ACCOUNTING

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Phil Comerford

In November 2024, PKF O’Connor Davies, an accounting firm with a 135-year legacy, accepted investment from private equity firms Investcorp and Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments. A year later, it announced a goal of reaching $1 billion a year in revenue. It also restructured much of its leadership, keeping CEO Kevin Keane but bringing in Philip Comerford, an exec with a lengthy PE resume focused on business services investments, as CFO.

These moves might cause a traditionalist to worry that the firm would soon change beyond recognition: Many PE-backed accounting firms have embarked on aggressive plans for expansion, pursuing multiple acquisitions, upgrading their technology, and increasing revenues with astonishing speed.

PKF O’Connor Davies, the nation’s 25th-largest accounting firm, has seen its revenue rise 41% since 2024, going from $380 million to $535 million, and its partner ranks grew a little more than 10% year over year. Reaching $1 billion in revenue would, as of Accounting Today’s 2026 list of the top 100 firms, move it about to the 15th-largest firm. However, PKF O’Connor Davies’s strategy is more tried-and-true than expand-at-all-costs, Comerford told CFO Brew.

Complex role. Previously a principal with PE firm Warburg Pincus and a VP at Investcorp, Comerford has enjoyed the move to operations. “I’d always gravitated more toward the portfolio management side of investing, partnering with management teams,” he said. It’s “much more rewarding of a career, in my mind.”

The PE investment in PKF O’Connor Davies was “an accelerant,” CFO Philip Comerford said.—CV

      

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EXEC COMP

Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance is preparing a proposal that would revise public company executive compensations disclosures, according to an update on the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website.

The OMB will then send the proposal back to the SEC, adding any edits it may have, before the SEC will vote on it and publicly release it.

Per the update, the SEC sent its proposal to the OMB on August 26—but it’s been a long time coming for some.

The SEC’s compensation disclosures have been in place since 1992. Under current rules, public companies must provide compensation disclosures on an annual basis stating how much its top executives, including the CFO, will be paid.

That includes information about how they’ll be compensated, with many finance chiefs receiving stock options and short-term cash incentives, in addition to base salary and signing bonuses. Companies also have to disclose how they arrived at compensation decisions.

SEC Chair Atkins said the longstanding disclosure rules are a “patchwork.”—NP

      

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AI GOVERNANCE

Francis Scialabba

Like the cookie tin that now houses sewing supplies at Nana’s house, most enterprises are witnessing agents do things outside of their original purpose.

According to an August report from Enterprise Management Associates for Cequence Security, 65% of companies said they’ve had an AI agent perform actions outside of its intended scope. Of those companies, 29.2% said these occurrences had a measurable impact (e.g., data exposure, financial loss, etc.) on their business. The findings are based on a survey of 202 global IT and security leaders at organizations deploying or evaluating agentic AI.

The governance problem. Cequence CISO Randolph Barr told IT Brew the high rate of unintended-action performing agents are a byproduct of governance and technical failures within organizations.

“A lot of organizations adopt AI quickly. They sometimes don’t have the proper controls in place to detect what these agents are doing, and on top of that, [are] assigning general access to these agents, not going through a review process and making sure that what the intention of an agent is…doing what it’s supposed to do,” Barr said.

IT Brew explains how to get control of rogue AI agents.—BM

      

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: November 2023. That’s the last time 10-year Treasury yields were this high, reaching just over 4.8% as of Wednesday morning. (CNBC)

Quote: “From a technological perspective, it is becoming evident that if your fragmented products don’t talk to each other, then AI is going to get the better of you, because you need your infrastructure to be able to respond at AI-level or machine-level speed.”—Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Apple’s new chief executive took over this week. He has in front of him a “balancing act” to master, involving both financial predictability and product innovation. It’s a dilemma that CFOs are very familiar with! ⚖️ (the New York Times)

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Jobs

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Director of Accounting at Arvato Bertelsmann
• Director of Accounting - Corporate and Consolidations at U.S. Physical Therapy
• Sr Internal Auditor at FREEMAN
• Sr Internal Auditor at Delek US Holdings
• IT Internal Auditor II at Sabre