CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Oct. 12

Discount retailer Stein Mart said that Gregory Kleffner, who heads finance, plans to retire in the spring. The company has hired an executive search firm to find external candidates to succeed him.Dominion Energy said that finance chief Mark McGettrick will retire from the firm on Jan. 1. Effecti...

By Joan Urdang • Oct. 12, 2018

Estée Lauder Aims to Dismiss CEO of Deciem

Estée Lauder announced it was seeking to have Brandon Truaxe removed as co-CEO of the skin-care company Deciem, following months of erratic online behavior and personnel decisions by the company founder.In a statement this week, Estée Lauder said it was “deeply concerned” about material Truaxe po...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 12, 2018

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Top 5 stories from CFO.com

From CPA licensure changes to undergoing a digital transformation, these are the most popular stories CFOs are reading. 

By CFO.com staff

Treasury Announces New Rules For Foreign Investments

The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued new temporary regulations on foreign investments in U.S. companies that will give the government more power to block foreign transactions on national security grounds.Under the new rules, foreign investors will have to alert a Treasury-led interagency co...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 11, 2018

Square CFO Friar Moves to Nextdoor’s Top Job

Sarah Friar, the longtime CFO of payments company Square, is making a major tech industry move, joining social network Nextdoor as its chief executive officer.During her six years at Square, Friar guided Square through an initial public offering — an experience she may repeat at Nextdoor, where s...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 11, 2018

Worksite Medical Clinics Proliferate, Save Costs

Large employers are increasingly likely to provide on-site or near-site medical clinics for employees, and for good reasons. Among them: they’re cost-effective.Mercer recently reported that in 2017, 33% of U.S. employers with at least 5,000 workers offered at least one such clinic for general med...

By David McCann • Oct. 11, 2018

Rolls-Royce: Restructuring a British Institution

This article has been corrected as of October 11 at 12:00 p.m. The original version erroneously stated that Rolls-Royce had sold off two of its divisions.LONDON — Once a company gets to a certain size or age, it can be easy for the employees to forget that the point of the business, ultimately, i...

By Efe Otokiti • Oct. 10, 2018

Four Key Skills for a New Era in Finance

LONDON — “Change is here, and there is no way to get around the fourth industrial revolution in finance,” Kathryn Sherratt, a CFO, opined at the CFO Rising Europe Summit in September.The fourth industrial revolution is defined as an era in which there is a fusion of technologies that blurs the li...

By Caitlin Stanway-Williams • Oct. 10, 2018

IMF Trims Global Growth Forecast

The International Monetary Fund has cut its growth forecast for the global economy in 2018 and 2019, citing rising international trade tensions and higher oil prices.The fund forecast that the U.S. economy would grow at 2.9% in 2018, but it said that rate would slow to 2.5% in 2019. “U.S. growth ...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 9, 2018

Ready for the New Lease Accounting Standard?

The new standard for lease accounting (Accounting Standards Codification 842) is intended to provide investors and other stakeholders with a more complete and transparent view of a US company’s financial position with respect to leasing activities.Its main objective is to address concerns about c...

By Deloitte & Touche, Sean Torr, Jeanne McGovern, and Deloitte & Touche • Oct. 9, 2018

Starbucks Names Hyatt’s Pat Grismer as CFO

Starbucks has hired Patrick Grismer, a finance executive with extensive restaurant industry experience, as its new CFO, replacing Scott Maw.Grismer will join the coffee giant from Hyatt Hotels, where he has served as CFO since March 2016. He was also previously finance chief at Yum Brands, the pa...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 8, 2018

U.S. Unemployment Hits Lowest Level Since 1969

The U.S. unemployment rate fell by 0.2% to 3.7% in September as the number of unemployed fell 270,000 to 6.0 million, according to the Labor Department.It was the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.“We’ve been dancing around hitting this unemployment record for several months. It was inevitable,...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 5, 2018

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Oct. 5

Jeffrey Davis has been named to lead the finance function at Qurate Retail Group, effective Oct. 15. Davis, who will also become CFO of QVC, comes to the company from J.C. Penney, where he also was finance chief. Previous posts include finance chief of Darden Restaurants as well as CFO of Walmart...

