SBA Loans on Upswing

Small business lending may be warming. The Small Business Administration has backed more small business loans so far this fiscal year than it did during the same period in 2012. As of May 4, the SBA had approved about 26,000 loans through its 7(a) program, compared to about 25,000 last fiscal yea...

By Marielle Segarra • May 6, 2013

Credit-Insurance Prices Falling for U.S. Companies

Samsung is an “ultra-conservative” company when it comes to protecting itself against the costs of bad debt, says Joseph McNamara. That was true before the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the many corporate bankruptcies in South Korea at the time only stiffened the company’s resolve to not be...

By David Katz • May 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

The Art of Marketing

CFO is a publication about corporate finance. Yesterday, I interviewed a fellow solely because he got a tattoo.Now, listen up: what I’m about to tell you might well be for your own good.On its face, Rapid Realty’s offer to raise commissions for its independent sales agents who get a tattoo showin...

By David McCann • May 2, 2013

Sales Soaring at Private Construction Companies

The housing sector is rebounding in a big way. Average home prices in 20 cities rose 9.3 percent over the 12 months ending February 2013, the biggest jump in residential real estate prices since 2006, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, released Tuesday.With that in m...

By Marielle Segarra • April 30, 2013

Sizing Up the Data

A retailer specializing in big and tall men’s apparel, Destination XL Group, holds its products’ sizes above all other aspects of clothing retail – including price. “It’s not the price of the items that get men into Destination XL stores,” says Dennis Hernreich, CFO of the company, formerly Casua...

By Taylor Provost • April 29, 2013

How Venture Capital and Crowdfunding Can Coexist

The one-year anniversary of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act just passed, but the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to write rules governing equity-based crowdfunding. In the meantime, some venture capital (VC) firms worry that crowdfunding, a means of collective financing ...

By Marielle Segarra • April 24, 2013

Should You Consider Cyber-Liability Insurance?

Telecommunications giant Verizon on Tuesday released its annual investigative report of data breaches, which found that small businesses are the number-one target of cyber-espionage attackers.Almost half of the 621 confirmed data-breach incidents Verizon recorded in 2012 occurred at companies wit...

By Taylor Provost • April 24, 2013

Why SMBs Should Embrace Negative Customer Feedback

Last week, the company I work for, a daily deals website called 1SaleADay.com, began selling a credit card pocketknife, a utility knife that folds into the size of a credit card. Soon after, a customer in law enforcement posted the following message, criticizing the sale of this product: “As a La...

By Eliyahu Federman • April 22, 2013

Does Leaking an M&A Deal Pay?

As recently as last February, the premature leak of a merger deal occurred. The Securities and Exchange Commission froze the Goldman Sachs account of a Swiss trader who allegedly bought a large number of Heinz call options the day before Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital agreed to buy Heinz. But ...

By Vincent Ryan • April 16, 2013

Obama Tax Could Make Terrorism Insurance Scarce

An Obama administration proposal to eliminate the tax deduction for reinsurance premiums paid by U.S.-based insurance companies to their foreign affiliates would boost prices for terrorism coverage and property-casualty insurance overall, corporate risk managers say.As a result of the provision, ...

By David Katz • April 16, 2013

Poised for Growth

Finance executives are feeling much better now than they did in late 2012, when worries about the fiscal cliff overshadowed the last Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. CFOs are seeing signs of strength in their businesses and seem to be looking forward to the year ahead,...

By Kate O'Sullivan • April 15, 2013

Easy Money Policies Could End Badly: IMF

When the major central banks inevitably try to end aggressive monetary stimulus, the casualty could be financial stability, according to a report released Thursday.The report, from the International Monetary Fund, echoes some of the rising voices expressing concern about the smooth withdrawal of ...

By Vincent Ryan • April 12, 2013

Small-Business Optimism Falters

Small-business optimism is dwindling, according to a report released yesterday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group. After three months of growth, last month’s Index of Small Business Optimism fell 1.3 points, to 89.5. The index components that declined most were labo...

