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Courtney Vien

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M&A is poised for a resurgence this year

A slow 2023 left PE firms with lots of dry tinder.

Natasha Piñon

Person walking up a set of stairs symbolizing the path of corporate growth strategy

Growth strategies: The basic playbook

Tried-and-true strategies are tried-and-true for a reason. 

Intuit’s AI bet is paying off

CFO Sandeep Aujla outlines AI’s role in the company’s strategy.

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting CFO strategy

Strategy

Spirit Airlines may soon find itself grounded.

’ about its ability to continue as a going concern over the next year,” according to the Associated Press. In securities filings, it stated that it’s having difficulty meeting its credit card processors’ 

Spirit, which flies to destinations in the US, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, mentioned “adverse market conditions” as one reason for its struggles. Demand for domestic flights is down, it said, and it expects that trend to continue through the end of this year. Consumers appear to be 

 on travel spending this summer due to concerns about tariffs and the economy, and lower- and middle-income travelers may opt to drive rather than fly.

, at least in some income brackets. Delta had a record second quarter, driven by a 5% rise in sales for premium seats, though sales of main cabin seats fell by 5%. It revised its third-quarter EPS guidance downward.

Spirit has had years of financial struggles. It failed to capitalize on the post-pandemic travel boom and lost more than $2.5 billion between 2020 and 2024, per the AP. In 2024, it cut its domestic flights by 20%, and started charging for snacks, drinks, and wi-fi. Despite those measures, it 

The airline emerged from bankruptcy protection in March 2025, having restructured its debt and secured new funding. To free up cash, it said, it plans to furlough around 270 pilots and demote around 140 others, and it will sell or monetize some aircraft and real estate.

If Spirit does go under, look for other airlines to pounce on it. Its fleet is newer, making it an “attractive takeover target,” the AP reported. Frontier and JetBlue have tried unsuccessfully to acquire Spirit in the past.

Spirit Airlines doubts it can continue as a going concern

Decreased travel demand and increased competition are sinking the budget carrier.

Jesse Klein

July’s Consumer Price Index showed that inflation accelerated slightly less than analysts expected, allowing betting markets to believe the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates in September.

The CPI increased 0.2% from June and 2.7% compared to last year. Dow Jones analysts estimated it would come in at 0.2 and 2.8%, respectively, 

. However, Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, showed more volatility. It grew 0.3% compared to June and 3.1% year over year.

This marks the largest monthly Core CPI gain since January and the highest annual level since February. Costs for services drove most of the increase, while goods inflation stayed tame, suggesting tariffs haven’t been a key factor in driving prices so far, the 

 reported. Household goods prices increased 0.7% after a 1% jump in June, up 2.4% YoY. But apparel prices, which could have been hit hard by tariffs, only grew 0.1%. In another tariff-sensitive market, new car prices remained flat while used car prices increased 0.5%.

 earlier in the year to avoid passing on tariff costs to consumers for as long as possible, but this month’s data shows that strategy’s time might be running out.

The CPI report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics arrived after President Trump 

, Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, in early August after a 

 and nominated E.J. Antoni from the Heritage foundation, a conservative think tank, to replace her.

And of course, just like many of Trump’s other nominees, Antoni has previously 

CPI grew slightly, but core CPI increased at the fastest rate in five months

Household goods and used car prices increased, while food prices remained steady.

Alex Zank

The financial services sector’s second quarter of dealmaking shows that strategic M&A is alive and well, despite a slump in deals overall.

Deal volume for financial services was down in Q2 nearly 3% from the previous quarter (and down 7.6% YoY) in the sector that includes banks, investment groups, and insurance companies, but deal value was up 22% from Q1 (and nearly 51% YoY) thanks to a few big-ticket deals, according to a recent KPMG 

KPMG warned regional banks must “scale or surrender.”

 Megadeals such as Global Payments’ purchase of Worldpay for $24.3 billion and the Columbia Banking x Pacific Premier merger drove banking M&A value through the roof, although the total number of deals was down. The Q2 M&A environment held an important lesson for regional banks: They “face a strategic crossroads as consolidation becomes imperative,” the firm noted.

Insurance firms pushed for specialization and consolidation.

 Insurance brokerage dealmaking dominated financial services M&A activity in the quarter. Strategic acquisitions “significantly outweigh[ed] financial buyer activity, indicating consolidation driven primarily by acquirers seeking synergies and market expansion rather than financial engineering,” according to the report.

In all, insurance-sector deal volume was down from Q1 and YoY, but total deal value shot up (nearly doubling from Q2 2024). While brokers continued their consolidation spree, insurance carriers set their sights on specialty products.

KPMG noted elevated activity “in specialty deals and smaller regional distribution transactions,” which “underscore the sector's focus on specialization and scale, enhancing market positions and driving premium valuations in strategic acquisitions.”

