How TX Group’s CFO Reimagines Finance for a Fragmented Media Future
How an integrated financial system, an unconventional CFO and a clear stance on the transformation of the TX Group are helping to reconcile economic contrasts, technological upheavals and institutional identity.
The story of TX Group reads like a compressed history of European media. A newspaper business founded more than a century ago. A classified empire born from the web’s disruptive rise. Two faces. One heritage pulling toward reinvention, the other resisting decline. It is in this tension that Wolf-Gerrit Benkendorff, Group CFO of TX Group, operates. His vantage point offers a rare window into how legacy institutions can transform themselves when technology not only supports their business but reshapes its very logic.
Benkendorff’s career path is itself a study in unconventional alignment. Twenty years in consulting. A background in finance and controlling. Deep familiarity with ERP systems. And finally, the moment when TX Group, once his client, became his employer, because the organization needed someone capable of steering an integrated digital finance landscape. The bridge between accounting and controlling had collapsed under its own fragmentation. Workday became the new backbone. And Benkendorff became the person who would connect two previously disconnected worlds.
What emerges from his perspective is a technology implementation story and a story about a necessary shift in institutional identity.
Before Workday, TX Group’s finance function was structurally—and culturally—divers. Accounting on one side. Controlling on the other. Two departments operating with different data, different interpretations, and different understandings of the same business reality. Integration therefore was an existential necessity.
Workday harmonized the functions into a shared source of truth, because the old operating model simply stopped fitting the new technological infrastructure. The organization needed what Benkendorff calls “one hat for both functions.” That structural unification created something technology alone never delivers: new behavior.
This is a recurring pattern across digital transformation efforts. Systems break old walls, but only leaders can redesign the architecture that follows. TX Group’s consolidation of finance and controlling was a cultural pivot born from a system that demanded coherence.
TX Group’s business embodies the contradictions of today’s media landscape. Newspapers, once the gravitational center of the company, are now under continued financial pressure. Classified marketplaces, born from the early migration of job ads, real estate listings, and automotive classifieds to the web, represent the vast majority of the company’s value. Profit on one side. Transformation pressure on the other.
For investors, this duality is simple: maximize the growth engine, avoid subsidizing decline. For employees, it feels more visceral. How can layoffs coexist with organizational profitability? How can a “struggling” business exist within a thriving group? Benkendorff must tell both stories simultaneously: a version tailored to analysts who demand clarity of capital allocation, and a version meant for internal teams navigating the emotional realities of restructuring.
It is here that technology again plays a subtler role. Though digital systems do not solve these dilemmas, they can shape the transparency with which they must be addressed. When data becomes unified, narratives can follow.
The decision to move from an on-premises platform to cloud was not driven by technical dissatisfaction alone. It represented a philosophical turning point. The company wanted something else: a platform aligned with agility rather than legacy assumptions.
Then came the bold part. The group decided to move all companies to Workday—and go live ten months later. A timeline many would consider reckless. To TX Group, it was a cultural signature. A willingness to jump rather than inch forward. Expertise would be built in flight, instead of prepared on the runway.
This appetite for decisive movement is instructive. Transformation often rewards conviction.
What defines a modern CFO? In Benkendorff’s case, it is less about technical mastery—though he has that—and more about architectural thinking. He inherited an organization where once-separated departments were suddenly interdependent. Where historic revenue models were in decline. Where investor expectations clashed with internal sentiment. And where a unified digital system demanded a unified operational model.
This is a CFO far beyond merely reconciling numbers but actually reconciling narratives.
His background in consulting becomes particularly relevant. Consultants see patterns. They connect constraints. They push organizations to question inherited logic. TX Group needed someone who could integrate both: systems and assumptions. And that is increasingly the core competency of transformation-era finance leaders.
TX Group's Story echo broader macrotrends shaping the future of work, finance, and organizational design:
Legacy structures collapse when unified systems arrive.
Media groups must master narrative asymmetry.
Speed is becoming a competitive differentiator.
CFOs now serve as translators between technological capability and organizational identity.
The truth is, that transformation is about adopting new systems but also about accepting that those systems will force new organizational truths.
TX Group, by choosing Workday, chose a new way of seeing itself. A company with deep roots in print had to reorganize around digital realities. A finance function accustomed to silos had to act as one. A CFO with a consulting pedigree became the architect of coherence rather than the steward of budgets.
TX Group’s journey is unfinished. The heritage business continues its transformation. The classified platforms continue to scale. Financial discipline must coexist with organizational empathy. And Workday is now the connective system through which those complexities are illuminated.
Benkendorff’s perspective offers a compelling takeaway: transformation can be a structural condition. Once a system becomes integrated, so can the organization. Once data becomes unified, so can decision-making. Once technology accelerates, leadership can match its pace.
The future rewards companies willing to realign their internal architecture with their technological one. TX Group is reconciling a century-old identity with a cloud-based future. And it is doing so through the lens of a CFO who understands that the hardest part of transformation is not technological change. It is institutional coherence.
