After a long career spent in high-profile finance positions at companies like MasterCard and American Express, Michael Kennedy was ready for a change. For a time, he worked at midsize companies backed by private equity before moving into the nonprofit realm.

“Quite frankly, I was tired of making all their shareholders rich,” he told CFO Brew.

After becoming CFO of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he quickly found an opportunity to put the knowledge he gained in the corporate realm into practice. His experience and talent for change management helped the organization survive a 60% drop in revenue during the pandemic. Now, he’s focused on keeping it stable and streamlined well into the future.

Soon after joining MDA, Kennedy realized that its technology was out of date and that its financial systems needed streamlining.

“Like a lot of nonprofits, they did not invest in their underlying infrastructure,” he said, “which made them inefficient in transactional processing.” The organization had around “65 systems that were not talking to each other,” he recalled. Staff “had 400 call center codes and they were using one about 90% of the time.” He likened it to “a big shoebox” full of receipts.

For more on creating efficiency, click here.—CV

We know business travel costs are soaring this summer. Thankfully, Ramp’s travel and expense management solution helps you easily keep expenses in check (think: minimal manual work). Here’s a peek at what they do for their customers:

• Provide real-time views of company spend.
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Over 25k businesses already rely on Ramp and reap those rewards. Their platform marries corporate cards with travel, expense management, procurement, accounting automation, + more.

Finance teams love it because they get total control over travel management. You can even build your own precise T&E controls into the platform, and Ramp will automatically flag out-of-policy transactions.

Save yourself some time and stress this summer (and beyond) with Ramp.

We here at CFO Brew spend a lot of time reporting on the talent shortage: how hard it is to find, train, and keep quality finance and accounting professionals. But there’s another side to that story: How do finance professionals find good jobs that offer security, stability, and opportunity?

To help navigate the pitfalls—and positives—of the job market, we’ve collected some of the best career advice LinkedIn cheat sheets that we’ve found over the last month.

Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance (or career) work because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts in a single cheat sheet.

With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew recently found on LinkedIn.

• Ryan Donaghy, “7 ways senior finance/data professionals can show their value in interviews.” Let’s not kid ourselves; job interviews are a sales pitch, with you and your experience as the product. Ryan Donaghy, a specialist English communications skills coach, offers up seven tips and practical examples of how to execute them for senior finance professionals to show off their “unique value” during interviews, valuable lessons as hard-to-demonstrate intangible soft skills become more in-demand for finance professionals.

For more career development cheat sheets, click here.—DA

If one of your junior accountants shows up to work in a Lamborghini, you just might have an occupational fraud problem. Financial crime committed by employees against their employers, also known as occupational fraud, is a growing problem that costs organizations trillions of dollars a year globally, and may be the most common type of financial crime in the world, according to Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) research.

As organizational financial guardians, CFOs are at the forefront of the battle against fraud. To help CFOs understand what they’re up against, CFO Brew spoke with Andi McNeal, chief training officer for the ACFE, about fraud trends, investing in fraud fighting, and how CFOs should be prioritizing fraud, as the organization’s annual conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are the big trends that you're seeing this year that you hadn’t expected?

I’m not sure there’s anything we didn’t expect. But we do have a lot of trends right now. We’re hearing a lot of companies are still fighting with some of the tried and true frauds that we’ve known for a long time. Obviously, employee fraud is always going to be a risk for any organization, just by nature of hiring people to work on their staff. Cyber-related risks, we still are hearing a lot of organizations having external fraudsters—people they don’t even know—trying to attack their infrastructure or trying to get access to their funds through social engineering, whether that’s in emails or phone calls or even text messages, trying to get staff to supply some unknown party access by pretending to be a known party. Those risks are still very, very large for organizations.

Click here to read more about fraud trends from the ACFE.—DA

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