Capital markets seized on strategic opportunities.

 Deal volume and value totals were down from Q1 in the capital markets space. The deals that did get done came from “sustained strategic interest in RIAs, crypto platforms, and alternative investment firms,” which showed a continued push toward “diversification and client acquisition,” the report said.

Financial services M&A landscape shows strategic dealmaking alive and well

Capital markets showed interest in crypto, while regional banks need to “scale or surrender.”

AI adoption is reaching a new phase, Salesforce COFO Robin Washington said during a recent press roundtable: one where companies are separating the wheat from the chaff.

Businesses are moving out of the “experimentation” stage and starting to “really decide what are the true value-enhancing AI opportunities that exist,” Washington said. She recommends that companies use “cross-functional teams” to determine which use cases for AI they “want to continue to experiment on, and which ones [they] want to mature and accelerate.”

During the roundtable, she and Paypal COFO Jamie Miller suggested that the next frontier is AI for revenue generation, not just improving efficiency. The examples Miller gave, though, were fairly high-level; she noted that “agentic commerce” could let consumers have an “end-to-end experience in a much different way.”

Washington and Miller leaned on the theme of jobs shifting, rather than going away, due to AI. Washington mentioned that AI can complete more of the redundant and time-consuming tasks, which, she said, “unleashes the ability for us to really do our jobs.” That’s allowed Salesforce to “reallocate employees to more value-add type of activities where we see, directionally, growth is coming from,” she said. Miller said she’s seen a similar “reallocation” of employees’ tasks at PayPal.

Ultimately, Washington said, AI could allow people without technical skills to play in the tech sandbox. “It opens up a lot of optionality for people that haven’t come from traditional skills to participate in this AI evolution,” she said, adding that she’s heard that “the biggest language for coding now is English.” (Salesforce 

 agentic AI platform Agentforce, so you know, grain of salt.)

These trends could place a premium on traditionally “human” skills like EI, curiosity and imagination, systems thinking, and being a self-starter, the COFOs suggested. “I was in a board meeting last week, and someone joked, ‘Sounds like it’s the revenge of the liberal arts grad, finally, right?’” Miller said.

English majors may not want to be smug too soon: 

. And speakers at this year’s Gartner CFO Conference predicted that the rise of AI means finance personnel will need 

Both COFOs see great potential for AI in the finance function. Miller speculates that it can help solve the “80/20” quandary that has plagued finance for decades: the theory that finance staff “spend 80% of [their] time manipulating data and only 20% actually doing insightful analysis that helps drive change.”

Washington says AI helps her and her team prepare for earnings calls. They use it to summarize data and drive messaging.

“That work has been reduced to hours instead of days, because I’m able to leverage AI tools to crunch that data, do analytics, and get at the crux of summarizing information,” she said.

Miller said her team is “having agents create content internally around internal analysis of data” and creating first drafts of “executive-level materials ,” like strategy documents.

But she’s not using it for financial statements yet. “I think we’ll work our way to some form of assistance on that,” she said. In those areas, she said, “executive gut feel still really matters, in terms of what’s important and around the risks or the opportunities to be highlighting.”

How F500 COFOs are using AI in finance

Companies are homing in on the real value-adds, Salesforce COFO Robin Washington said.

, cows are in the business of mooing, ghosts are in the business of spooking.

CFOs, meanwhile, are in the uncertainty business, or more specifically, the 

. And in the tumultuous times we currently live in, that’s becoming an increasingly difficult undertaking—with the consequences of getting it wrong reverberating in new ways.

“If you’re kind of close to your forecast—either above or below—you’re in fairly good shape,” Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a founding director of the closely watched Duke-CFO survey, told CFO Brew.

 the forecast, but you have very little confidence in that forecast,” he explained. “And what that means is that there’s a high probability that what actually happens could be much different than your forecast, and that’s where the company gets into trouble.”

No one is debating that we’re in an uncertain environment. “Is there a lot of uncertainty today? Definitely,” Harvey said. And in a sense, the prevalence of uncertainty is what makes agreeing on a definition tricky; CFOs are attributing a range of outcomes to uncertainty, but potentially using the term in different ways.

Like “circle back,” “synergy,” and “touching base,” uncertainty, as a corporate term, is inching closer to workplace ubiquity (and all the overuse that entails). But while we may forever debate when to use “low-hanging fruit” instead of “a quick win,” uncertainty does have a much more concrete definition, even if it’s currently being used in a multitude of contexts.

The “easiest” definition for finance professionals is that uncertainty is a type of risk, Harvey explained. And when it comes to forecasting, uncertainty is simply “how much confidence you have in [your] forecast. Your forecast has a high, a low, and a baseline. With uncertainty, there’s a huge gap between the high and the low.”