By Joan Urdang • Oct. 5, 2018

Highest Priority for Finance Today: FP&A

Financial planning and analysis has emerged in recent years as a cornerstone of an effective finance function. Still, whatever advancements in FP&A quality have been achieved, they’re apparently not enough to satisfy CFOs.Among 10 key finance processes and activities, finance officials survey...

By David McCann • Oct. 4, 2018

Accountants Protecting Their Turf

Do appraisers of business assets have to be accountants? To most CFOs, the answer would be no. However, a vocal group of accountants is pushing to limit a recognized professional designation for appraisers to those already licensed as certified public accountants. This is the type of formalistic ...

By Robert Pozen • Oct. 4, 2018

U.S. Shopping Malls Limp Into the Holiday Quarter

The first indoor shopping mall in the United States opened in Edina, Minn., in 1956. Sixty-two years later, the concept is hanging on for dear life.Despite strong consumer confidence and some increases in wages, as well as the forecast of healthy U.S. holiday sales, the mall vacancy rate increase...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 4, 2018

The Difference Between Good CFOs and Great CFOs

When CFOs of large North American companies were asked by Deloitte about the legacy they wanted to leave, they said, in overwhelming numbers, that they wanted to have had a strong influence on their company’s ability to perform well in the future and to have left things better than they found the...

By Sandy Cockrell III and Charles Holley • Oct. 3, 2018

Auditing the Auditor

Most mid-size to large organizations rely on internal and external audits as a key preventative measure against fraud. The problem is, many CFOs assume that a routine financial audit will reveal financial anomalies that could be fraud. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true.Audits almost never...

By Tiffany Couch and Acuity Forensics • Oct. 2, 2018

Why and How to Transition to a Subscription Business

Most finance chiefs are probably already aware that subscription business models are the darlings of Wall Street.According to Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, subscription-based businesses are growing revenue nine times faster than the S&P 500. Some of the largest recent IPOs have been for...

By Daniel McCarthy and Robbie Kellman Baxter • Oct. 2, 2018

Slump in MBA Applications Hits Elite Schools

The decline in applications to MBA programs in the U.S. appears to have spread to elite schools, with Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford all experiencing slumps this year.Overall, U.S. business schools received 140,860 applications for programs including the traditional two-year MBA, down 7% from the...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 2, 2018

California to Require Women On Boards

A bill passed by the California legislature last month was signed into law on Sunday by Governor Jerry Brown requiring publicly traded firms to have at least one woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019.The bill was part of a set of legislation that looks to “protect and support wome...

By William Sprouse • Oct. 1, 2018

Not the First Choice

Not all CFOs are brimming with enthusiasm about RPA or think it heralds a vast improvement in productivity.At Zebra Technologies, a manufacturer of barcode scanners, data-tracking systems, and information management tools, finance chief Olivier Leonetti isn’t expecting an automation revolution un...

By David McCann • Oct. 1, 2018

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Sept. 28

Commercial fleet manager Ryder System said that Art Garcia, who heads finance, plans to retire next April. The company has begun a search to replace Garcia, who joined the company in 1997 and has led the finance function since 2010. Once his successor has been chosen, Garcia will become a special...

By Joan Urdang • Sept. 28, 2018

RPA: Seeing is Believing

Shortly after Deanna Strable was promoted to CFO at Principal Financial in February 2017, she attended a conference for finance executives. While networking, she found that about half of the group was talking about robotic process automation.“To be honest, I didn’t even know what RPA was at that ...

By David McCann • Sept. 28, 2018

Time to Shine: CFOs to Watch 2018

Ascending to the top of finance at a consumer giant, trying to revive the shares of a popular social media app, guiding a company through a backdoor listing, allocating capital to development of a leading-edge product, assuming the mantle after an internal controls debacle — our CFOs to Watch wil...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 27, 2018

Petrobras Fined $1.8B for Duping U.S. Investors

Brazilian energy giant Petrobras has agreed to pay nearly $1.8 billion to settle U.S. allegations that it manipulated its financial statements to conceal a massive corruption scheme from investors.The settlement resolves U.S. investigations arising out of the corruption scandal at Petrobras that ...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 27, 2018