This is true, I was saying the CFO may not handle all of the day-to-day of the accounting. They wouldn’t necessarily hire all of the day-to-day for M&A either. If you look at big org charts, which I’m sure you have, there are several departments that typically report directly to the CFO and he/she is responsible for all of them. There’s treasury, accounting, M&A, and possibly an investment department (which may be separate from treasury) depending on the business.
Hedge fund CFO is not that different as it has elements of all of the above depending on the fund. I was mentioning that since he was talking about hedge funds.
Actually in my experience that’s the type of things (requirements for deconsolidations, etc.) that they tend to be pretty proficient about, because it directly affects how they structure a leasing transaction with banks.
I would think in a hedge fund or asset manager, the CFO might be more accounting-oriented than elsewhere, since the investment functions are likely to be distributed through the organization into investment teams, because investment is the primary business of AM or HFs. The CFO might therefore be more accounting oriented because the rest of the organization is more investment-oriented than your standard product-producing company (though the CFO would still have to be knowledgeable enough about investing to understand the busines and do their job).
In other businesses, where the object of the rest of the organization is to produce a product or a service and get it to customers, the CFO is likely in charge of the parts of the organization that do more of the investment kinds of things.
In a small to mid sized fund this is what a hedge fund CFO does:
Fund formation
SEC registration and compliance
SEC filings: 13F/D/G etc.
Payroll / expense accounting
Working with service providers: administrators, primes, auditors
Possibly tax (sometimes this is outsourced)
Possibly trading and treasury functions related to trading
It’s not dissimilar to other CFO jobs but there are specific hedge fund nuances. At a big firm these will be broken down and you will have a seperate trading division and a dedicated controller. If the firm trades exotics, you might have a dedicated exotic guy as well. There is also possibly some overlap between CFO and legal that will be separated with a dedicated legal staff at a big fund whereas at a small fund the CFO will likely handle some of that and/or interface with outside counsel.
I Work in an investment company ,well to rephrase my statement my company(O&G) is owned by a larger (O&G) company which is then owned by an investment company.To give you the scale one of our sister companies is a top 5 shipping company(O&G Tankers) in terms of gross tonnage.My company is base oil oriented ,now at the big investment company the investment activities is under the CFO ,it makes me wonder cause investing and typical CFO jobs are not the same,though they may speak the same language
I guess people don’t want to be CFO’s because they may not have deep knowledge of the product compared to SVP, Engineering, and therefore less likely to be CEO. Especially at a firm where product knowledge is important, CFO may be seen as a support role, aka MO.
CFOs are critical , a good CFO versus a bad CFO will have VERY VERY DIRECT imapct on a company,unlike say HR(My least favourite)however they are less likely to be promoted due to theri nature where as CMO,CTO,COO are far more likely