMA hire for classic finance roles too: a business controller for e-commerce at Albert Heijn, and roles in audit, risk and payroll at HEMA.

Wehkamp, the company standing still, had 1 open finance role, in procurement. Actuals notes that in a downturn, not hiring is a rational choice. The signal shows where a company is heading, and says nothing about the skill of its finance team.

The empty rows

Actuals also lists 6 roles that build the finance of tomorrow. 3 of them were open at none of the 10 companies: a reconciliation lead, a controller who codes, and FP&A with real-time tooling.

Actuals counts a financial systems owner, a data engineer in finance and an automation lead for finance operations as open at 1 of the 10 each, although elsewhere the study says no company hires explicitly for automation. In Actuals' view, reconciliation at scale is the foundation under everything. Yet hardly anyone hires for it.

An empty quadrant is not a shortfall. It is an open goal.

Read your own team

You can apply the same yardstick to your own department in 10 minutes, Actuals writes. Open your own finance job posts and write down the titles, exactly as they stand. Take what you are hiring now, not what you want to hire.

Then sort them. Do they build data, systems, automation or reconciliation, or do they run control and administration? Last, look at which future role is missing. In Actuals' words, that's the role you'd hire first. Start at the source of your data: reconciliation and systems.

What to do on Monday

Each step below comes from the Actuals study.

1. Open your own finance job posts and write down the titles exactly as they stand.
2. Sort them: do they build data and systems in finance, or run control and administration?
3. Find the future role that is missing, and start at the source of your data: reconciliation and systems.
4. Make your match rate a number you can name, day after day.
5. Move reconciliation upstream, before the ledger, instead of leaving it for a correction round at the close.

Source: Actuals Research, June and July 2026