Similarly, Margaret Franklin, CEO of the CFA Institute, a nonprofit that provides finance education to investment professionals, thinks CFOs are currently defining uncertainty the same way as portfolio managers or security analysts.

“What does the future cash flow projection look like? What are the conditions for a company to do well or not, and what does that look like? And what tools do I have available…to help with that work?” Franklin posits the kind of questions CFOs might ask to ascertain how much uncertainty is at play, and how to manage it.

 in more public settings, Franklin notes many CFOs are using uncertainty as a shorthand for a degree of disruption to their customers, supply chains, and a “disruption to confidence broadly,” she added. And when that’s the definition, she says “there’s no reason 

 and investment decisions “because you don’t know what the impact of inflation is really going to be; you don’t know what trade alliances are going to be acceptable or not.”

But it could be that the broad definition of uncertainty allows the word to be flung around perhaps more often than it should. “One of the key short-term objectives of CFOs is to hit the earnings target. They don’t want to fall short,” Harvey said. “With increased uncertainty, it’s more difficult to do that.”

In that context, uncertainty becomes a way to set expectations for investors that a miss could be coming, he continued.

“We know misses are really punished in the market, but the degree of punishment depends on the uncertainty,” Harvey added. “If there’s very little uncertainty, and then you miss your target, that’s very bad. If there’s a large amount of uncertainty, and you miss, well, it’s an uncertain environment.”

Just because uncertainty, as a term, may be used loosely, doesn’t mean that it’s somehow immaterial. On the contrary, the uncertainty of the macroeconomic environment in the US is likely only going to breed more uncertainty in the future, in Franklin and Harvey’s eyes.

“People are questioning: Is the US as safe as it used to be?” Harvey said, referring to trade. “The US has got this privilege of being the reserve currency of the world. Will it be in the future? All of this causes people outside of the US to be thinking of alternatives.”

“If we look here at the US, which has been really the singularly best performing market and economy for decades, that’s being challenged in this new environment,” Franklin added. “And I don’t think any of us imagined we’d be reimagining the core fundamental market being the US market, and that is what’s happening now.”

That’s a tall order. And in the short term, there may be a benefit to ignoring some of the more immediate policy uncertainty, given how diffuse it is, Franklin pointed out.

“It’s not just what opportunity you didn’t take, but what was afforded to you by not making a rash decision in the short term,” she said. “You want to be able to have a better sense of the available information so that you can make sound decisions.”

All the while, there’s a time horizon to all uncertainty—and those who keep their eyes on longer term uncertainty may come out on top, Harvey said. Nascent technologies like artificial intelligence, for example, won’t impact what’s happening next quarter, he noted, “but it could significantly induce uncertainty over the next five years.”

Similarly, if the market nosedives, and you “panicked and sold at the low point, then waited and then bought back once the market fully recovered, then you’re a huge loser,” he said. “Some of this uncertainty…we call this time diversification, that if you hold long enough, then some of that noise in the short term will kind of go away.”

If all of this sounds like fodder for your next therapy sessions, take comfort in knowing that “it’s also the case that this is the time when high quality managers shine,” Harvey added.

In times of crisis or heightened uncertainty, that’s when “you can really separate out the [leaders] that are skilled and the ones that are just lucky to be there,” he noted. “It’s the time, especially in the finance function, in corporations, in investment management, it’s a time when, if you’re good, you can show it.”

And for those curious what the good managers are doing right now, Harvey’s advice is succinct: “Don’t overreact. Assuming that you’ve got a good strategic plan in place, stick to the plan unless you detect a structural change. Think about the long term, not the short term.”

What does uncertainty really mean to CFOs? 

The buzzword is on seemingly every CFO’s lips—but are they using it the same way?

 Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after what he claimed was an inaccurate July jobs report. The move may cast doubt on the accuracy and reliability of government statistics moving forward, experts told CFO Brew.

What’s that mean for businesses? If they feel uneasy about the data coming from the feds, they will likely rely more on other data sources to verify what those agencies are reporting. Organizations will also be more cautious in their forecasts and investments, the experts said.

“It is very disheartening and concerning to see the BLS commissioner fired over monthly jobs numbers,” Maria Flynn, a former senior executive at the Department of Labor and CEO of nonprofit group Jobs for the Future, told us. What she views as the politicization of BLS jobs data will have ripple effects that “ultimately compromise the integrity of all of the US federal statistical agencies,” including the Census Bureau, Flynn added.

In a social media post on Friday, Trump suggested the 

 and downward revisions of job gains in the previous two months were “manipulated for political purposes.” The White House posted a statement the same day claiming McEntarfer had “a lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence” as BLS chief.

 of jobs reports are far from rare. The BLS regularly revises its reports from previous months, especially in January and July, according to Wafa Hakim Orman, an economics professor and associate dean of the college of business at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

“Certainly, his statement could give one the impression that he fired [McEntarfer] because he didn’t like what he was seeing, and that feels a little like firing your doctor because they tell you you’re sick,” Orman told us.

