It’s the world’s easiest riddle: Why is a CFO thinking about their company’s emissions in 2024?

A looming sense of climate doom, a feeling of goodwill for humanity, some savvy business acumen? Sure. But more likely: The SEC climate rule.

Even before the Securities Exchange Commission adopted its final climate rules, many companies had already started making bold carbon reduction commitments,

Kristen Sullivan, Deloitte’s US sustainability and ESG services leader and an audit and assurance partner, told CFO Brew.

The trouble: A lot of that is mainly just talk for now.

In a 2023 report from Net Zero Tracker, the report’s authors found under 5% of companies passed a basic checklist based on the United Nations’s Race to Zero campaign for their net zero commitments, like setting interim targets and covering all emissions.

“People are now falling well short of their commitments, scratching their heads and thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, how do I do this?’” Ewan Lamont, head of sustainability solutions for agricultural technology company Indigo Agriculture, told CFO Brew. “We’re going to have to rethink what we’re doing because sustainability has gone from this voluntary, brand-building exercise to an absolute must-have,” in light of new regulations, he explained.

For more on ways companies are innovating to meet ESG regulations, click here.—NP

Here’s the snag: Controllers spend a whopping 70% of their time on tactical blocking and tackling and just 30% on proactive strategy. What if controllers could spend their precious time forecasting how they can save your company 10% of $100 million?

Well, controllers can with Paystand. They just dropped The Controller’s Guide to B2B Payments Optimization, a game changer for finance leaders looking to bring their accounts receivable processes out of the Dark Ages.

In their guide, you’ll get the inside scoop on:

• cost efficiency and savings
• saving time through automation
• enhancing customer experience
• strategic financial management

Set your A/R process on easy mode.

After July’s jobs report and the Nasdaq correction, we’re all on extra-high alert for signs of consumer weakness. So when the New York Fed released its most recent look at household debt on August 6, we clicked on that report so fast that we understood what it must have felt like trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets last year.

When we opened the report, what we saw was…not terrible, actually.

Household debt did increase “moderately” in the second quarter, according to the report, with a 0.6% jump from the previous quarter. That’s 4.3% higher than the same period in 2023. Looking at shorter intervals, quarter over quarter growth in household debt has been slowing since the end of 2023.

As the New York Fed’s sister branch in Kansas City pointed out in May, growing debt doesn’t spell trouble on its own, and households’ low debt-to-income ratios are a sign that households aren’t taking on too much.

“Overall, there isn’t evidence of a retrenchment in consumer spending,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told the New York Times.

Click here for more on consumer debt.—GD

If there was a more dramatic 100-day run-up to a US presidential election, we must have fallen asleep during that APUSH lesson.

Ask a CFO what they thought about the 2024 election back in spring or early summer and maybe they would’ve grumbled something about tariffs. Now? There’s no avoiding election chatter, but while everyone else is talking about coconut trees and couches, CFOs have a slightly different agenda. We sorted through recent earnings calls to see how some CFOs are talking about the upcoming election.

On one side of the court, there are CFOs like Honda Motor Co.’s Eiji Fujimura, who stayed relatively mum on the election’s potential impacts during a recent earnings call.

Keep reading here.—NP

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