Stories of Demise of Health Coverage Are Exaggerated

About 1 in 11 employers plans to drop employee health-care coverage within three years as the health-care exchanges described in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) become operational, Deloitte said on Wednesday after surveying 560 employers. But that result, which made headlines nationwide, tells only...

By David McCann • July 26, 2012

Tarnished Reputations Could Hit Banks Hard

Disgraced by scandals, banks may find it harder to win back trust. But with flush corporate clients, lower profit margins, and new competition from outside the industry, their survival may depend on it, experts contend.In addition to the JP Morgan and London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) debacle...

By Caroline McDonald • July 26, 2012

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

Solar Storms: What’s the Risk for Companies?

When severe storms caused Amazon to lose power to its Virginia data center for the second time last month, its entire chain of clients, including Netflix, Pininterest, and Instagram, were affected. Instagram, a photo-sharing service, was down for more than 15 hours after the incident. Even with m...

By Caroline McDonald • July 23, 2012

M&A Forecast: Capacity, but No Moxie

Despite having room on their balance sheets, few companies will have the appetite for mergers and acquisitions the rest of this year, according to KPMG’s “M&A Predictor” report, released Thursday. KPMG says the global appetite for M&A deals will continue to be suppressed by a cloudy macro...

By Vincent Ryan • July 19, 2012

Lessons from a CFO Who Loves Start-Ups

I decided to drop in on Pingup, a technology start-up that enables people to text instead of call businesses (“Are you open?” “What’s the special tonight?” “How fast can you dry clean my tux?”), and the businesses to text them back (“Until 6 p.m.” “Peking Duck.” “Twenty-four hours.”), partly beca...

By David Rosenbaum • July 19, 2012

Who Owns Risk Management?

After writing about risk management for more than a decade, I’m well aware of a disconnect often present between risk management and a company’s executives and board. The situation has improved as more companies are focusing on risk — all risks, not just financial — in the wake of a number of nat...

By Caroline McDonald • July 17, 2012

Will Big Companies Drop Health Benefits?

Large employers plan to continue offering health benefits after the health-insurance exchanges provided for under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) begin operating — whether that’s in 2014, as the law currently requires, or later, as seems more likely.At least, that’s what those employers are saying ...

By David McCann • July 12, 2012

Cloud FAQs for CFOs

Q: OK, I’ll bite. As simply as possible, explain the cloud so that I don’t have to go to any more conferences or listen to any more lectures.Once upon a time, if you ran a business and needed electricity, you made it yourself. You had a generator; you bought coal and burned it. Your business wasn...

By David Rosenbaum • July 12, 2012

How to Break Up the Euro

A 150-page report detailing how a breakup of the euro could happen has won a six-digit prize — payable in British pounds. Consultancy Capital Economics and lead author Roger Bootle won the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize for setting out “how best to manage the orderly exit of one or more member ...

By Andrew Sawers • July 11, 2012

Companies Facing Property Insurance Hikes

While it was expected that insured losses from 2011 natural catastrophes would send property-insurance premiums skyward, increases were only slight. But the upward trend appears to be gathering momentum, especially for organizations with a market capitalization of less than $300 million, accordin...

By Caroline McDonald • July 2, 2012

Investing in Interns Can Produce More Than Interim Benefits

Internship programs can be a relatively inexpensive (and sometimes free) way for businesses, especially small-to-midsize ones, to hand off the dirty work they need to get done, such as data entry and filing. But recent high-profile lawsuits from unpaid interns against Hearst and Fox may have busi...

By Bonnie Evans • July 2, 2012

Health-Care Ruling Benefits Small Business, Some Say

“It’s moot,” says Pingup CFO Bethe Palmer when asked about the impact on her small technology start-up of today’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insur...

By David Rosenbaum • June 28, 2012

Stunned CFOs Now Must Focus on Complying with Health-Care Act

CFOs, health-care attorneys, and benefits consultants interviewed today by CFO uniformly expressed surprise, and in some cases shock, at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the individual-mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).The decision, which left ...

