Coworking with Steven I. Weiss

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. This week, we’re featuring one of our own! Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

CFO Brew has undergone a lot of changes this year, including welcoming a new roster of reporters. To help get you acquainted with the team, this week we’re talking with Steven I. Weiss, who joined CFO Brew as a new reporter last month.

Steven has a lengthy career as a business journalist, investigative reporter, and data scientist. We’re excited to have him on board, especially on the tech beat.

Feel free to contact him with story ideas or tips at [email protected].

What’s your background as an accounting and finance reporter?

While I’ve focused heavily on business journalism over the past couple of years, for most of my career, I’ve woven accounting and finance topics into other beats, building off my experience as a 3x entrepreneur and from training in accounting and finance.

One of my bigger coups was a multiyear investigation that won the New York State Society of CPAs’ Excellence in Financial Journalism Award, among others, when I strung together more than 20 years of audits to show how one of the world’s leading universities lost a billion dollars under a new administration.

What do you see as the most pressing issues facing finance professionals and accountants right now?

There’s so much that’s unprecedented, or at least unprecedented in finance professionals’ careers. Nearly every professional under a certain age—let's pick 45—has made every important financial decision within a zero-interest-rate policy environment. The spillover effects of a return to the historically average go far beyond deposits and lending. At the same time, we’re dealing with inflation levels not seen for 40-ish years.

And amid all that, the growth of big data and AI—as toolsets, frameworks, and skill sets—is changing every professional’s job.

I look forward to finding the stories and information that reveal and help people understand how to navigate all of that.

What are the CFO Brew beats you’re most excited to cover?

I’m a credentialed data scientist, so data and AI are big for me. I also have a strong investigative bent, and fraud is a huge issue on this beat.

And then I want to explore what people are thinking about every day in the field, from taxes and accounting, to treasury and recruiting.

When you talk to finance and accounting professionals, what are they saying are their top concerns?

Inflation, the end of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), geopolitical shifts, and the fallout from all of those, are dominating many people’s thoughts. I talked before about inflation and ZIRP, so on the geopolitical front, if your supply chain, or our forex approach, or your personnel management relied on certain assumptions of the way things were from the ’90s through the 2010s, well, you know that a lot of those assumptions have become, at the least, far more complicated.

What’s something people wouldn’t know about you from your LinkedIn profile?

I’m a better cook than most people you know.