We’d forgive you if you haven’t been checking LinkedIn with your morning coffee lately. There are only so many times you can read about how a CFO learned the true meaning of Christmas and generated shareholder value in the process.

But for anyone in the midst of a digital detox, there has to be a way to see which CFOs left their posts and took on new roles this year, right? Well, would you look at that…We’ve rounded them up for you.

And if you want to see what happened earlier in the year, we’ve also got you covered.

Fresh face. Ulta Beauty appointed Christopher DelOrefice as its next CFO, effective December 5. Chris Lialios, who served in the role on an interim basis after former CFO Paula Oyibo left the company in June, returned to his former position as SVP and controller.

Most recently, DelOrefice served as CFO at medical technology company Becton Dickinson since 2021. Previously, he spent 20 years at Johnson & Johnson, where he held a variety of financial leadership roles, including VP of investor relations.

Spatial awareness. Autonomous driving company Waymo tapped Google executive Steven Fieler to take over as CFO. Fieler’s new post became effective December 1, when he took the baton from CFO Elisa de Martel, according to a LinkedIn post from Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana.

“This is a pivotal moment in our journey as we continue to scale our fully autonomous ride-hailing business, expand our operations globally, and grow our team. Steve’s extensive experience will be instrumental in guiding us through this next transformational chapter,” Mawakana said.

Keep reading.—NP

Whether it’s to close the books faster or automate menial tasks, opportunities abound to transform the finance function with technology.

Finance execs and other experts shared their thoughts with CFO Brew on what 2026 may have in store for digital transformation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence and different ways it’s being deployed are top of mind.

Comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Siqi Chen, CEO and CFO of Runway: If you look at where AI has had the most traction so far—customer support, writing, coding—it makes sense. Those are domains where the interface is natural language, and the data is both high-volume and relatively low-context. Finance hasn’t seen that same level of adoption yet…That’s what I think changes in 2026. We’re going to see the software finally match the capabilities of the models. And when that happens, a huge amount of work that’s traditionally been human-led, like forecasting or variance analysis, is going to start shifting. Maybe not all at once, but you’ll start to notice that the effort and resources required to get to “good enough” drop by an order of magnitude. That’s going to create real economic leverage for finance teams because the cost of doing high-quality work goes down, and the speed goes up. All of that frees up judgment and time.

Keep reading.—AZ

There’s a lot from the mid- to late 2000s that invites feelings of nostalgia.

Seth Rogen and his troupe dominated the comedy scene with hits like Knocked Up, Superbad, and Pineapple Express. Warped Tour was at its zenith. Eli Manning and the Giants gave NFL fans the Helmet Catch in Super Bowl XLII. The 2007–08 global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession gave an entire generation lasting economic anxiety…wait a minute.

A core memory needn’t be cheerful to be consequential. Indeed, the financial crisis led to passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, an overhaul of the US financial sector “on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression,” as then-President Barack Obama described it.

The Dodd-Frank Act was lawmakers’ response to “the shadow banking system at the time,” according to Mark Nelson, senior legal analyst at Wolters Kluwer, and they passed it in 2010.

That shadow banking system included “the largely unregulated businesses that were getting blamed for [the crisis],” such as mortgage lenders, Nelson told CFO Brew. “And I think the Dodd-Frank Act, it addresses those issues mostly in the banking provisions, like bank capital, bank stress testing, and things like that. But it also pulled in a lot of other topics that may or may not have been directly responsible for the financial crisis,” including hedge funds.

Dodd-Frank still plays a central role in public discourse 15 years later, though its future is uncertain in a Trump administration focused on deregulation. Before we go there, let’s examine all the ways it impacted banking and, more generally, corporate America.

Keep reading.—AZ