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We love a good vibe check.
And that’s why we turn to Deloitte's CFO Signals survey time and time again, because you don’t have to look much further to get a sense of what’s top of mind for hundreds of CFOs.
Back in March, the very same survey told us that a majority (59%) of CFOs saw the economy as “good or very good,” up from 47% the previous quarter. CFOs were especially likely to view their own companies’ prospects optimistically; only 11% said they were pessimistic about their businesses’ outlook, a steep drop from 27% the quarter before and 41% in Q4 2022.
This time around, things are markedly more mixed in the survey, which polled 200 finance leaders from the US, Canada, and Mexico. There was a near-equal split between respondents who said they felt greater optimism (38%) and those who said they were less optimistic about their company’s financial prospects in the next year (39%).
That’s likely because they have heads full of worry. Only 26% of respondents thought it was a good time to be taking greater risks, and economic and geopolitical concerns were top of mind.
Three-fifths of the CFOs surveyed listed the economy as their primary external risk right now, with geopolitics and cybersecurity rounding out the top three.
Recent high-profile attacks likely won’t help that last worry: In a regulatory filing at the end of May, Live Nation said it discovered “unauthorized activity” on a “third-party cloud database” primarily impacting Ticketmaster data.
But some of the worries are coming from inside the house. Nearly half of the respondents (48%) said their top internal risk was GenAI adoption; CFOs were particularly worried about a lack of GenAI talent. Talent and technology transformation were also big concerns, with 47% and 45% of CFOs citing those worries in the top slots, respectively.
One thing CFOs aren’t worrying about (but probably should be)? Succession planning. One in four respondents said their companies lack a formal CFO succession plan, notable given that the survey concerns businesses earning more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Logan Roy they’re not.