STRATEGY

Natalie Derse

Gen Digital may be an unfamiliar name to you, but you’ve more than likely heard about at least one of its products—computer security solutions Norton and Avast, for example, and a more recent addition, mobile financial and banking platform MoneyLion. The company has gone through some “big milestone changes” in recent years, and has what CFO Natalie Derse told CFO Brew is “a very strong reputation of operational execution.”

For Gen Digital’s fiscal quarter ending July 3, it recorded an 11% YoY increase in revenue, to $1.3 billion, which was its “fastest growth rate” since its rebrand in 2022, Derse said. It also reported 19% YoY growth in diluted EPS. Both measures beat Gen’s guidance from the previous quarter. The quarter was also another when Gen achieved its goal of “continuously grow[ing] EPS faster than we do the rate of revenue,” Derse said.

Gen Digital prioritizes profitable growth—and one way it does that is by not holding growth and cost discipline as mutually exclusive, according to Derse. “We’re going to do both of them, and we find a way to do both of them.”

She added: “I come from General Electric. You operate lean, and even in the best business days, you are still finding a way to optimize and to really cut back, cut costs, operate in the most efficient way possible.”

Daily data reports help Natalie Derse decide where the next marketing dollar should go.—AZ

      

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FINANCIAL SYSTEM RISK

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The risk assessors were too risk averse.

In releasing the initial findings of an independent review of the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman found fault with the Fed’s supervisory staff, writing in the review that “our supervisory staff knew, or should have known” about SVB’s vulnerabilities, while listing six other “critical findings.”

At a speech in London on September 18, Bowman detailed the main takeaways from consulting firm Starling Advisory Group’s independent investigation into SVB’s failure, which Bowman said “fundamentally shook public confidence in the effectiveness of bank supervision.”

The findings from Starling Advisory’s review doubled down on some of the key takeaways of the Fed’s self-assessment released in April 2023—a month after regulators closed the bank.

Bowman, who became vice chair in June 2025, said the new report showed that supervisory staff did not take “prompt and decisive” action, and that there was a “long-standing culture of risk aversion” by employees, according to her prepared remarks. “Staff believed it was personally safer to take no action unless they were certain the action was exactly right,” Bowman said.

“There was no evidence that social media accelerated the run,” the independent review said.—DL

      

ASSET MANAGEMENT

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

Halloween may still be a month away, but something frightening may be haunting your business in the meantime: ghost assets.

Ghost assets cannot be accounted for, but still show up on a company’s inventory list. For example, they might include devices that have been lost, misplaced, or stolen.

“They could be left in a desk drawer. They could have left with an employee who took it with them when they departed the organization,” Mitch Berk, VP of product management and autonomous endpoint management at Ivanti, said. “They could have been recycled and not deleted from the systems, but it’s an accounting or systems error where things aren’t reconciled.”

Henrique Teixeira, SVP of strategy at Saviynt, told IT Brew ghost assets can also include digital assets, including accounts and identities.

“A ghost account is when…somebody leaves the company, and all those accesses that were created, people just forget. They forget they were even created,” Teixeira said. “And what happens is it becomes like a backdoor to your organization because somebody could use my old Henrique account to access my files and to access other corporate systems.”

Unaccounted-for assets can lead to unnecessary costs and compliance risks, IT Brew reports.—BM

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 6.5% increase vs. 7.1% decrease. That’s the expected quarterly sales performance of Hyundai and Ford, respectively, according to a Cox Automotive forecast. If that plays out, it would mark “the first time ever” that the South Korean automaker beat the American company in sales. One reason? Hybrid vehicles. (CNBC)

Quote: “Until we see changes in both of those levers, [oil] prices are likely to stay elevated.”—Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner, referring to shipping flows and refining capacity (Wall Street Journal)

Read: Tax breaks on capital investments are benefiting US tech companies that are pouring money into artificial intelligence infrastructure, leading to lower tax payments to the federal government. (Politico)

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