Good morning.
It pays to be a CFO.
Fortune reviewed compensation numbers collected by data company Equilar for the pay ratios between CEOs and other C-suite executives at S&P 500 companies in 2022. I then looked up the 2023 proxy statements listed on each company's website. I found that for at least 20 companies, the CFO earned 50% or more of the CEO's total compensation for 2022.
Every company has its own approach to executive compensation each year based on the decision of the board of directors, with input from shareholders. But in 2022 the highest CFO-CEO pay ratios I found was at Gen Digital. The pay of CFO Natalie Derse was $12.1 million, which was about 89% of CEO Vincent Pilette’s pay of $13.5 million.
The Walt Disney Company paid Christine M. McCarthy, then CFO, $20.2 million, approximately 83% of former CEO Bob Chapek’s pay of $24.2 million. In June, Disney announced McCarthy would be stepping down from her role and taking a family medical leave of absence, and Kevin Lansberry, EVP and CFO of Disney Parks, experiences and products, began as interim CFO on July 1. At Disney, Bob Iger returned as CEO in November 2022, when his successor Chapek, stepped down.
In my colleague Geoff Colvin’s analysis of Equilar’s data on pay ratios between CEOs and all C-suite positions, he found gains among CFOs were the largest. In Colvin’s analysis, he found that among the 10 companies in the Fortune 20 that shared the salaries of both CEO and CFO over the past 10 years, the CFO’s pay has risen from an average of 34% of the CEO’s pay in 2012 to 44% of the CEO’s pay in 2022.
“There’s less financial incentive to be a CEO,” Laszlo Bock, former HR chief at Google and cofounder of Humu, a maker of HR-related software, told Colvin. “The compensation of the layer below the CEO has risen at a higher rate than the CEO.”
The finance field, overall, had a good payday in 2022. I recently talked with Mariam Lamech, director of survey research at the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) about the organization’s compensation report that found treasury and finance professionals received 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, according to AFP.
The future of finance may include healthy compensation.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
