What problem does it solve? Deciding how much cash a firm should return to shareholders as dividends or buybacks requires comparing what was returned against what could have been returned, and judging whether management can be trusted with any surplus. This Skill runs that payout-policy judgment as stage S10 of a corporate finance valuation pipeline. ## Core Features & Use Cases - FCFE Analysis: Computes cash returned, payout ratios, and three FCFE variants (including target-debt-ratio and bank regulatory-capital routes) via a deterministic Python engine. - Trust and Sustainability Judgment: Scores management quality with ROE versus required return and Jensen's alpha, maps the firm onto the Damodaran payout matrix, and projects five-year dividend sustainability. - Use Case: As part of a corporate-finance or restructuring run, the orchestrator hands this stage cleaned financials and cost of capital; it returns a payout.json artifact with a quadrant verdict, a recommendation on amount, form, and speed, and a readable markdown report. ## Quick Start Ask the valuation orchestrator to run a corporate-finance analysis on the company and include the payout policy stage with the cleaned financial statements.
