Meeting the moment: how finance ministries are evolving as expectations surge
Under pressure on multiple fronts, finance ministries can use data and AI to write the public finance playbook
Finance ministries occupy an essential role at the centre of government. In a fast-changing world, their strategic role is expanding as demands grow.
A recent research report – The Future of the Finance Ministry – by Global Government Finance and Global Government Forum identified priority themes: responding to uncertainty; shifting to more flexible systems to better support outcomes; embracing and driving digital transformation and artificial intelligence; and boosting talent and trust.
This international discussion – ‘The future of the finance ministry unpacked and what it means for government’ – explored the report’s findings.
The session featured John McCarthy, chief economist in Ireland’s Department of Finance (who led the interviews for the research); three of the study’s interviewees (from the governments of France, Argentina and Bermuda); and Valentina Ion, public finance and social services global lead at Microsoft (the report’s knowledge partner).
The Future of the Finance Ministry: read the report
Irish ministry’s ‘boundary expansion’
McCarthy has worked for the Department of Finance for more than two decades and highlighted two structural shifts he has seen during that time.
First, a “boundary expansion” and, second, a “lowering of the bar for public sector intervention in the economy.”
“The breadth of issues that we in the finance ministry have to cover has expanded enormously over the past decade or so,” he explained, mentioning the UK’s exit from the European Union in 2020; economic responses to Covid-19; trade policies and tariffs; and the “rebirth of industrial policies”.
“We have been dealing with policy instruments that are typically in the domains of other ministries across government, and over the past few years these really have migrated to the doors of the finance ministry,” he said. “In my experience, over the past few years, it’s been a case of ‘all roads lead to the finance ministry’.”
“What we’ve been dealing with here in the Irish Treasury is so similar to what colleagues have been dealing with elsewhere,” he summarised, referring to the research’s findings. “The universe of issues that we’re all grappling with is evolving rapidly, and [….] it also shows the scale of responsibilities that are now being directed towards finance ministries.”
French ‘gains from digitalisation’
France’s Treasury is part of the Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty (the addition of ‘Industrial and Digital Sovereignty’ is a recent title update).
The ministry has seen the biggest staff reduction among all ministries “because of gains from digitalisation,” said Treasury-based chief economist Dorothée Rouzet.
Productivity gains through digitalisation had, she said, been particularly made in the area of tax administration and collection.
Overall, the Treasury’s structural agenda was shaped more by “re-shifting of priorities rather than expansion or downsizing,” she said.
As examples, two new divisions have been created in the past three years. One focuses on climate and environmental policy (“to look holistically”) and another on financial sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) and fighting financial crime, which became an increased priority after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
GLOBAL GOVERNMENT FINANCE SUMMIT: a unique event that brings together senior civil servants from finance ministries around the world. Enquire about attending the Global Government Finance Summit: 14-15 September 2026, Dublin.
Argentina’s public sector cuts
Carlos Guberman is secretary of the Treasury in Argentina, whose president Javier Milei famously wielded a chainsaw in 2023 to symbolise a promise to cut back the size of the state.
Milei has dramatically streamlined the South American country’s government by halving the number of federal ministries from 18 to nine.
“The Ministry of Economy was around 12,000 people working when we started in office [2023] – now we are around 9,000. So, a very, very huge reduction,” Guberman explained. Within that, “traditional” finance areas including treasury, financing and economic policy have seen their headcount reduced from about 9,000 to about 6,000.
Is the presidential chainsaw still whirring? “We are still working on finding ways to improve the efficiency of the public service,” Guberman said, referencing the use of new technologies.
“We are more thinking about using a very sharp knife right now […] but we are still going in the same direction,” he added.
Bermuda’s growing pressures
Government of Bermuda financial secretary Chidozie Ofoego described the self-governing British Overseas Territory as a “very small” jurisdiction “but yet an important international financial centre that punches above our weight”.
