Cue movie trailer narrator: In a world beset with misinformation and regulatory complexity, it falls on finance professionals to conduct accurate and timely due diligence to protect their organizations from fraud, legal, and reputational risk.

However, that’s a great big mandate: Do finance professionals have what it takes?

Cynthia Hetherington, is the CEO and founder of the Hetherington Group, an intelligence and investigations consultancy, as well as the founder of the Osmosis Institute, an international association for the development and sharing of intelligence skills. She’s an expert in open source intelligence (OSINT), the use of publicly available information in answering investigative questions, and she recently published OSINT, The Authoritative Guide to Due Diligence.

CFO Brew followed up with her after she spoke at the recent Association of Certified Fraud Examiners conference in Las Vegas about common due diligence mistakes, the skills finance professionals need to practice open source intelligence (OSINT), and how organizations should be thinking about due diligence.

This is part two of our interview with Cynthia Hetherington. To read part one, click here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some of the due diligence mistakes that you see organizations making?

There are a few mistakes that happen. One is coming late to the game. You know, in the 11th hour somebody decides, “Oh, wow, now is a good time to get a background investigation done on the parties or players we’re getting involved with.” Also, fact checking international relationships and making general assumptions that things will just be unavailable, inaccessible or too expensive to reach. Now that the internet has just been in, productively speaking, it’s 30th year of really giving us answers. Everything is within reach now. The third point is that the [chief] financial officer doesn’t always understand where the barriers are legally and ethically.

For more on the accountant’s role in due diligence, click here.—DA

A loaded question, really. Finance leaders have a ton going on: competing priorities, balancing growth and cost management, navigating challenges with tech stacks—you name it.

But did ya know the No. 1 priority for 2024 is accessing external financing? Yep, money’s on the mind.

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Get your finger on the CFO pulse.

File this under bad news getting even more bad: The cost of data breaches grew 10% in the year ending February 2024, according to IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach Report released on July 30.

The Ponemon Institute, which IBM pays to make the study, pinned the larger breach costs, which hit nearly $4.9 million, on the growing costs of business disruption, “including operational downtime and lost customers,” fines from regulators, and paying for customer support in the aftermath of the breach. Those costs make up more than half the average cost of a breach.

Speaking of customer support, those customers would probably be less than pleased to learn that many of them are paying for that assistance, and everything else the company is doing to recover from the breach. “When asked how they’re dealing with these costs,” the report said, “more than half of organizations said they are passing them on to customers,” an idea it diplomatically referred to as a “problematic” business strategy.

The report does have a lot of terrifying facts, but no need to go down a doomsday rabbit hole. Instead, let’s consider a question posed by one of the report’s key findings.

For more on why data breaches are getting more expensive, click here.—GD

Tech giant Intel will be shedding more than 15% of its workforce—or over 19,000 employees—as part of a plan to cut $10 billion in costs after it failed to meet quarterly expectations.

Intel reported revenue of $12.83 billion on expectations of $12.94 billion in revenue in its second quarter 2024 earnings, reported CNBC. The company reported plunging from a net income of $1.48 billion in Q2 2023 to a net loss of $1.61 billion YOY.

Intel stock fell by 26% following the forecast and news of cuts, which Bloomberg reported was the biggest single-day drop in the last four decades of Intel history. A Morningstar analysis of Intel’s forecast for coming months concluded a “severe negative reaction was justified,” arguing the company is “doing the proper work” in its pivot to its Intel Foundry chipmaking business but nonetheless shedding customers in a number of markets.

In addition to layoffs, Intel plans to cut its gross capital expenditures by 20%. Intel will also suspend dividend payments to shareholders until “cash flows improve to sustainably higher levels,” the release noted. An internal Intel memo from CEO Pat Gelsinger mentioned the imminent creation of a “companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees” and process for voluntary departures.

To continue reading IT Brew’s story about Intel’s slide, click here.—TM

AI bills jumped 375% in 12 months. Ramp processes billions of dollars in spend each month, so they’ve got a front-row seat to spotting new tools that companies are testing en masse—and AI’s leading the list. These companies include OpenAI, Grammarly, and Anthropic. Check out five charts on the latest spending trends.