The Top 50 Most Reputable Companies

Five years ago, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan deciphered the global market meltdown and credit freeze in a speech at Georgetown University. “In a market system based on trust, reputation has a significant economic value,” he said. Today, those words and the economic decline in 20...

By Jonathan Salem Baskin and Nir Kossovsky • Oct. 16, 2013

Execs Should Fight SEC “Conflict Minerals” Rule

As part of the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress required the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt rules requiring disclosures from public companies that manufacture, or contract to have manufactured, products that use so-called “conflict minerals.”Those minerals, including columbite-tantalite, cas...

By Brinkley Dickerson • Oct. 3, 2013

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Study: Firms that “Cast” Earnings Calls Underperform

Companies that “choreograph” earnings calls by only taking questions from bullish analysts are usually hiding negative information and tend to underperform during future quarters, according to a new working paper by professors at Harvard University and the London School of Economics and Political...

By Alissa Ponchione • Oct. 2, 2013

SEC Goes Ahead with Hated Pay Ratio Rule

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to propose a rule requiring publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of CEO compensation to the median pay of all other employees. The vote was 3-2 along party lines by the Democratic-majority SEC.The commission has delayed the rulemakin...

By Alissa Ponchione • Sept. 18, 2013

Do Board Quotas Cause Bad Accounting?

A truckload of academic research performed in recent years suggests that having women CFOs and board members helps companies achieve some important financial goals. Studies have concluded that the presence of women in one or both of those roles causes statistically significant positive results in...

By David McCann • Aug. 16, 2013

D&O Rates Rise on Flood of Merger Lawsuits

Most finance chiefs working for companies involved in a recent merger or acquisition are well aware of the irritating abundance of legal protests against their deals.Now, however, the omnipresence of so-called “merger objection” lawsuits is hitting companies on another front, helping to drive up ...

By David Katz • July 25, 2013

How to Aggregate Risks Across Your Organization

For many organizations, gathering risk information from many business units and departments and then creating a consolidated risk report to share with senior managements and boards can seem daunting.The sheer volume of risk data to be aggregated can overwhelm even the most astute decision makers....

By Larry Warner and Kristina Narvaez • July 17, 2013

Finance Chiefs Lack Solid Compliance Metrics

Despite being presented with soaring budget requests from compliance executives, CFOs largely have only “lagging indicators” available to gauge the return on investment in corporate regulatory and ethics programs, according to a new report.Over the last three years, the cost of compliance program...

By David Katz • July 8, 2013

Regulatory Risks: Be Very, Very Afraid

Regulatory risks, such as the threat of government pressure to reallocate capital, are the number one threat facing companies in a variety of industries, according to a recent KPMG survey of C-Suite executives.Seventy percent of C-suite executives across all industries said that regulatory change...

By David Katz • May 22, 2013

External Board Service: Chicken or Egg?

Do CFOs who serve on the boards of other companies bring back valuable insights that help their own companies deliver greater value to shareholders? Or are the CFOs of outperforming companies simply more attractive board candidates?Either way, the outperformance is plain to see. Among the 482 pub...

By David McCann • May 8, 2013

Not an Automatic Marriage

There is a lot to accomplish in the run-up to going public, and corporate governance might seem like one of the easier parts of the process. But it is essential, says a new report from PwC. Soon after a company files its initial public offering, it will begin to face scrutiny from shareholders an...

By Marielle Segarra • April 29, 2013

Chase’s Contingency Plan Leaves Lasting Impression

For years, I have covered disasters and have written about contingency planning for catastrophes. To stay open in the aftermath of a disaster, experts have advised organizations to go beyond protecting their physical property.Companies need to make sure their employees are safe and that they also...

By Caroline McDonald • April 2, 2013

Takeovers: Ding Dong Dell

Last month Michael Dell offered to take private the computer firm he founded. It could cost him his job. On March 25th a subcommittee of Dell’s board concluded that two rival bids might prove better than the $13.65 a share that Mr. Dell is offering.The battle could drag on. The new bidders, Carl ...

