76% of Executives Say Embedded Lending is Massive Growth Opportunity

As sales and customer experience continue to drive allocation requests, CFOs may be tasked with assigning capital to programs that offer financing for customers. More than three quarters (76%) of executives have gone as far as to label embedded lending products as a "massive" growth opportunity, ...

By Adam Zaki • Dec. 13, 2022

3 Tips for Better Managing The Software Stack

Adopting the right software at the right price and time in a company's lifecycle is a competitive advantage. And within this turbulent macroeconomic environment, lowering costs while increasing efficiency is everything.CFOs should renegotiate all software supplier contracts and seek to adopt more...

By Jason Quinn • Dec. 13, 2022

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The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

3 Ways CFOs Can Use Existing Software to Achieve Financial Goals

Over the last decade, many corporations adopted new technologies as part of overall digital transformation strategies that allowed them to remain competitive in rapidly changing markets. Now, some of the software and technology tools purchased during the digital transformation process are being u...

By Joanne Cheng • Dec. 6, 2022

IT Spending and 2023 Budgets Under Close Scrutiny

The great pandemic-related IT shopping spree may finally be over. For two years, U.S. businesses spent freely on building digital infrastructure, connecting remote workers, and turning legacy products into digital ones. The spending needed to be done quickly, as cities locked down and markets shi...

By Vincent Ryan • Dec. 5, 2022

4 Ways CFOs Can Mitigate Costs of Poor Data Management

As the size of our data collection grows, so too does the need to keep that information secure. We’ve seen the headlines of companies falling victim to many kinds of cyberattacks. One well-known case is that of SolarWinds, which was tricked into sending out malware to its partner network. The mis...

By Adam Moloney • Nov. 29, 2022

Financial Industry is Third-Most Targeted By Hackers

As cybersecurity concerns grow throughout corporate finance, hackers continue to target financial institutions with some success. According to a research report conducted by Proxy, modern data breaches targeting large-scale financial institutions that have underdeveloped cybersecurity protocols r...

By Adam Zaki • Nov. 23, 2022

Return on Data Assets: A New Way for CFOs to Measure the Value of Data

Data can be considered a modern business's most valuable asset, and yet it’s not treated as such. Consider Uber and Lyft. Without data from billions of historical rides, traffic patterns, and outside sources, there could be no estimated times of arrival, no shared rides, and no estimation of a ri...

By Junta Nakai • Nov. 22, 2022

How to Future-Proof and Modernize the Finance Department

Amidst economic uncertainty and rising costs, organizations are looking for effective ways to ensure their future. And if leaders have learned anything from the challenges of the past few years, it’s that agility is often the key to survival.  One of the most effective strategies for creating agi...

By Cameron White • Nov. 21, 2022

90% of SaaS Buyers Are Overpaying — Are You?

The process of buying, selling, and implementing software-as-a-service products is forcing companies to allocate excessive amounts of capital toward those types of services, according to new data. The research, from SaaS purchasing platform Vertice, found many companies are overpaying for product...

By Adam Zaki • Nov. 2, 2022

Too Many ERP Systems Are a Bad Thing: Metric of the Month

Finance shared service centers (SSCs) provide a centralized team that carries out high-volume, repeatable finance processes on behalf of business units or areas across an enterprise. Organizations commonly choose this model to achieve process standardization and improvement, reduce errors, and br...

By Perry D. Wiggins • Nov. 2, 2022

5 Ways CFOs Can Maximize Blockchain Technology

As the next generation of the world wide web comes to fruition, new economic and technological infrastructures are on the horizon. With this new generation, known as Web3, concepts including decentralization, digital currencies, token-based economics, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are making the...

By Adam Zaki • Oct. 26, 2022

38% of Accountants With Harmonious Use of Technology Have Low Burnout

As employee burnout continues to be prioritized by companies who are looking to keep their employees satisfied and engaged, recent survey data from FloQast shows a direct relationship between the level of burnout for accountants and their relationship with work-related technology. In July, the co...

By Adam Zaki • Oct. 26, 2022

35% of CFOs Say Cybersecurity is Among Their Highest Concerns: Weekly Stat

Over 35% of CFOs say cybersecurity is among their highest concerns, and more than half (60%) are deeply involved in their company’s cyber risk responses and strategies, according to a recent survey published by Jefferson Wells. Despite more than a third (34%) of CFOs admitting they don’t have an ...

