Quotas Aren’t Best Way to Get Women on Boards: Study

The use of quotas isn’t the most effective way to get more women to participate – and remain — on corporate boards, according to research presented Wednesday at BNY Mellon’s Womenomics conference and reported in The New York Times/Deal Book.More than quotas, greater indicators of women’s particip...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • April 8, 2015

Executives Forced to Own More Company Stock

Bowing to pressure from investors to make top executives more accountable for their performance, large companies are gradually requiring CEOs and CFOs to own more of their employer’s stock.In 2014, among the 90% of Fortune 500 companies that had stock-ownership guidelines, 92% had guidelines for ...

By David McCann • March 19, 2015

Companies Dropping the Ball on Risk, Compliance

Companies are woefully unprepared to deal with the increasingly challenging risk and compliance environment, and the blitz of devastating corporate blunders witnessed in 2014 will recur, and then some, this year, says Forrester Research in a scathing new report.The report cites such corporate fai...

By David McCann • March 4, 2015

Five Tips for Measuring Compliance Success

Whistleblower hotlines are an essential component of any compliance program. They provide an anonymous process for reporting unethical issues and have led to many very high-profile investigations and prosecutions.But when it comes to determining the success of compliance programs, too many compan...

By Lucy Skelton • Nov. 10, 2014

Lack of Integration Hurts Loss Control at Family Enterprises

As advisers to family-controlled operating businesses and private investment offices, we’re likely to encounter every week a new tale of dispute, fraud, theft, litigation and ensuing financial loss among multi-generational businesses.After decades of serving this community, we are no longer surpr...

By Paul McKibbin and Linda Bourn • Oct. 27, 2014

Replacing the Board

Corporate boards are among the most important institutions in capitalism. Their job is to police the relationship between shareholders who own companies and managers who run them. This means keeping an eye out for managerial incompetence and fraud. It also means standing back and offering strateg...

By Economist Staff • Aug. 21, 2014

Ezcorp Shareholder Ousts CEO, Elevates CFO

In the wake of last week’s ouster of its CEO by a top shareholder, pawn-shop operator Ezcorp said Monday that it had installed CFO Mark Kuchenrither as interim chief executive.The announcement was made by the shareholder group MS Pawn Limited Partnership, which owns all of the company’s voting co...

By Iris Dorbian • July 21, 2014

Special Report: Spring Insurance Buying

The phrase “it happens every spring,” which doubles as the title of a 1949 movie about a college professor who discovers a formula that turns him into an overpowering baseball pitcher, evokes the excitement baseball fans feel every year at the onset of this season. For the CFOs and risk managers ...

By David Katz • April 18, 2014

It’s Time for Boards to Have Technology Committees

I’ve had the privilege of serving as a director on several public-company boards for the past 15 years. Audit committees are, of course, very important and we’ve all seen compensation committees grow increasingly important. But no board I’ve heard of has a technology committee. I think it’s time,...

By Timothy Chou • April 15, 2014

B Prepared

Six years ago, Matthew Weatherley-White became convinced that his company should stake a claim to sustainability. “I saw a real opportunity from a market perspective to plant a flag around an issue that I felt was going to become increasingly important,” recalls Weatherley-White, a managing direc...

By Marielle Segarra • March 25, 2014

Five Ways to Manage Supplier Risks

As companies develop business relationships around the world into more complex supply chains, protecting these essential links from disruption is becoming harder to manage.Thus growing number of organizations are developing enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks and other holistic risk manag...

By John Bugalla and Kristina Narvaez • Feb. 25, 2014

Google’s Flaws Start to Show

In its third quarter 2013 financial results, Google reported its eighth consecutive decline in price per click, the money it can charge advertisers. But what’s worrisome is that this eight percent year-over-year loss in pricing power for its core business, a symptom of reputational value loss, is...

By Jonathan Salem Baskin and Nir Kossovsky • Jan. 2, 2014

Risk of Water Scarcity Rising

Multinational companies are feeling the burden of tackling water scarcity, in which a lack of water halts product production, exacerbates other risks and causes revenue shortfalls.In a Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) report, “Moving beyond business as usual,” which presents data on the water-rela...

By Alissa Ponchione • Dec. 18, 2013

Game Theory Sparks Terrorism Risk Modeling

Thirteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one thing has become clear about the challenges of modeling and analyzing terrorism risk: at the core of the peril is the intelligence of an adversary who can decide where and when to strike and have counter-moves for ev...

By David Katz • Dec. 2, 2013

CFO Pay Trends by Industry: Wildly Diverse

BDO, the accounting and advisory firm, recently performed an analysis of CFO vs. CEO pay trends at 600 midsize public companies. It shows that total pay for 2012 — salary, annual bonus and long-term incentives — rose 5 percent for finance chiefs and 6 percent for their bosses, compared with the p...

By David McCann • Oct. 29, 2013

Obstacles to Protecting Data Abound

While the digital landscape continues to evolve, information-security controls are constantly being tested. Generally, an individual’s rights to online privacy are protected by some form of legislation in most countries. As a result, organizations that store and manage an individual’s personal in...

By Rob Livingstone • Oct. 24, 2013

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

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