By Economist Staff • March 29, 2013

Buyers Fear Stiff Workers’ Comp Pricing

In their company’s most recent spate of insurance renewals, many CFOs found workers’ compensation the toughest line of insurance coverage to buy at the right price. To deal with the stiff pricing and underwriting of such coverage, some have been focusing on keeping claims down. But with the marke...

By Caroline McDonald • March 27, 2013

Consequences of Ignoring a Key Risk Indicator

Wall Street was shocked in January 2002 when Ford Motor Co. announced a $1 billion write-off of its stockpile of precious metals, primarily palladium. Why had the number-two carmaker taken such a risk, building up a big inventory of a precious metal that, as it turned out, was not being included ...

By Kristina Narvaez • March 25, 2013

Pension Plans Evolve into Quasi-Insurers

Corporations with defined-benefit pension plans are beginning to recognize that having a pension plan is just like having an insurance subsidiary. Increasingly, corporate boards are realizing that insurance subsidiaries are not core to their business, so they must decide either to run the pension...

By Charles E.F. Millard • March 21, 2013

Will Dodd-Frank Double Tax Captive Insurers?

A subsection of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Nonadmitted and Reinsurance Reform Act (NRRA), has become a source of worry for the senior finance and tax executives of companies that self-insure their own risks via domestically domiciled captive insurance companies.The source of anxiety is whether a cap...

By Caroline McDonald • March 11, 2013

Buying Property Insurance in Stormy Times

Companies preparing for annual insurance renewals may be facing higher premiums for property coverage. That’s not a surprise, given the devastating fall storm season in the Northeast. Insured losses stemming from superstorm Sandy, which struck the East Coast on October 29, 2012, are alone likely ...

By Caroline McDonald • March 8, 2013

The Importance of the CFO-CRO Partnership

In today’s new era of permanent volatility, the CFO–chief risk officer partnership can promote a more effective, integrated approach to risk management, while driving further strategic and operational efficiencies in a company. That, in turn, helps to make companies more agile and able to retain ...

By John Bugalla and Kristina Narvaez • March 5, 2013

How to Map Your Risks

Over the last 10 years, many companies have adopted an enterprise risk management (ERM) framework and launched the process by taking steps to identify and assess their risks. But such an exercise for a global company can involve developing a list of risks that could number in the hundreds.Such an...

By James Kallman and John Bugalla • Feb. 14, 2013

Smart Choices, Smart Workers

Thank you for highlighting the issues around the complex subject of workplace environments (“Office Space,” December 2012). The impact of workstyles/workplaces on performance can definitely be measured: when a few key metrics are defined up front, the commitment to collecting data (qualitative an...

By CFO Readers • Feb. 7, 2013

Lehman Couldn’t Handle the Risk Management Truth

During the financial crisis beginning in 2008, risk management–or the lack of it–was examined, questioned, and sometimes blamed for the financial state of banks and other financial institutions, some of which were bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).In at least one institution,...

By Caroline McDonald • Feb. 4, 2013

The Bad News about Bank Risk Management

During the past 18 months, we at Egon Zehnder International have examined the enterprise risk management (ERM) practices at 10 major global banks, and the good news is that all of them see ERM as a strategic imperative. They recognize that risks of all kinds — not just credit, market, and liquidi...

By Rob Sloan • Jan. 31, 2013

How Performance Drives Risk Management

Do you think enterprise risk management (ERM) is on life support? Well, for many organizations, it is. But for those astute leaders who have come to learn that success is affected most often by risk and the way in which risks are managed, the risk-management discipline has a new life.That new lif...

By Chris Mandel and Gary Bierc • Jan. 22, 2013

10 Steps 401(k) Plan Sponsors Should Take This Year

The corporate sponsors of 401(k)s and other defined-contribution (DC) benefit plans are likely to be more active in reviewing plan goals, more prescriptive in their investment options, and more prone to interact with employees who want to understand how to hit their own retirement income, accordi...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Jan. 14, 2013