Economic uncertainty is supposed to make CFOs defensive. Today, it’s giving the strongest companies permission to attack. New data in the October 2026 edition of “The 2026 Certainty Project” from PYMNTS Intelligence finds that 87% of CFOs see at least some opportunity in market softness,...
At the most efficient growing companies, 80% say their primary reason for using working capital is planned growth. Among the least efficient, just 2% say the same. That 78-percentage-point gap is a central finding in “The 24-Day Advantage: What Top-Performing CFOs Know About Working Capital,” a...
The term “real time” is becoming to corporate finance what “AI-powered” became to enterprise software: Ubiquitous enough to sound meaningful, but elastic enough to mean almost anything. But real-time finance isn’t about how quickly a dashboard refreshes. It’s about how long it takes an economic...
For middle market companies, greater certainty and higher investment often go together: 59% of firms with rising certainty increased capital spending. That connection runs through “The Cost of Caution: Why CFOs Put Growth Plans on Hold,” the latest report in the PYMNTS Intelligence 2026 Certainty...
A well-prepared finance department typically implies a well-prepared business. And that’s supported by new PYMNTS Intelligence research in the June 2026 edition of the Growth Corporates Working Capital Index,which revealed that today’s strongest finance organizations are treating liquidity as something to position in advance, not something to source...
Middle market CFOs are getting themselves stuck by doing what they think is the right thing. And that “right thing” is typically still treating finance modernization as a technology upgrade. Findings in the August 2026 edition of The 2026 Certainty Project, a PYMNTS Intelligence report in collaboration with Fynapse, show how growth is...
Corporate America may have a capital allocation problem hiding inside its risk management discipline. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Cost of Caution: Why CFOs Put Growth Plans on Hold,” the latest installment of the 2026 Certainty Project, found in September that middle-market chief financial officers...
The next generation of payment infrastructure is giving CFOs something more valuable than speed. It’s giving them optionality. Real-time rails, richer ISO 20022 data, virtual accounts, embedded FX and automated treasury systems are providing finance teams with new levers over four variables CFOs have historically...
Corporate cash forecasting was easier to tolerate as an imperfect discipline when idle cash earned almost nothing. After all, for most of the zero-rate era, an imperfect cash forecast was an operational nuisance. But in 2026, it can be an earnings leak. According to a...