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CFO Brew // Morning Brew // Update
US Attorney Jay Clayton welcomes fraudsters to self-report.

Greetings. Consider this our formal petition to institute companywide paid time off for the precious first two days of fool’s spring the Midwest and Northeast invariably experience every year.

In this issue:

🫵 Jay: Volunteer

IPO adrenaline rush

This is fine

Jesse Klein, Sissy Yan

COMPLIANCE

Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, home to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York

Leonardo Munoz/Getty Images

Governments are testing an age-old idiom: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The Southern District of New York, one of the country’s most prominent federal white-collar crime courts, is encouraging companies to come clean about their potential financial misconduct. In exchange, companies that qualify could avoid criminal charges.

On February 24, US Attorney Jay Clayton announced the SDNY’s new Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Program for Financial Crimes. The program offers a “fast track” for companies that report their own fraud and financial misconduct before prosecutors come knocking or a whistleblower outs them.

Companies that self-report fraud or market manipulation, cooperate with investigators, make amends for the wrongdoings, and commit to three years of conduct reporting can receive a conditional declination letter from the government, which says the company won’t be brought up on criminal charges.

Keep reading.JK

Presented By AvidXChange

CFOVILLE

Photo of Bill Zerella, a man with salt and pepper grey hair and stubble wearing a button-down shirt and blazer.

Morning Brew Design | ACV Auto

With 2026 set to be an important year for IPOs, including the potential debuts of AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, we wanted a veteran’s take on the experience of steering a company through going public.

Bill Zerella has shepherded three companies through new public listings. He’s currently the CFO of ACV Auctions, a vehicle auction platform he helped take public in 2021. Fitbit and healthcare communication platform Vocera were the first two.

CFO Brew talked with Zerella to get his vantage point on the challenges of preparing for an IPO and the current conditions for companies getting ready to hit the markets.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With your experience of taking companies public, what are you seeing in the IPO market now?

The bar keeps getting raised in terms of bringing companies to the public markets…There were some very successful IPOs last year. A lot of the bankers that I talked to expect this year to be a pretty good year for IPOs. There are a lot of companies that have grown to be pretty large as private companies, because the private equity markets are incredibly deep today versus 20 years ago. So companies have a lot of options other than just going public these days, in terms of getting liquidity and raising capital. So I think we’ll start to see things improve this year for IPOs versus the last few years.

Keep reading.JK

HOT TAKES

An oil barrel with a shadow of a dollar sign

Francis Scialabba

We’ve all heard about how the ongoing war in Iran is hurting the US economy. With oil prices rising to nearly $120 per barrel over the weekend, economists are calling this the biggest oil disruption in history, with many hinting at chances of stagflation.

US stocks slid over the past week, too. Airlines and cruise operators tumbled thanks to soaring fuel prices, while some tech firms faced disruptions tied to data centers in the Middle East.

This all sounds pretty grim, but Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat, has a different perspective: He argues that the rise in oil prices actually serves to benefit the US economy. That sounds pretty counterintuitive at first, but his reasoning comes down to a few key points.

Keep reading on Brew Markets.SY

MARKET FORCES

market forces chart

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 400 million barrels. That’s how much oil the International Energy Agency said it’s releasing from its reserves, which the Wall Street Journal reports is the “largest reserves distribution in history.” (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “If we look at overall AI development, I think even in the last two or three months things have accelerated at a pace that has kind of blown everyone’s minds.”—Yee Jiun Song, Meta’s VP of engineering (Bloomberg)

Read: AI as a fractional CFO? Mastercard thinks so. The company is creating a “Virtual C-suite.” (Fortune)

Workflow wins: Finance teams aren’t getting bigger, but they are getting sharper. AvidXchange’s latest blog shows exactly how—through redesigning workflows, cross-training their teams, and boosting automation.*

*A message from our sponsor.

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