Finance Intelligence

2 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: KPMG's Scandal Fallout Reaches 1,000 Jobs, the AML Deadline Most Firms Just Passed, and Who Climate Reporting Actually Catches Five operational and compliance reads for NFP, NDIS, childcare and SME finance teams — including one widely repeated claim about charities and climate reporting that doesn't survive a look at the legislation. Sunday's round-up is the compliance-and-operations digest: the deadlines, funding conditions and rule changes that don't make headlines outside the sector but change what your finance function has to do. This week's batch has a deadline that passed on Wednesday, a mandatory training obligation that started on Friday, and a reporting requirement a lot of NFP boards have been told applies to them when it very likely doesn't. 1. KPMG Australia weighs cutting up to 1,000 staff and dozens of partners as the audit ...

1 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: A Big Four Firm's AI-Written Research Falls Apart, Altman Talks About Slowing Down, and the ASX Puts AI in Its Draft Governance Code Six stories from the past week — three about what AI can now do, three about who is supposed to be watching it — plus what I'd actually take from each one. Every Saturday I pull together the AI stories that matter to a finance function rather than the ones that trend. This week split cleanly: three items about capability and price, three about accountability. The one I'd read first isn't a model release — it's a consulting firm's own research collapsing under a check that took an afternoon. 1. PwC published AI "thought leadership" riddled with fake footnotes — the third Big Four firm caught this year Researchers at GPTZero, with their findings verified by the Financial Times , identified four PwC Middle Eas...

Friday, 31 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Why NFP and NDIS Boards Need an AI Policy Before Staff Build Their Own Workarounds You don't need to wait for a regulator to tell you this. The template already exists — someone just has to put it on the agenda. The gap your board hasn't noticed yet Here's what I think most NFP and NDIS boards get wrong about AI: they're waiting to be asked. Someone assumes the CEO, the CFO or IT will bring an AI policy to the table when it becomes necessary. Meanwhile, staff are already using AI. Not in six months — now. A commissioned national survey published this month (Employment Hero's AI Paradox at Work report, based on 1,634 Australian workers and 1,008 business leaders) found that one in three Australian workers are using AI tools at work without their employer's knowledge. There's no reason to assume finance, program and intake teams in the NFP and NDIS sector a...

Thursday, 30 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Why Your Finance Team's AI Bill Keeps Climbing While Token Prices Crash Token prices have fallen roughly tenfold a year. Enterprise AI spend still doubled. Here's the actual cost driver — and the fix that doesn't involve cutting the tools your team relies on. If you had asked a CFO eighteen months ago what would happen to AI costs once token prices came down, most would have guessed the bill would shrink. Reasonable guess. Wrong answer. Token prices for large language models have fallen at roughly the rate industry analysts have tracked since the technology went mainstream: about ten times cheaper for equivalent output quality, every year, according to Andreessen Horowitz's ongoing analysis of LLM inference pricing. And yet enterprise AI-native application spend grew 108% year-on-year in 2026, according to Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, with 78% of IT leaders...

Wednesday, 29 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) What Judo Bank's Bad Loans Reveal About Your Own SME Credit Risk A month on from Judo's dramatic guidance downgrade, the real lesson isn't about one lender — it's about how fast credit conditions can turn on any business. Back in late June, Judo Bank's parent company, Judo Capital Holdings (ASX: JDO), delivered one of the sharpest single-day share price falls the ASX has seen from a bank in years. On 25 June 2026, Judo's shares plunged as much as 46 per cent in early trade, after the specialist SME lender told the market that three business loans — worth a combined $75 million — had deteriorated "very rapidly" in the space of a few weeks. A month on, the story isn't really about Judo Bank's share price anymore. It's about what the episode says regarding how quickly a small cluster of underperforming loans can turn into a market event, a...

Tuesday, 28 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The Data Your Finance Team Shouldn't Paste Into AI (And a One-Page Checklist for What's Safe) Only 11% of Australian and New Zealand organisations have a formal AI policy. Here's a practical test finance staff can run before anything involving NDIS, aged care or payroll data goes into a prompt box. The Shadow AI Problem Already Inside Your Finance Team Your finance team is probably already using AI. Whether your organisation has approved it or not. That's not a guess. A 2023 survey of Australian and New Zealand organisations by ISACA, the global IT governance association, found that 63% of employees were already using AI at work, while only 11% of their organisations had a formal, comprehensive policy governing its use. More recent data suggests the gap hasn't closed. The Josys Shadow AI Report 2025, based on a survey of 500 Australian technology decision-make...