As corporations look to cut their environmental costs, evaluating total cost of ownership - or the total direct and indirect costs of owning a product or service - may provide a way to achieve greater environmental accountability, better resource management and financial savings, according to a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project.

A hack at Sony Pictures that exposed more than 170,000 emails in 2014 derailed a much-hyped film's release and prompted a months-long industry freakout. A hacking incident at Yahoo now threatens to derail a sale to Verizon. WikiLeaks' releases of Democratic officials' hacked private emails are providing near-endless fodder for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. And yet, while large numbers of Americans appreciate the threat of getting hacked, they don't seem to be changing their behaviors in any appreciable way.

China reported this week that its economy grew 6.7 percent in the third quarter compared with a year ago. That matched economists' expectations exactly, and was identical to the pace China set in the first and second quarters of this year. In economics, stability like that is remarkable - and usually not to be believed.

More than two-thirds of consumers who have ever made a domestic online purchase have also made an online purchase from another country in the past year, according to an annual online shopping survey by Pitney Bowes, an e-commerce technology company. Singapore (89 percent), Australia (86 percent) and Hong Kong (85 percent) have the highest number of cross-border shoppers, while countries like Japan (34 percent) and the U.S. (45 percent) are still growing in cross-border confidence.

It might not come as much of a surprise to learn that the more companies spend on analytics technology, the better the performance of their financial planning and analysis functions. What might be less intuitive is just how extreme the advantage is when using more FP&A-oriented technology, according to a survey by the Association for Finance Professionals.