One of Nils Chrestin’s favorite vacation experiences was turning the lights on at the Vatican.

He and his wife joined Gianni Crea, the head keykeeper at the Vatican, at 6am for a small group tour where they helped open the Vatican museums for the day. “You open up the windows, you pull back the curtains,” he recalls. “Everybody gets a key to open one of those hundreds-of-years-old doors.”

Those types of moments are what Chrestin helps bring others through his role as CFO of GetYourGuide, a booking platform for travel experiences. Founded in 2009, GetYourGuide has since become one of Europe’s leading startups. Recently, it became a “double unicorn,” valued at $2 billion.

The company’s ability to spot and capitalize on trends, Chrestin told CFO Brew, is fundamental to its success.

Trendspotters: GetYourGuide’s been successful because it saw the potential in the “experience” side of the travel industry early on, Chrestin said. Unlike, say, hotels or airlines, the experience market is fairly fragmented.

For more on how this CFO helped his company become a double unicorn, click here.—CV

The US economy seems to have started its New Year’s resolutions a week early: In the last week of December, fewer people filed for new unemployment benefits than at any time since April. Speaking of resolutions, this latest sign of economic strength could end up providing extra motivation for the Federal Reserve to stick with its plans to cut rates just twice this year.

People filing for new benefits fell by 9,000 from the previous week to 211,000, seasonally adjusted, for the week ending December 28, the Labor Department reported last week. That number hasn’t been so low since April, according to Reuters, and is 5% lower than what Reuters economists had expected.

The number of people filing for unemployment benefits also fell by 52,000 week over week at the end of December, the Labor Department reported.

At its meeting last month, the Fed projected it would cut the central bank’s benchmark interest rate to 3.9% in 2025, which would be a half-point less than it forecast in September and a “suggesti[on] that they will make just two rate cuts,” the New York Times reported, compared to the four cuts the Fed predicted for 2025 in September.

Steady Feddy. The central bank’s approach won’t change unless hiring slows dramatically, LPL Financial chief economist Jeffrey Roach told Reuters. “A stable job market will squelch the Fed’s appetite for cutting rates aggressively amid nagging services inflation," he said.

For more on recent economic data, click here.—GD

A new data analysis from the Cybernews Business Digital Index found that 65% of North American companies scored a D or worse on cybersecurity protections, a damning statistic that points to how underprepared businesses are. The breakdown—31% scoring a D and 34% scoring an F—is concerning, all the more so when you consider that only 7% scored an A. Of Fortune 500 companies analyzed, a staggering 84% scored a D or worse.

Vincentas Baubonis, Cybernews’s head of security research, told IT Brew that while the numbers aren’t good, the findings may lead to positive change. While it’s not the responsibility of Cybernews to provide solutions—Baubonis noted that it focuses on analysis of publicly available data—he suggested an internal audit, and that companies look at the index as a resource.

Checking in. Data breaches in 2024 reached major companies, including Meta, Fortinet, JPMorgan Chase, and others. As IT Brew reported in September, governments around the world are taking action, levying fines and establishing regulations to enforce data privacy guidelines that aim to ensure the security of information.

“The enforcement that we’re seeing happening around data privacy is probably two, three years ahead of what we’re likely to see in how the cyber rules are being enforced,” NCC Group Head of Government Affairs Katharina Sommer told IT Brew at the time.

Click here to keep reading IT Brew’s story on cyber preparedness.—EH