Buy just about anything on a website these days, and you’ll be faced with a smorgasbord of payment options on the checkout screen: Google Wallet, Amazon Pay, Venmo, Paypal, Klarna, good old credit cards, and the list goes on. But many of these options weren’t available just a few years ago.

As Katie Chew, managing director of treasury operations for United Airlines, said at the recent AFP 2024 conference, “There’s been more transformation in this space in the past few years than really I’ve ever seen before.”

But there’s a lot for CFOs to consider when choosing which payment methods to accept beyond costs such as customer loyalty and geographic differences.

If you don’t offer customers a seamless way to pay, Chew said, they may balk. Especially as many people have become used to the convenience of one-click payments.“So we risk losing customers where either they could go to another airline, or, more likely, they're going to go to a travel agent, because that travel agent is going to accept bank transfer,” she said.

So many ways to pay: Chew outlined some of the newer alternate forms of payment (AFOPs, if you’re hip) that CFOs can consider accepting at their businesses.

For more on finding the right payment options, click here.—CV

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) wants companies to get more granular about income statement expenses in their financial reporting with its latest accounting standards update (ASU).

According to FASB, the ASU will require public companies to disclose “specified information about certain costs and expenses” in the notes of financial statements in interim and annual reports.

The report says that the new standards will require companies to:

• Disclose purchases of inventory; employee compensation; depreciation; intangible asset amortization; and depreciation, depletion, and amortization “recognized as part of oil- and gas-producing activities (or other amounts of depletion expense) included in each relevant expense caption.”
• Include certain amounts they already need to disclose under GAAP “in the same disclosure as the other disaggregation requirements.”
• “Disclose a qualitative description of the amounts remaining in relevant expense captions that are not separately disaggregated quantitatively.”
• Disclose selling expenses totals as well as, in annual reports, “an entity’s definition of selling expenses.”

The requirements are effective for annual reporting periods beginning after Dec. 15, 2026, and for interim reporting periods starting after Dec. 15, 2027.

Click here for more on the new expense reporting standards.—AZ

As consumers look to save $$, they’re cutting back on spending and seeking value in a number of consumer categories, impacting many CPGs’ Q3 results.

Hershey reported last week a 1.4% net sales drop in its third quarter on the back of high cocoa prices that led to higher prices passed on to consumers, as well as a “challenging consumer environment,” CEO and President Michele Buck noted. The company reduced its full-year growth outlook to be flat year over year.

“Consumers across the income spectrum are making budgetary trade-offs and shopping differently this year,” Buck said, as consumers prioritizing “satiety” has led to fewer trips to convenience and drug stores, favoring club, dollar, and online retailers, where its product categories are “less developed.” In confection, especially chocolate, it’s losing share to smaller brands and private labels, she said. Its North America Confectionary segment secured 0.9% growth thanks largely to price increases. In September, the company brought on former PepsiCo exec Michael Del Pozzo to lead its US confection business, who will prioritize “reigniting chocolate,” Buck said.

It’s not the only CPG struggling: Last month, PepsiCo lowered its annual sales forecast as volumes fell for North American beverage sales and Frito-Lay snacks, while Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe noted that “consumer demand has weakened in recent months.”

Continue reading Retail Brew’s story on consumer pullback here.—EC