The Ministry of Finance has about 180 staff – a number that “hasn’t materially changed over the years”, he said, “with expenditure staying reasonably flat over that period of time”.
But, he said, “the pressures on us are increasing, and the work required to comply with international regulations and manage the increasingly complex landscape is always changing and putting more resource demands on our team”.
He envisaged headcount as continuing to “stay relatively flat as we look to manage some of those demands through the use of technology”.
Public finance as ‘strategic brain’
Microsoft’s Valentina Ion spoke of finance ministries’ growing importance across society and growing use of AI.
“It’s no longer [just] about collecting revenue to finance the economy – it is about social impact, social-value creation, sustainability and bigger themes,” she said.
She described “humans and AI agents” as “coming together” in an “AI era” that is “about not only productivity gains, but also about AI as a value-creation engine, and allowing for new [and] more complex priorities to be taken on.”
“There’s also more need for transparency that builds trust – not only sharing what ministries are driving, but also being able to measure the outcomes of the allocation of budget [to] different financing programmes, tax programmes, tax incentives, and so on,” she continued. “All this calls for real-time insights, but also capacity of foresight.”
Finance ministries and the public finance function in general are “no longer the back [seat] of the government” but instead are becoming “the strategic brain of government when using and embracing innovation and the right tools,” Ion said.
Black swans: more common
These observations teed up each participant’s reflections on The Future of the Finance Ministry’s opening chapter, titled ‘The evolving role of the finance ministry’.
“We’ve had to be taking on areas not because we wanted to move into those areas but simply because they involve the allocation of resources,” McCarthy said, describing “an involuntary mission creep”.
“We’ve had to get involved simply out of necessity and, of course, that means we’ve had to ramp up our skillset, our knowledge base across many areas,” he continued.
“It means my colleagues and I have to deal with so many different ministries,” he said, explaining what this means day to day. “I would say historically we haven’t had many dealings with our foreign affairs ministry [for example], but we’re dealing with them much more now, given many of the issues are geopolitical in nature.”
“It also means that we’ve had to become much less risk averse because we’re really designing policies from scratch with very little of an evidence base to support the policies,” he said. But “many of these discussions are played out in the public domain, and civil servants are being dragged into the politics rather than just providing the evidence,” he added.
On the topic of horizon scanning, he highlighted an Ireland Department of Finance report, titled ‘Future Forty’ and published in October 2025, that examined how demographic, technological, social and environmental trends could impact Ireland’s public finances over the next 40 years.
“I think a key lesson of the last 10-15 years is that the tails of the probability distribution need to be better understood,” he said. “Black swans are becoming much more common, so I say to my colleagues in the finance ministry, and to other ministries: ‘if we in the finance ministry are not thinking about these things, you can be sure that nobody else is across government’. So, I think that horizon scanning, scenario planning, Plan B thinking about those issues are really important.”
‘Unprecedented uncertainty’ on repeat
On the same trend, Rouzet referred to finance ministries needing to navigate an “environment of permanent uncertainty” involving a succession of crises.
“We don’t exactly know where the next one is coming, but between pandemics, energy crisis, war, tariffs – there seems to be something every year, and we have to adapt our functioning,” she said.
The ink was “barely dry”, she said, on a recent macroeconomic forecast – normally updated twice a year – when developments in US-Iran relations meant that underlying assumptions needed adjusting.
“I think we’ve had to move from having one central scenario to having a range of scenarios,” she said, adding that this has a knock-on effect on “core missions” such as budget preparation.
“Every year we write: ‘we live in unprecedented certainty’… but it’s becoming a habit,” she reflected.
Focus on resilience has become an objective in itself, she said, “rather than growth, jobs, deficit, which are the usual indicators”.
Data in demand
Guberman agreed with McCarthy’s point that if the finance ministry is not thinking about the long term, then “nobody is thinking about that in a government”.
