Do chief financial officers make desirable CEOs? At a time when finance plays an ever-larger role in corporate strategy and many CFOs serve not only as key advisers to the CEO but also as the point person for communicating with financial markets, the CFO's portfolio of skills would seem to serve well as a platform for that final leap to the boss's suite.

Or does it? The ability of the chief financial officer to win promotion to the CEO's job is mixed. About a fifth of all CEOs in the United Kingdom and the United States once served as CFO. The number drops to between 5 and 10 percent in European markets (for example, France and Germany) and in Asia, perhaps because many companies in those regions still have CFOs who are little more than controllers. However, recent high-profile examples—including Werner Wenning at Bayer, Yoichi Wada at Square Enix, and Charles Chao at Sina—show that boards in continental Europe and Asia are willing to turn to the CFO as the next chief executive, even in some very large multinational companies.

To explore the CFO's appeal for a company's top position, we conducted interviews with investors, board members, external advisers, CFOs,...