CFO OUTLOOK

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Does it seem like everyone is worried about higher interest rates? Well, CFOs are. That’s according to the results of the CFO Survey that Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta released on September 23. It found that monetary policy was the top concern for CFOs in the third quarter, even before the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates on September 16. The study of CFO sentiment and plans was fielded from August 17 to September 4.

Of 517 financial executives who responded to the survey, 9.5% picked monetary policy as their firm’s biggest worry. Inflation, the top concern for CFOs in Q2, came in second, with 8.6%.

CFOs’ optimism about the US economy in the third quarter averaged 60.3 on a scale from zero to 100. That was a slight drop from the 60.6 recorded in Q2. Since the onset of Covid in March 2020, the high point for CFOs’ economic optimism was 69 in June 2021, and the low point was 50.5 in June 2022.

When CFOs were asked about their own company, the optimism index declined slightly, from 70.7 in the second quarter to 69.7.

“Overall, CFOs remain optimistic about the US economy and their own company’s prospects,” Sonya Ravindranath Waddell, VP and economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said in a statement. “Rising optimism among large firms is accompanied by strong expectations for revenue and employment growth in 2026 and 2027.”

Over half of CFOs said their company had increased spending over the prior three months.—LB

      

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REGULATIONS

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has been busy issuing proposals in line with Chair Paul Atkins’ desire to overhaul “the current public company regulatory framework.” From the proposed semiannual reporting rule to limiting SOX 404(b) auditor attestation requirements to only the largest filers, there’s a lot for public companies (and their CFOs) to consider.

A driving factor behind these actions is how the SEC can “get more companies to be public companies, and give investors a lot more opportunities for companies that they can invest in,” Kurt Hohl, the agency’s chief accountant, said in a prerecorded interview shown at Workiva’s annual Amplify conference mid-September in Las Vegas.

Workiva played Hohl’s comments during a session to walk attendees through the myriad potential SEC reforms.

“The general sentiment is that there’s a lot,” Steve Soter, VP and industry principal at Workiva, told CFO Brew after the session. “We’re starting to see some very active rulemaking at the SEC, and it has largely followed what Chair Atkins said that he was going to do.”

Hohl said he’d meet with audit committees to discuss what they’ll do differently if the proposals pass.—AZ

      

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PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY

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TL;DR: The battle of the personal AI agents is heating up, with Meta’s Muse making huge waves last week. For users, the big benefit is that these agents can remove some of the friction from your day (unless they make a mistake, of course). For AI firms: They get data on your entire life.

What happened: If the past few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that instead of swapping phone numbers or business cards, we might soon live in a world where people say, “I’ll have my AI agent reach out to yours.”

These handy robot assistants are all anyone can talk about lately, with Muse now topping the US App Store. But Meta has plenty of rivals vying to be the top personal AI agent in your life, including Siri AI, Google CC, Grok Bot, and a viral text message-based assistant called Instinct. (OpenAI might jump in soon, too, after hiring OpenClaw’s creator earlier this year to “drive the next generation of personal agents.”)

The agent to-do list is growing: The competition has gotten fiercer now that AI can start and finish tasks more proactively. Here are some of the errands people claim their agents have handled:

• Emailing a junk removal company to haul off a fallen tree branch in the yard.
• Haggling their phone bill down by $40 a month.
• Successfully tracking down jumbotron footage of them at the US Open, despite repeatedly being told by the event organizers that the video wasn’t available.
• Noticing that a user qualified for a flight refund, then canceling and rebooking to save them about $550.

For tech companies, the draw of a personal agent is precious user data, Tech Brew reports.—WK

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: $150 billion. That’s the latest increase to Nvidia’s share buyback program, which the chipmaker said is the largest stock repurchase in history. (The New York Times)

Quote: “We have a healthy competition among all of [GM’s] senior leaders, where every month we show [AI] usage by function and department. That’s a good, healthy competition across the board.”—General Motors CFO Paul Jacobson, on the company’s approach to measuring AI use (Business Insider)

Read: Some hoist-on-your-own-petard economic moves. (The Wall Street Journal)

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