With Milei committed to maintain fiscal balance there is no scope to miss targets, Guberman said. “It’s a very, very tight jacket for us, and we have to be very careful about planning and having the best human resources, the best technology for forecasting and for analysis, and for having real-time data in every aspect of the administration.”
Ofoego highlighted a ‘public value assessment’ tool used in Bermuda. This sees ministries assess financial packages and resource requirements based on the public value that those different activities will generate. It allows for cross-ministerial discussions and allows for prioritisation based on outcomes that are expected to be derived from different activities, he explained. “It facilitates a more holistic conversation around how we prioritise resources and make an assessment of both the financial implications and also broader implications of those prioritisation decisions,” he said.
“There’s work to do, and there are challenges with such a system: how do you measure the outcomes and so on?” he continued. “But at the same time, I think it provides a strong foundation to support discussions. With regards to horizon scanning and scenario planning, we’re thinking more and more about that now, and how we build resilience.”
“I don’t think this is particular to government,” he said. “In Bermuda we have a large insurance and reinsurance industry who are experts looking at risk, looking at what to do under different scenarios, so I think it’s incumbent on finance ministries to look at the available data and plot different paths that we as a country would take depending on whichever scenario materialises. How we’re addressing that is really focused on data, how we build up those early-warning indicators, how we pull data from different areas to support those types of decisions. I think over time we need to improve how we do that, and we will do.”
On ‘data cooperation’ and AI
The importance of “cooperation and collaboration” between ministries and indeed governments was highlighted by Ion. The challenge, she said, is to “remove the blockers” on “digital touchpoints” and on “data cooperation”.
She used the phrasing ‘data cooperation’ and not ‘data sharing’ because technology “can enable data to reside where it is [while] the insights [and] intelligence [can] be shared in real time,” she explained.
“Yes, there are significant differences in terms of digitalisation across governments, in terms of legacy systems, and that needs to change,” Ion continued. “But it’s easier today, in the era of AI. If legacy modernisation would have taken three to five years in the past, today we’re looking at weeks because AI can help write code, can help drive the entire migration process. But it’s also about putting an interface on natural language and enabling for natural system integration.”
Such tech has all sorts of uses for finance ministries, ranging from tax compliance – indeed also enabling reduced costs for taxpayers themselves – to predicting which sectors would be worst affected by budget reallocations.
Ion added that a vast related field of considerations also opens up here – for example, data governance, AI ethics and also change management – beyond the pure technology.
Digital maturity self-assessed
The panel’s government representatives were asked to self-assess the ‘digital maturity’ of their ministries on a scale of one to five. They were also asked how they see innovation in funding for transformational technology following a comment from an audience member that digital upgrades and services require both an initial capital investment and also sustained funding.
McCarthy and Rouzet answered, respectively, “quite high” and “fairly high”; Guberman put a number on it (three); and Ofoego opted for “medium”.
Ireland’s Department of Finance is not, McCarthy said, burdened by older IT systems that some interviewees in the study described elsewhere. Data analysis was, he said, perhaps the biggest challenge.
“We have very strong competition within the labour market for skills in that area,” he said. “We tend to pay less than in the private sector, so that is the key challenge.”
On technology funding, he responded that “one of the great beneficiaries of AI, etc, is going to be the public sector – once we roll it out more – so [it’s about] reprioritising and a willingness to accept the trade-offs.”
French Treasury AI use
Pointing out that ‘digital maturity’ can be evaluated across multiple fields, Rouzet focused specifically on two areas: data and AI.
“I think we always want more data, in a way, probably because we become more demanding because there’s more out there,” she said. But she acknowledged that French government data about (to give a specific example) “households who are below a certain level of income and live in rural areas and have a car” would reside in three different databases that cannot currently be combined. “These kind of things are constraints. We’re working on it,” she said.