By David McCann • June 28, 2012

The Global Company’s Challenge

Managing global organizations has been a business challenge for centuries. But the nature of the task is changing with the accelerating shift of economic activity from Europe and North America to markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.McKinsey Global Institute research suggests that 400 midsi...

By Martin Dewhurst and Jonathan Harris • June 25, 2012

Corporate Lawsuit Apathy Worries D&O Insurer

Company executives with enough insurance coverage may be lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to lawsuits. More than 80% believe a suit is “unlikely,” according to an insurer survey.“It’s a little bit of human nature to say ‘it can’t happen to me because I’m not doing anything wron...

By Caroline McDonald • June 22, 2012

C-Suite Looking for More in Risk Management

Finance chiefs want more out of their risk managers than mere property-casualty insurance buying, even though risk managers themselves place a high value on their knowledge of insurance coverage, experts say.Yet while corporate risk managers have long been identified as mere policy purchasers, th...

By Caroline McDonald • June 21, 2012

An Emerging Concern

Like many CFOs, Kevin Gordon is preoccupied with risk. The finance chief of Quintiles, a company that provides services to pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, says risk management is on his mind “every minute of the day.”Gordon is particularly concerned about emerging risks — the kind th...

By Sarah Johnson • June 15, 2012

Going Digital

Digital business initiatives involving big data, cloud computing, and social media are becoming a strategic priority for many companies, according to McKinsey & Co. More than half of nearly 1,500 C-level executives surveyed by the consultancy in April said both big data and digital marketing ...

By Marielle Segarra • June 15, 2012

Facebook Users, Meet Timeline

In March, Facebook forced all business users to adopt Timeline, its new page layout. The change may cause companies to put more effort into maintaining their Facebook business pages, but the new design may also help them increase customer engagement, experts say.The switch to Timeline has already...

By Bonnie Evans • June 15, 2012

Before You Sign That Cloud Contract

When a business moves to the cloud, it hands off its servers, its networks, and even its data to its provider. All that it has left is a contract. Given this, CFOs need to ensure that their cloud contracts are comprehensive, balanced, and enforceable, preferably in legal jurisdictions that suit t...

By Rob Livingstone • June 15, 2012

CFOs See Growth Ahead

Like doctors standing over a slowly improving patient, senior finance officers in the United States remain guardedly optimistic that the country will realize at least moderate economic growth this year, according to a recent global survey.Seventy-eight percent of U.S.-based CFOs foresee economic ...

By Josh Hyatt • June 15, 2012

Driving Lessons

Name: Ed GoldfingerPosition: CFO of ZipcarPrevious Positions: CFO of Spotfire, a business-intelligence and analytics software company; CFO of the Latin American beverage business at Pepsi-Cola International; senior manager in the audit practice at KPMG.Notable For: Being finance chief of the larg...

By Marielle Segarra • June 15, 2012

U.S. Deal-Making Chills

May was another slow month for mergers and acquisitions in North America. As of May 29, there were 254 deals with a total disclosed value of $88.3 billion for the month, according to data from Mergermarket. That’s a drop from May 2011 of 40% by deal count and 22% by dollar volume.CFOs were clearl...

By Vincent Ryan • June 15, 2012

Do Mergers Add Value After All?

For years, debate has raged over the value of mergers and acquisitions. Studies have tended to find that M&A is a surefire way to destroy shareholder value in acquiring firms. Yet, companies keep making acquisitions to grow market share, expand geographically, and diversify into other industr...

By Andrew Sawers • June 15, 2012

Hawaiian’s Big Growth Gamble

Last week Hawaiian Airlines launched its first, and currently the only, daily nonstop flights from New York’s JFK Airport to Honolulu, growing its overall capacity nearly 25%. Starting a new air route, admits Hawaiian CFO Scott Topping, is “always a risk.” That’s especially true in difficult econ...

By David Rosenbaum • June 14, 2012