CFOVILLE

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Amit Singhi, Adobe Stock

CFOs must act as catalysts within their organization, Humanetics CFO Amit Singhi believes. Leaders who can derive insights from data and drive change based on what they’ve learned.

A seasoned CFO, Singhi served as CFO of Ford South America, Ford Global’s customer service division, thermal imaging device manufacturer FLIR, and automotive components manufacturing group the Piston Group before joining Humanetics in 2020, the global high-tech safety devices manufacturer that’s best known for inventing and producing the crash test dummies used in vehicle-safety evaluations.

Singhi said he’s thought about what it means to be a catalyst since reading about Deloitte’s framework “The four faces of the CFO,” which describes four roles that CFOs, ideally, will fulfill. Along with catalyst, in Singhi’s take on the framework, there’s steward, operator, and strategist. For Singhi, catalyst could be the persona in which a CFO can have the greatest impact.

“Being an operator and a leader is a given,” he told CFO Brew. “But as a catalyst, that’s where you are driving the most day-to-day tactical performance by identifying gaps in the business, identifying best in class, and then helping the organization close that gap and keep improving.”

The ability to overcome resistance to change is a key job for the catalyst.—CV

      

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The last few days of the month arrive, and suddenly everything depends on who’s available and whether the data landed safely. For multi-entity finance teams, that routine resets every 30 days.

During insightsoftware’s upcoming webinar, Warwick Leitch, director of product management, sits down with Mary Beth Fichter, VP/corporate controller, who lives the month-end close. They start with where the bottlenecks hide, the ones that make every close feel like the first.

Next comes AI across the full close workflow. You’ll see where it catches errors and validates data and what that gives the team back in both time and confidence.

From there, the conversation turns to ownership. Finance configures rules and manages approvals without raising a ticket.

You could leave with a benchmark for whether your close runs consistently or depends on the few people who know how it works.

Register for the Nov. 12 webinar.

AI GOVERNANCE

Arthobbit/Getty Images

On Oct. 22 at Campfire’s Basecamp summit in San Francisco, the company’s CEO and CFO John Glasgow walked on stage in a pair of custom Nike Jordan’s bearing the company logo.

Smiling, he told CFO Brew off stage that he paid an Etsy artist to paint them, and wears them to conferences. Glasgow and Campfire customers are planning for 2027 and thinking a lot about AI token spend and accountability.

“Typically there was always [a] software budget, and there was [a] payment budget. And where does token spend sit? And how do we think about usage-based pricing? Because if your largest bill is usage-based, unlike cloud vendors like AWS, it’s actually quite hard to forecast token consumption for an organization,” Glasgow said.

“But the big debate is do we cap token use per employee? What if the incremental tokens make them more productive? But we’re capping the use, and so actually, are we capping productivity?”

How Glasgow is trying to minimize AI “slop grenades.”—DL

      

HEALTHCARE

Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock

More adults are going without health insurance, and hospitals are feeling it.

After falling during the pandemic, the uninsured rate among adults is on its way up again: About 11.2% of US adults 19 to 64 were uninsured in 2026, up from 8.9% in 2024, according to an Oct. 22 biennial survey from health research nonprofit the Commonwealth Fund. Some other adults experienced a coverage gap at some point in the year (12%) or were underinsured (23%), meaning they had insurance but didn’t have coverage for affordable care.

This report points to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollment drops as one cause. Additional coverage losses are expected in 2027 when changes from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) Act, such as Medicaid work requirements, take effect. As uninsured and underinsured rates rise, medical debt has challenged hospital finances, and companies may respond by selling to private equity (PE) or passing on costs to health plans and patients, experts told Healthcare Brew.

“Hospitals and health systems are taking a number of proactive steps as they see a rise in uninsured patients and uncompensated care…Even with these actions, rising levels of uncompensated care and other negative impacts from OBBBA may threaten hospitals’ ability to provide full access to care in their communities,” Aaron Wesolowski, VP of policy at the American Hospital Association, told Healthcare Brew over email.

One expert told Healthcare Brew that the financial strain could drive hospitals to sell to private equity.—CC

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

MARKET FORCES

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: $33.24 billion. That’s how much Anthropic said it made in revenue for the nine months ending September 30, a 1,200% jump from the same period last year, according to the AI giant’s revised S-1. (CNBC)

Quote: “There’s more content out there in electronic format now, and Gen AI is better at finding things than the average human. Now banks are more exposed.”—Michael Eastwood, director of Americas equity research at Jefferies LLC, on Wall Street banks’ attempts to restrict dissemination of their research (Bloomberg)

Read: The strategic financial thinking behind…the Pizookie. (the Wall Street Journal)

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EVENT

Morning Brew Inc.

Weeks lost to fragmented tools is a hard number to explain in a board meeting. Join us for a conversation on how one login, connected systems, and AI that runs across the full cycle can give finance leaders a clear line of sight, from planning to close to reporting. Register now.

Jobs

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