France’s Treasury is, she said, using AI tools fairly significantly. “About 70% of staff say they use AI in their work regularly and about a quarter of our staff would say they are advanced AI users,” she said. “We are a fairly ‘young’ directorate, so the age structure probably helps there. But it’s being incorporated in the way we work, with the advantages and the pitfalls.”
She provided examples of AI use including: “basic, no-brainer tasks” such as coding and translation; and for what she described as “replication of studies” to help tackle policy challenges. “If there has been an academic article on Germany, and the code is out there, and the data is available, then using AI to replicate this, and [asking]: ‘What are the results for France?’. It saves weeks of work,” she explained.
“These kinds of uses are being developed more and more, and I think people invent new uses to facilitate or make their work more interesting as we go along,” she added.
On AI constraints and funding
On the question of financing for technology, Rouzet agreed with McCarthy’s reference to reprioritising.
But the way budgets are “constructed” can act as a “basic” barrier, she said. “We have budget for ‘staff’ and budget for ‘non-staff’, and these are not fungible.”
“More fundamentally – and we [governments] probably all face the same constraint, where we handle very confidential information – we can’t just use any general public AI [tool] and just pour our data and our confidential notes in, and use AI for that,” she continued. “So, confidentiality and sovereignty concerns are, in a way, slowing down [uptake] because we can’t necessarily always use the latest state of-the-art tool. We have to use secure tools, a closed network, diffuse guidelines to staff about which AI tools for which use you can actually use.”
The question effectively incorporated fields such as industrial and innovation policies, she said, adding that the French government wants to rely on “sovereign tools, meaning European tools”.
“In our case, these [tools] need funding to grow,” she said. “They also need a market and they need data to be trained. And the public sector is obviously a very big customer. So public procurement and using European-grown tools in the public sector is also giving them a sort of guaranteed market to invest and also to train their model. I think this is also a very important area where the funding needs of the sector in Europe and the needs of the public sector can coincide.”
On skills and ‘value-add’
Guberman described Argentina’s Ministry of the Economy as “working very, very hard to improve” in respect of digital investment. But he argued that public entities across the world would surely always be lagging in this respect because – as Rouzet said – they need to tread carefully.
“We have to understand the liabilities that we might have in using that, so that’s why we are not going to be at the frontier at every moment,” he said.
He echoed McCarthy’s point about skills (“we are not able to pay the same wages that the private sector are paying, so we have to be very intelligent in the way that we hire people”); and Rouzet’s point about how the public sector could potentially better help the private sector (in his words: “give them ways to see that they can use public information as a way to improve their own technology”).
Ofoego said that Bermuda’s Ministry of Finance was in the process of upgrading legacy systems. “We are really thinking about opportunities to leverage technology, we have a number of vacant posts, so this is where some of these issues interact,” he said.
“There’s heavy competition for talent within Bermuda – it’s difficult for the government to recruit – and I see that some of the technological solutions will allow us to augment our existing resource and possibly reduce the need to fill some of those vacancies,” he continued. “There are individuals across the ministry using the technology, but at an enterprise level it requires probably a different type of thinking to really understand where the value-add could be, and so we’re conducting data audits and looking at some of our processes to really understand where we can best achieve value for money by using technology.”
On the funding question, “strategic funds” are available, Ofoego said, that will allow for investment in upfront costs. He then echoed McCarthy’s point about ongoing costs, saying that “it will need to be a case of prioritisation discussions, and really it’s incumbent on those looking for strategic investments to demonstrate where their ongoing value for money will be”.
Top current challenges
The discussion drew to a close with the panel asked to summarise finance ministries’ biggest challenge.
“I’d say the biggest challenge most finance ministries face is this perception that every problem can be monetised: that you can throw money at every problem,” McCarthy responded. “And the excessive focus on the short term – visibly nobody cares about the long term, and that all being amplified by social media.”
