One of the big lessons to come out of the crisis is that companies should discuss with their banking partners how they are managing risk on a broad scale, how that is changing, and how it will affect their business.

This is a lesson which was highlighted again in a new report on bank risk management by an association representing regulators from around the world.

Companies that look to banks for loan facilities are the ones that ultimately will pay for rising bank regulatory costs under Dodd-Frank, and a group of lenders are in the process of changing loan document standards to ensure that is the case.

New corporate loan documents are already seeing clauses added to shift the cost of Dodd-Frank compliance from the bank to the borrower, according to a report on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.

Although it published a timeline in September for implementing changes under the Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC was not wholly successful in meeting it.

In fact, the regulatory body missed on a broad range of changes that it expected to have done by year-end. For example, the creation of a number of new offices and units under the SEC was put off due to budgetary uncertainty, according to an update by lawyers at law firm Leonard, Street and Deinard.

Further consolidation in the mid-tier banking markets is inevitable, particularly as new regulatory requirements under Basel III, published recently by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision-forces more small players out of the payments services business. This will have far-reaching effects on US banking and will likely mean less liquidity available for corporates in the US.

The new rules are likely to increase the cost to institutions of providing low-value, high-volume payments--the bread and butter of the payments business-and are yet another issue that will force further consolidation in the mid-tier-and-smaller banking market in the US.

In a follow-on from my blog yesterday on small business confidence and economic recovery, today I will take a look at the impact on retirement planning of continued tough conditions and a lack of external funding for businesses.

Retirement planning has taken a back burner for many small business owners since the crisis started. With small business confidence dropping in December for the first time in three months and many still reporting a dearth of outside funding sources, many owners expect to see their savings dwindle further in the coming six months, rather than grow.

As spending soared above even optimistic predictions this holiday season, small business owners are still far from optimistic about economic recovery as a whole, according to a survey by Discover Small Business Watch.

Discover's monthly index of small business confidence fell for the first time in three months in December, even as consumer spending soared. The index fell to 81.6 from 87.2 in November, a drop of 5.6 points.

As companies come to terms with new 1099 reporting requirements, software firms are starting to build new solutions-or update their existing ones--to help make finance executives' lives a little easier.

The new 1099 reporting requirement that all vendors who supply more than $600 worth of goods or services within the tax year be sent a form 1099, which takes effect in 2012, could cause untold headaches for small, medium, and even large companies, given the vastly-increased reporting burden that it is likely to create.

CFOs who cook the books are often bullied into it by overbearing CEOs that are looking out for their own equity stakes, according to a new piece of research by a group of global academics.

The research looked at why and when CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations, and what factors increased the likelihood that CFOs would knowingly become involved in accounting fraud.

Although corporate social responsibility and sustainability are big buzzwords right now, and have been for some time, actual efforts to implement sustainable practices within the supply chain have not been a priority for many companies over the past few years.

This is, of course, hardly surprising. Given the vast array of changing regulations, increased compliance requirements, and the need to simply focus on basics as markets floundered through some of the toughest economic conditions of the past century, any projects not deemed either necessary for compliance purposes or able to show a very quick return on investment were understandably put on hold.

Many companies have considered, and rejected, the use of data analytics tools in their efforts to improve efficiency and reduce process costs. Often, CFOS and their CIOs may feel that the need for better data quality is too big of a hurdle to overcome. As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.

But John Lucker, Principal at Deloitte Consulting, says that CFOs should stop getting hung up on data quality. "All too often, CFOs and their CIO colleagues think that the quality of their data has to be perfect to be used for business analytics, and it does not."