TALENT MANAGEMENT

Carmen Chan

First-time CFOs looking for a how-to guide might want to take a page out of Carmen Chan’s playbook.

Chan, who most recently served as managing director of Barclays, technically started her new gig as the CFO of online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter on August 17, but the work really kicked off weeks before that. Her ZipRecruiter role marks Chan’s first CFO job: Before Barclays, Chan served as VP of corporate development and investor relations at digital health company Noom.

The personal upskilling required for the public-facing aspects of the CFO gig happened as soon as she joined the team at ZipRecruiter. “My first week was basically earnings,” she told CFO Brew, and she credits ZipRecruiter president and interim CFO David Travers for her relative ease transitioning into that environment.

“It really helps to have someone who is a current CFO show you the baseline, because then you’re not trying to assess where the baseline is,” she said of her upskilling process. “You can see what is status quo and you can make your own determination as to, what are the highest ROI projects for you to really drive in your first three months, six months, a year from now?”

30 ’til infinity. Now that her first day has actually passed, she’s focused on those next 30, 60, and 90.

Chan sees the US labor market as “stabilized” but “still subdued.”—NP

      

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ACCOUNTING

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Goodwill accounting is back on the menu at FASB, four years after the accounting standards body dropped a project to revise the model for writing down the intangible asset.

This time FASB is taking a much smaller bite. Instead of attempting a massive change like it did four years ago—and failing to get it across the finish line—FASB on July 29 decided to add a project to its technical agenda that would focus on “targeted improvements to goodwill impairment testing.” Those improvements focus on the frequency of the testing and at what organizational level an impairment analysis needs to be done.

Goodwill, according to fintech Mercury, is “how accounting captures the value of things that don’t fit neatly into a balance sheet, like reputation, customer stickiness, brand, and people.” It is often “created when the purchase price” of an acquisition is “higher than the fair market value…of the company’s net assets,” the Corporate Finance Institute says.

Valuation firm Kroll’s 2026 US Goodwill Impairment Study found that in 2025, among 8,393 US-based companies, there were 266 goodwill impairment events worth $97 billion. Goodwill impairment means a drop in value, so “it potentially signals that a business combination failed to meet management’s expectations due to internal or external factors,” according to CPA firm Miller Kaplan.

FASB voted to reexamine the rule requiring annual impairment testing.—VR

      

SUSTAINABILITY

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Imagine the world’s first magical to-do list: Add one item to it, and a few others automatically get marked complete at the same time.

Here’s the thing: It’s not totally magic. In fact, it’s what your to-do list might look like if you start viewing sustainability efforts and capital strategy as connected parts of a puzzle rather than treating them as separate entities.

We talked with PwC’s sustainability assurance services leader, Kevin O’Connell, about the changes in the regulatory climate, how finance chiefs can better integrate sustainability into broader business decisions, and the use of AI in sustainability efforts by companies and stakeholders.

It’d be helpful to start by taking a step back to get some context on climate disclosure rules more broadly, especially how they’ve changed. What does the regulatory apparatus look like in 2026?

What’s happened in the regulatory reporting environment is I think we’re getting to a point now where there’s much more clarity than there was obviously two years ago, right when [the] Omnibus [package, the European Commission’s streamlining of the Corporate Sustainability Directive] came in.

Some stakeholders are using AI to model companies’ sustainability targets.—NP

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: $100 million. That’s how much Zillow allegedly paid Redfin to stop listing rentals on its platform, a move that led to an FTC lawsuit. Zillow has settled to keep the matter from going to court. 🪧 (Reuters)

Quote: “The administration obviously has a lot of incentive to try to be able to say that they’re doing something about high beef prices in particular.”—Oklahoma State agribusiness professor Derrell Peel, on allowing more Mexican cattle to enter the US in hopes of lowering beef prices 🥩 (AP)

Read: AI jitters abound at Wall Street’s invite-only “nerd camp” in the Maine wilderness. 🤓 (Wall Street Journal)

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After roughly 30 acquisitions, is Aprio still the same firm? CEO Richard Kopelman breaks down the onboarding playbook that’s kept the culture intact through years of rapid M&A-driven growth.