A rather traditional CFO role can also be concluded from the studies of Bremer (2010) and
Lüdtke (2010), who analyzed the job descriptions of the 86 CFOs working for the largest
publicly traded German firms in 1998 and in 2007. On one hand, they found that more firms
had installed a CFO position near the top of the corporate hierarchy in 2007 compared to
1998. However, on the other hand, the findings of Bremer and Lüdtke also suggested that the
CFO still mainly has responsibility for traditional tasks and only limited responsibility for
strategic tasks. These studies also focused on a country’s largest corporations, which implies
that its results mainly apply to the CFO role in NFBs.