News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
If any CFOs made their New Year’s resolution to be more optimistic, they’re doing pretty well so far.
Among the CFOs surveyed in Deloitte’s latest CFO Signals survey, 72% said the North American economy would improve in a year, a marked jump from the 19% of CFOs who said the same the previous quarter.
And compared to three months earlier, 59% of CFOs said they were “significantly or somewhat more optimistic” about their organization’s financial prospects, another jump from the previous quarter.
The survey’s overall CFO confidence score—the tally of five categories of questions—climbed to its highest reading in 10 quarters.
They’re not just feeling confident. They’re also feeling risky. Two-thirds of respondents said it’s “a good time to be taking greater risks”, a big climb from the mere 12% that said the same last quarter.
With the growing appetite for risk, CFOs are looking to boost capital expenditures at their organizations by 8.7%. Nearly half (44%) planned to “allocate or reallocate capital to new business investments,” while 43% said they’d fund acquisitions.
For all the optimism and risk-taking readiness, CFOs see some major changes coming in the year ahead. When asked what changes they expect to make in the next year, 47% said they may move their global supply chains, which makes sense given that 46% said geopolitics was “their most worrisome external risk.”
Now, for the elephant in the room. The timing of the latest survey, which interviewed 200 CFOs at organizations with a minimum of $1b in revenue, could be partly to thank for the optimistic tone, the authors noted. The US presidential election occurred days before the survey was conducted, and right after the Federal Reserve cut rates.
Let’s see how long these optimists can keep the New Year’s energy going.