By Marielle Segarra • April 10, 2013

A Cure for Supply-Chain Blues

“Collaboration” and “supply chain” go hand in hand, or you might think they should. But there are two kinds of collaboration with respect to supply chains. While many companies are focused on working with suppliers to arrive at more efficient and effective solutions, our studies have repeatedly s...

By Shawn Casemore • April 10, 2013

Marine Insurance: A Tale of Two Coverages

CFOs of shipping companies, or, for that matter, companies that ship cargo or clean up after shipwrecks, should take note: A convergence of circumstances has led to a split in the marine insurance market, with hull and machinery coverage softening and protection and indemnity (P&I) skyrocketi...

By Caroline McDonald • April 5, 2013

Can Mandatory Environmental Insurance Resolve Pollution Problems in China?

The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection recently mandated nationwide compulsory purchase of pollution liability insurance for companies with high environmental risks, ahead of the originally forecasted target date of 2015.There is little doubt that this accelerated notice is a response t...

By Julien Combeau • April 3, 2013

Sharing Synergies Can Boost Buyers’ Share Prices

When the buyer in a merger or acquisition estimates it can close redundant plants, cut headcount, centralize administrative functions, or realize other synergies post-transaction, it generally doesn’t want to share much of that potential value with the target company.In fact, the standard thinkin...

By Vincent Ryan • April 1, 2013

Can Software Take the Guesswork out of Pricing?

In 2003, Shaw Industries, a Berkshire Hathaway company that produces and distributes carpeting and flooring, was determining the prices of its myriad products largely by relying on the intuition of its sales staff. Management had set a long-established ladder of pricing for salespeople to refer t...

By Taylor Provost • March 29, 2013

Seven Keys to Successful IT Outsourcing

When my executive-search firm is asked to recruit a new CIO, we always ask the senior leadership team what went wrong with the old one. High among the litany of complaints are the following:  Our IT outsourcing relationship is a mess. We’re not getting the service we need. No one is managing the ...

By Martha Heller • March 28, 2013

Familiarity Breeds Higher Prices

When multiple vendors compete for your business, you can expect to see aggressive pricing. But with your existing suppliers, competitive sourcing is not always an option, and without that you may be paying an above-market premium. This is not an easy problem to address. True competition would req...

By Scott Drobes • March 27, 2013

How CFOs Should Prepare for the Coming Demand Spike

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM), a not-for-profit industry research and educational association, recently reported that as of February 2013, U.S. manufacturing activity expanded at its fastest monthly rate since June 2011.  While several factors have contributed to this growth, the upti...

By David Savier • March 22, 2013

Get Ready for SEPA

For many treasury departments, this could be the year of SEPA, whether they like it or not. That’s because they will have to accelerate efforts to make their European operations compliant with the new 32-nation Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), slated to go into effect next year. Even though the ...

By Andrew Sawers • March 21, 2013

Eyes on the Price

If Silver Lake Partners and Michael Dell pull off their leveraged buyout of Dell at a 25% premium, they will be getting a bargain, at least as merger-and-acquisition premiums go. In merger deals involving nonfinancial public companies in 2012, the average premium paid was nearly 41%, according to...

By Vincent Ryan • March 21, 2013

Can You Keep a Secret?

The conventional way to protect intellectual property is to patent it. This gives an inventor legal protection for his idea: if others want to use it, they must pay him. The snag is that he must publish his idea, making it easy for someone in a less lawful country to steal it.So a lot of companie...

By Economist Staff • March 20, 2013

Waiting for the Crowd’s Cash

When President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act on April 5, 2012, he called it a “game-changing” bill.The game needed changing. After the Great Recession, access to capital became a huge problem for small business, as the percentage of loans under $1 million that banks approve...

By David Rosenbaum • March 19, 2013