Beware of Leaky Apps

Intrigued by the fact that his more than 70-year-old mother had begun using WhatsApp, an up-to-the-minute, cross-platform instant messaging application, Vinny Sakore googled the app and found a wiki page that seems to have amused him a great deal.Speaking at a session on cybersecurity for mobile ...

By David Katz • May 6, 2015

Ambitious Growth Plan Takes Wing for Gogo

Gogo has set its sights sky-high — literally. The company, which went public two years ago, provides wireless Internet connectivity to 2,100 commercial airplanes and more than 6,600 business jets.Gogo also has set its sights sky-high figuratively. It currently serves about 20% of the world’s comm...

By David McCann • May 6, 2015

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

Data Analytics Grows Sears Appliance-Repair Unit

There hasn’t been a lot of good news about Sears Holdings in recent years, but a divisional finance chief for the owner of Sears and Kmart showed up at a CFO conference last month to present a success story about its use of data analytics.One thing the company still has going for it is bulk. It’s...

By David McCann • April 22, 2015

A Startup’s Finance Chief Is a Cat in the Hats

In just over a year as finance chief at PlaceIQ, Matt Novick has managed not only finance but also, for various lengths of time, sales, business development and marketing. “Especially at a startup, a CFO has to be ready to answer the call of the CEO and the company when needs dictate,” he says.Pl...

By David McCann • April 21, 2015

Forecasting the Future of the Internet of Things

Every now and again I get asked to do work to predict how some topic of interest will develop over the long term, usually at least ten years. I’ve been doing this for a long time – and I’ve learned that the best you can generally do is to get general directions and macro effects approximately rig...

By John Parkinson • April 8, 2015

From Quarterly Pressure Cooker to Ultimate Long-Horizon View

Like many executives at large public companies, Carmelle Giblin traded down to a smaller one in order to get her first CFO job. But the cultural shift had to do with a lot more than scale.Giblin spent 21 years at Illinois Tool Works (ITW), currently a $14 billion company, where she was a division...

By David McCann • April 2, 2015

Dip in Jobless Claims: Rare Economic Bright Spot

There were fewer-than-expected jobless claims last week, a bright spot amid other reports indicating a slowing economy.In the week ending March 21, there were 282,000 seasonally-adjusted initial claims , a decrease of 9,000 from the previous week, the Labor Dept. said Thursday. Economists on aver...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 26, 2015

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending March 13

Eric Aboaf has been named finance chief at Citizens Financial Group, effective April 6. He takes over for John Fawcett, who is retiring at the end of April. Aboaf joins the firm from Citigroup, were he was global treasurer and before that, CFO of its Institutional Client and North American Consum...

By Joan Urdang • March 13, 2015

The Problems of Prosperity

U.S. finance executives have started out the year building confidence in a continued economic recovery, according to the most recent Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook survey. The first-quarter survey tabulated the views of 547 senior finance and corporate executives from U.S. c...

By David W. Owens • March 11, 2015

Fewer Companies Able to Detect a Cyber Breach

These days, it seems, one of the most important jobs of an IT staff would be to detect a cyber attack.Actually, though, companies are increasingly reliant on third-parties to notify them that their security has been compromised, according to a new report from FireEye’s Mandiant unit.Companies are...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 25, 2015

YRC Keeps on Truckin’

This is an introduction to a series of six articles about the volatile financial misfortunes and turnaround of trucking company YRC Worldwide. See parts one, two, three, four, five and six.In the fall of 2013 I started thinking about doing an in-depth look at a big-company finance department from...

By David McCann • Feb. 10, 2015

Lead Workers, Not Just Employees

Have you heard phrases like “non-employment work arrangements,” “freelance talent platforms” and “labor market intermediaries”? They reflect an emerging trend in which work and workers exist “beyond employment.”John Boudreau Many leaders have hardly noticed the rising frequency with which these t...

By John Boudreau • Jan. 26, 2015

Global Cellular Network Ripe for Hacking

The global “hand-shaking” network that allows cellular carriers to route calls, texts and other services to each other is vulnerable to hackers, spies and criminals, putting the privacy of billions of cell phone users at risk, German researchers have found.The Washington Post said the flaws disco...

