Good morning,
Pierre R. Breber, VP and CFO at Chevron Corporation is set to receive a $75,000 increase in salary, resulting in an annual base salary of $1,150,000, according to the company’s form 8-K filed on Jan. 24. And plenty of other companies are continuing to vie for high-performing finance professionals by offering competitive pay.
I sat down with Mariam Lamech, director of survey research at the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP). We talked about the organization's latest compensation report that found treasury and finance professionals realized a 5% increase in their 2022 base salaries, up from 4.4% in 2021. It was the largest increase seen in the past 10 years.
Management-level employees, like FP&A, had the largest bump at 5.3%, followed by executives (5%) and staff (4.8%). Effective Jan. 1, 2023, the average reported base salary of CFOs was $256,038. And their average bonus was $94,262.
A total of 1,408 financial professionals responded to APF’s survey, with 43% working at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue representing various industries such as manufacturing, retail, and financial services. The survey collected data on total compensation earned by financial professionals during the calendar year 2022 as well as data on base salaries as of Jan. 1.
Will this trend in salary hikes continue? “It's very hard to predict,” Lamech says. “If we are able to avoid an economic downturn in the next year, there is no reason we shouldn't see similar raises next year.”
AFP’s research also found that 60% of treasury and finance practitioners said there's a shortage of talent in their functions. Is there any indication that giving base salaries a bump has been helpful in the talent crunch?
“When we asked the question in the survey about whether the organization was facing a talent shortage, there was a group that said, yes, and a group that said, no,” Lamech says. Half of the group that said no pointed to flexible work environments, and the other half pointed to competitive compensation as the reasons why they weren’t facing a talent shortage, Lamech explains. “So treasury and finance specialists believe that [competitive compensation] is helping,” she says.
But for some of the companies that are still struggling to hire finance and treasury professionals, Lamech has heard they’re filling some positions with contractors as they continue to recruit. AFP administers Certified Treasury Professional and Certified Corporate FP&A Professional credentials and offers skills training.
"What we’re hearing anecdotally from members is competitive talent pools, the lack of skills of [candidates] as they go out to recruit, and the volume of work are pain points,” she says.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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