“How can finance ministries adapt? There’s no silver bullet, I think it involves a number of elements,” he continued. “I think by doing the ‘bread-and-butter’ issues is really important, so continuing to communicate value for money, continuing to communicate fiscal sustainability, better allocation of public resources – even though there’s pushback, we still need to communicate that.”
“I think there’s a need to leverage data technologies, but also staff – [to ensure] that you are getting the brightest and the best,” he said. “And that you’re also providing the evidence base, irrespective of what the political situation is: you are carving out space to think about longer-term dynamics. You’re not simply like most other line departments, thinking about the next budget, the next allocation of money – you are thinking about the demographic trends, the climate transition, all these megatrends.”
“So, it’s by showing leadership in those areas that a finance ministry can respond and stay at the centre of government,” he summarised.
‘Navigating tension’
“I think keeping an eye on the long term is a real challenge,” responded Rouzet.
“Navigating the tension between new demands for public money – and there’s always a good reason for it – and the need to actually restore public finances is a major difficulty,” she said.
She described a need to be “pedagogical” and to highlight the difference between “facts and figures” and “political choices” – and the “line between these two”.
The French Treasury has, for example, created and promoted a graph showing what €1,000 of taxes pay for, breaking down the composition of public spending, she said.
“What I’ve done as chief economist – and this has maybe traditionally not been a strength of finance ministries – is engaging not just in expert debate, and debate with other ministries (and in Brussels, for those countries in the European Union, etc), but going to very ‘broad’ media and talking to the public, and not leaving that only to other people who may not have the facts and figures. This doesn’t solve the problem, but I think it’s at least a direction in which we need to go,” she said.
‘Pulled in so many directions’
Guberman concluded by arguing that finance ministries should have greater power to decide where public funds are spent.
“We are adding layers of expenditure every time – we have to start choosing which ones we should be paying attention to and [which we should be] leaving aside,” he said. “I think finance ministries should be empowered in every government to have a say on which way to improve the quality of public policies everywhere.”
Ofoego echoed Rouzet’s point of the importance of public communication before also emphasising finance ministries’ pivotal role in government.
“There is an incredible opportunity within a finance ministry to get involved in a breadth of different issues because we have those touchpoints in a way that not many other ministries do,” he said.
“That creates opportunity but also challenges in that you’re pulled into so many directions that there really does have to be clarity over the strategic direction and North Star to help finance ministries and others really focus on what those priorities are that will make a difference to the population. That’s probably my biggest challenge,” he said.
Ion highlighted finance ministries’ increased capability, and need, to “act on signals” to take decisions more quickly; and was optimistic that innovation and purpose act a “talent magnet”.
Common challenges
Overall, the discussion reinforced the findings of The Future of the Finance Ministry report that finance ministries are assuming an increasingly strategic role at the centre of government.
While the scale and context differed across Ireland, France, Argentina and Bermuda, the common challenges identified by each speaker demonstrated that these pressures are shared across governments regardless of size, political leadership or economic circumstances.
The webinar also highlighted that technology alone will not determine the future success of finance ministries. Investment in people, collaboration across government, effective communication with the public and the ability to attract and retain skilled professionals were all identified as important.
Speakers acknowledged that finance ministries will continue to face difficult trade-offs between competing priorities amid an uncertain global environment. But that they are becoming key drivers of resilience, reform and long-term value creation.
The ‘The future of the finance ministry unpacked – and what it means for government’ webinar took place on 24 June 2026. It was hosted by Global Government Finance and Global Government Forum. You can watch the webinar on-demand here.
The study informing the webinar was produced in partnership with Microsoft. Read The Future of the Finance Ministry report
About Ian Hall
Ian is Global Government Finance editor. He has formerly held roles including UK director of Euractiv (2011-2018), editor of Public Affairs News (2007-2011) and news editor of PR Week (2000-2007). He was shortlisted for ‘Editor of the Year’ at the British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) Awards in 2010. He began his career in the Balkans at English-language weekly the Sofia Echo (Bulgaria: 1998-1999).
