As EVP and head of enterprise payments at Truist, Chris Ward works with clients large and small across a variety of industries, and speaks with many CFOs. We spoke with him at the 2024 Association for Financial Professionals Conference to learn which payments trends will be top of mind for finance professionals heading into 2025.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are you hearing from CFOs about payments?

Everybody is trying to do more with less in today's world…People really want simplicity in the way they do things. When they're interacting with their customers or their suppliers, they're looking for ways to do things in a more simple way. They want things to be more speedy, and speed means also transparency… And then the last thing is, everybody wants to operate in a safe, sound, and secure manner. People want to know that when they're transacting and doing payments, they're doing it in a safe way, and they're protecting themselves.

What do you see on the horizon for 2025 in payments?

I think there's going to continue to be more adoption of real time payments. As a CFO, you might be faced with upgrading your ERP system and moving it to a more modern approach. Being able to more tightly integrate with your bank for more seamless payment processing through APIs…is going to be the next wave as folks are coming off their ERP upgrades. They're thinking about transforming the treasury function and making it more digital and [having] more integrated payment solutions with their financial institutions. That’s probably on the horizon for ’25 and beyond.

Click here for more on the future of payments.—CV

It’s quite simple, really. If you want more high-quality candidates, you have to make it worth their while.

That’s a major takeaway from the AICPA’s new report, which examines the state of the public-sector CPA profession based on six virtual forums and a survey of more than 900 government finance and audit professionals. According to the report, “although government entities may seldom offer monetary incentives, when they do offer them, such incentives are effective in hiring and retaining staff.”

Far and away, “failure of government entities to offer a competitive compensation package” was the most crucial hindrance to hiring and retaining CPAs. Survey respondents identified that factor more than twice as often than any other. More than half (56.3%) of respondents said that failure to offer a competitive compensation package had a large impact on governments’ ability to hire and retain CPAs. When adding in those who said it had a moderate impact, that percentage rose to nearly 84%.

This response is giving big oof, considering that, according to the survey, compensation and benefits are the two most important factors to CPAs who work in government.

For more on recruiting government finance talent, click here.—AZ

Businesses will need employees with the skills to perform “green jobs” if they intend to meet corporate sustainability goals, but workers can’t do those jobs without learning the applicable skills, which the US workforce is gravely lacking, a new report from LinkedIn found.

LinkedIn’s annual Global Green Skills Report, which compiled data from LinkedIn’s more than 1 billion profiles, found that the talent pool of workers with “green skills” in fields like decarbonization, sustainable procurement, and climate crisis mitigation needs to double.

That’s because the global demand for workers with green skills grew twice as fast as the supply of people with those skills between last year and this year. According to the report, demand for workers with green skills will only continue to grow in the construction, manufacturing, energy, and utilities sectors.

“Every single climate goal is at risk if we don’t have a workforce prepared to deliver the change we urgently need,” Sue Duke, LinkedIn’s VP of public policy and economic graph, said in the report.

So, what should higher-ups at corporations do to increase the green workforce, which in turn will help them meet sustainability targets?

Click here to continue reading Tech Brew’s story on the lack of talent with green skills.—TC