By Adam Zaki • Oct. 19, 2022

A CFO’s Guide to Business Transformation

Business and digital transformation are not only a buzzword but are also fast becoming a core function at many companies. Transformations, versus discrete projects, are large-scale programs that change the way a company operates across multiple parts of its business and usually encompass optimiza...

By Marilyn Jentzen • Sept. 26, 2022

CFOs Should No Longer View Cybersecurity as Insurance

As external economic factors continue to drive CFOs’ thought processes and allocation decisions, reliance on data to both innovate and cut costs is leaving many organizations much more vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches than they are currently aware.In a recent survey by Kroll analyzing the rel...

By Adam Zaki • Sept. 20, 2022

Empowering the CFO to Champion Cyber Risk Management

We are collectively experiencing the side effects of a disruptive geopolitical conflict that is influencing the ongoing inflation cycle. World economies will continue to be impacted by the consequences, but global organizations have ample opportunities to redirect and distribute their finite reso...

By Saket Modi • Sept. 12, 2022

Top Performers Automate 40% of Primary Controls: Metric of the Month

If you’re not already automating your internal controls, you should be. The cost of controls technology has come way down while its capabilities have increased. Advanced controls automation is now accessible even to smaller organizations, and the return on investment is high. Automation not only ...

By Perry D. Wiggins • Sept. 7, 2022

Workplace Monitoring: 3 Steps to Balance Employee Productivity and Privacy

Long before the pandemic accelerated remote work, tools and technologies emerged to collect corporate “data exhaust.” This is the trail of often sensitive corporate and employee data that are artifacts of the common use of digital communication and productivity tools. According to an Insider Thre...

By Jay Bartot • Aug. 18, 2022

Don’t Let Failed Digital Transformations Prevent Future Attempts

Companies that adopt digital-first systems across operations, sales, marketing, and more can realize significant cost savings — cutting down on labor needs, leveraging data and business intelligence tools, and even reducing time to market. But, the fact is 70% of complex, large-scale digital tran...

By Alex Nekritz • Aug. 16, 2022

CFOs Must Face Tech Stack Inflation by Balancing Priorities

It’s been a good run. Business consumers of software have enjoyed stable or even falling prices amid an explosion in productivity and choice. Plentiful capital, intense competition, and a strong pace of innovation over two decades deterred tech providers from raising their prices as they focused ...

By Sean McBride • Aug. 11, 2022

Top Organizations Record Accounts Payable Cycle Time in 2.8 Days: Metric of the Month

An optimized accounts payable (AP) process not only helps organizations take advantage of early pay discounts and favorable payment terms but is vital for cash flow management more broadly. But AP teams do not work in a vacuum — process excellence is partly a product of collaboration with other a...

By Perry D. Wiggins • Aug. 3, 2022

How CFOs and CISOs Can Build Strong Partnerships

A successful relationship between the chief financial officer and chief information security officer (CISO) is critical to helping an organization build a strong cyber defense strategy. When the two work as partners, they are in a unique position to combat cyber risk.One of the best ways to enhan...

By Bob Violino • Aug. 1, 2022

Finance Transformation: Unleashing the Potential of Data

The desire to squeeze more value out of the finance department is driving many companies to embark on finance transformation projects. Put simply, these projects involve implementing measures to free up the finance team from much of its routine, lower-value work. That's mostly accomplished by aut...

By Will Newcomer • July 19, 2022

5 Cybersecurity Questions CFOs Should Ask CISOs

Even in a shrinking economy, organizations are likely to maintain their level of cybersecurity spend. But that doesn't mean in the current economic climate of burgeoning costs and a possible recession they won't take a magnifying glass to how they are spending the money budgeted to defend systems...

By Bob Violino • July 18, 2022

For CFOs, Digital Transformation Requires Letting Go

As a finance executive, do you always trust the forecast from a knowledgeable FP&A staffer over one given by a sophisticated, machine-learning-enabled forecasting tool? Are you satisfied when a number is close enough for business unit decision-making purposes, such as assessing a market trend...

By Vincent Ryan • June 8, 2022