Businesses in all industries rely on government data for forecasting and to decide how many people to hire or make logistical decisions, Orman said.

Organizations that feel less certain about federal data will look to other sources from private entities like ZipRecruiter or Indeed, either to compare with the BLS or build into an aggregate estimate, Flynn said.

With McEntarfer’s firing, US investors may need to put a “political-interference premium” on government statistics, while economists and asset managers overseas may begin to view the official figures as “no longer the definitive reference,” Michael Ashley Schulman, partner and chief investment officer at financial services firm Running Point Capital, wrote in a message to CFO Brew.

“Credibility is fiscal and monetary policy’s invisible anchor,” he wrote. When that credibility is gone, “it risks higher funding costs and a softer dollar, even if the raw surveys stay methodologically sound.”

Business leaders will likely be more cautious in their decision-making if they feel less confident about the economic data they’re using, according to Orman.

“We could see businesses be slower to make big decisions, slower to make large investments [or] big commitments of any kind,” she said. “I would expect to see that increased caution go through the economy.”

Sacking of BLS chief brings uncertainty to business forecasting

Businesses will likely be more cautious about making big investments if they feel less confident in the economic data, experts said.

Pencils down, kids. If earnings reports are the pop quizzes of the business world, then last week was more like a midterm you meant to spend all semester preparing for, only to ultimately cram all your studying into a matter of days.

To give a sense of just how much new information came in, economists have called it everything from “a 

Good timing. We needed a better look at the state of the US economy, because a weird thing has been happening: While economists and other experts braced themselves for a sharp slowdown as a result of President Trump’s tariffs, that hasn’t exactly panned out. Instead, the state of the economy remained 

, simultaneously looking more resilient than expected (though that resilience was overstated—more on that below), while also showing signs of cracks.

“We’re going to look back and either say, ‘Wow, the economy was super resilient and these things didn’t matter as much as we thought they would,’ or we’re going to say, ‘Yeah, you could kind of feel it was weakening,’” Louise Sheiner, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times. “I think we just don’t know.”

Now, the picture is getting clearer—and it might have economists longing for the halcyon days of approximately one week ago.

GDP beat expectations, though there’s a catch: 

Gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 3% for the three months ending in June. That was better than economists anticipated, but the true usefulness of that figure was limited by abnormal trade patterns as a result of President Trump’s tariffs.

In anticipation of Trump’s second term, many companies stocked up on foreign goods and materials to get ahead of proposed tariffs. As a result, imports surged at the start of the year, and large swings in imports can muddle GDP data, which shouldn’t actually count imports at all, per the NYT.

“Measures of underlying activity, which remove the volatile trade and inventory components, show that growth slowed sharply in the first quarter, then weakened further in the second,” the Times reported. Economists anticipate GDP data will be revised in future months, so that’s a wait-and-see situation for now.

 to not lower interest rates, the other fresh data point to come in was consumer confidence, which 

 in July to a reading of 97.2, according to the Conference Board. That was an improvement from a precipitous drop in April, but remained “below last year’s heady levels,” according to Stephanie Guichard, senior economist of global indicators at the Conference Board, which conducts the survey.

Guichard noted that US consumers’ outlook on current job availability weakened for the seventh month in a row, dropping to its lowest level since March 2021. In July, 18.9% of consumers said jobs were hard to get, compared with 14.5% in January.

That was something of a hint for Friday’s jobs report, which the Federal Reserve might have wanted to see before it decided to 

 for the fifth time in a row. The central bank made the decision even as two Trump-appointed board officials voted against the majority in favor of a rate cut, marking the first disagreement of its kind 

Before the Fed made its decision, Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at forecasting firm Oxford Economics, told the New York Times that the Fed might finally cut rates once it sees “a couple of job reports that aren’t overly encouraging,” noting that the central bank’s “North Star is still the unemployment rate.”

Well, that star is dimming. On Friday, the Labor Department said job growth in the US 

, with employers adding a seasonally adjusted 73,000 jobs, lower than the 100,000 jobs economists polled by the 

Worse yet: Revisions to May and June’s jobs reports “were larger than normal,” the Labor Department said. And they meant it: In May, new jobs were revised down 87% from 144,000 to 19,000, and in June the US economy only added 14,000 jobs, down 90% from the 147,000 the BLS initially reported. The Labor Department explained that “monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.”

In July, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1%, bringing the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer to 1.83 million, up from 1.65 million in June.

While economists caution against reading too much into a single week, there’s now plenty of fuel for 

 that the economy is starting to show cracks. Back to the midterm analogy: If last week was a test, your teacher would’ve handed it back face down.

A sports fan looking dejected seen in silouhette. 