•Digital technologies will further impact the finance function and controllers.•Senior controllers feel that their current digital competency levels are too low.•Advancing task-specific digital competencies is required to stay relevant.•At any current competency level, knowledge drives the competency growth they expect to be required from them.•Digital competency growth can be self-started by deepening knowledge first. Prior research foresees that advancing digital technologies call for increasing competency levels of controllers. Competency theory predicts that achieving this will require increasing knowledge of these technologies and the ability to task-specifically use it. Empirical evidence of the recognition of these necessary conditions is missing. Drawing on competency literature and extant research on influences of nine technologies, we survey 453 senior controllers. We find for all technologies that they perceive their current knowledge and competency levels lower than required and that their expectations of the required competency growth correlate positively with perceived current knowledge at any current competency level, even for task-specific technologies that have the highest current and future competency scores (big data, analytics, visualization). However, their expectations may underestimate the future digital competency levels required for staying relevant. Our evidence urges controllers to work on their digital competencies and put task-specific knowledge first for each new competency.