By Matthew Heller • Dec. 19, 2014

End-of-Year Economic Outlook: The U.S. Leads the Way

End-of-year results from the quarterly Duke University/CFO Global Business Outlook survey leave us with a muddled outlook for the global economy. The confidence of U.S. finance executives in both the domestic economy and their own companies remained relatively strong. U.S. confidence levels were ...

By David W. Owens • Dec. 10, 2014

CFO Savors Wild World of Consumer e-Lending

A few short years after imprudent consumer lending helped trigger the Great Recession, some financial companies have emerged that actually take just seconds to decide whether to approve a loan application. And the entire process is automated.Suk Shah One such firm is AvantCredit, which wrote its ...

By David McCann • Dec. 9, 2014

Key to Growth: A License to Kill

For better or worse, in today’s working world we’re often in do-more-with-less mode. It’s easy to see the “worse” side of the equation: ceaseless demands for growth butting up against cost-control pressures, leading to a burned-out, disengaged work force. But is there really a “better” story to b...

By David McCann • Dec. 3, 2014

Small Company, Big CFO Job

As great as the demands are on a CFO at a publicly held Fortune 500 company, it’s perhaps just as demanding to run finance at a small, growth-stage private one.David Blanke Done well, it may require spending large blocks of time on evaluating technology tools to perform tasks that the small staff...

By David McCann • Nov. 11, 2014

Hurting from Recall, GM Reveals Margin-Boosting Plan

General Motors CEO Mary Barra told an audience packed with investors and analysts that she is committed to increasing her company’s profit margins while scaling back costs and expanding operations in China, The New York Times reported.Mary Barra It’s Barra’s strategy to salvage a storied American...

By Iris Dorbian • Oct. 1, 2014

Will Windows 10 Score With Enterprises?

As Microsoft unveils a preview of what was supposed to be Windows 9, but is now being called Windows 10, it hopes to banish the memory of Windows 8 to the darkest recesses of history.In an article on Tuesday, PC World speculates that Windows 10 might be a case in which Microsoft will rectify the ...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 30, 2014

Intel to Invest $1.5B in Chinese Chip Makers

Silicon Valley chip-maker Intel will pay $1.5 billion for a minority stake in China-based Tsinghua Unigroup, a Chinese-government affiliated private equity firm that owns two mobile chip makers: Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics. The investment is part of Intel’s strategy to gain...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 26, 2014

SAP to Buy Concur for $7.3B

To fortify its position in cloud computing, German software maker SAP has agreed to buy Bellevue, Wash.-based Concur, a provider of software for expense and travel management, for $7.3 billion in cash.Reuters reports that the acquisition was an inevitability given the momentum in the cloud comput...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 19, 2014

3rd-Quarter Economic Outlook: U.S. Stronger, Latin America Weaker

Results from the Duke University/CFO Global Business Outlook survey for the third quarter of 2014 showed continued strengthening in the confidence that U.S. finance executives have both in the economy and in their own companies. At the same time, the gloomier outlook in Latin America has started ...

By David W. Owens • Sept. 9, 2014

Jobs Growth Cooled in August

Despite six consecutive months of relatively strong employment figures, hiring lost momentum in August, with only 142,000 jobs added to payrolls, the U.S. Labor Department said on Friday.The New York Times reports that the figure was a considerable decrease from the 200,000 jobs increase estimate...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 5, 2014

Are China’s Antitrust Probes Unfairly Targeting U.S. Firms?

Due process concerns about antitrust regulation in China are being raised in a paper issued Wednesday by the U.S-China Business Council. The council suggests that China is unfairly targeting American companies in an attempt to tamp down overseas competition while boosting homegrown businesses.The...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 3, 2014

China No Longer An Investment Valhalla

American investor fatigue is setting in with China, according to a new study by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. High labor costs and flat revenue growth are the two main reasons behind the wariness of U.S. firms’ to invest more in a country considered the second largest economy on the ...

By Iris Dorbian • Sept. 2, 2014