All right, thank you so much for staying with us. Now, as a global body for professional accountants, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, ACCA, is poised in raising the bar to meet the professionalism gap in the financial sector. Now, notable for its zero-tolerance standards and zero tolerance for quackery in the accounting profession, the chief executive officer of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, ACCA, Helen Brand, spoke with my colleague, Ikechukwu Obinna, to highlight some of the innovative ideas the professional body is exploring. And welcome back. Well, ACCA is the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and of course it's a globally recognized accounting body that offers qualification with strong local relevance for careers in audit, tax, and finance. And I'm being joined at the moment by the CEO of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, Helen Brand. Thank you very kindly for joining us.
Hello, it's my pleasure to be with you today.
All right, yes, ACCA is the global body for professional accountants, as people know. Please, can you tell us more about it and your members here in Nigeria as well?
Well, you're quite right. We're a global body for professional accountants. We now have over a quarter of a million fully qualified professional accountants, members of ACCA, in 180 countries around the world, and over half a million what we call future members are students who are at various stages of study. And they work in all sectors, all parts of the world. So, whether it's in audit, whether it's in the corporate sector, and very importantly, the public sector, our members are adding value every day. And that includes here in Nigeria. Our members started qualifying and living here in Nigeria in the 1950s, so been around a while. And now many of them are very senior positions, CFOs, CEOs. And that's the path now that we do see professional accountants taking, rising to the senior levels of the profession here in Nigeria and across the world.
Indeed. Beyond supporting your members here in Nigeria, what are the ways that you support in the development of the economy and of course especially the development of skills in Nigeria?
Well, we believe that the skills that accountants bring to the economy are part of that infrastructure, the ecosystem that makes everything function better. And it can start very young. So, we're working on various programs in schools here in Nigeria, whether they're focused on pocket money and how to use your money wisely, whether it's focused on we have something called the sustainability hour that we launched recently, which is to teach students, young people the relevance of sustainability in their lives and how they can go about doing that from a very early age.
Indeed. You talked about something very critical to the body which is sustainability. Indeed, some people this is not something people associate with the body that said the ACCA. Can you tell us more about the sustainability standards?
Sure. Well, ACCA produced its first report on what was then called environmental accounting in 1990. So, we've been on this journey for quite some time. And there's something about that message that you can only manage what you measure. And now, whether it's the government, regulators, the public, customers, are demanding more and more of businesses that they are accountable for how they impact on the environment, on the societies where they work, on the economies where they make their money. So, that whole piece around reporting on the impact you have as an organization, and also the sustainability of your organization in a world of
That's very critical. Yeah. In a world of climate change, are you thinking ahead? Are you investing in the right way? Is your supply chain going to be sustainable going into the future? And the accountant, at the center of the business, is really critical there in terms of making sure that the right allocation of resources are made, that there's the right strategy in the organization. And also, as you mentioned, that with the increasing number of international sustainability reporting standards, businesses are able to report against those standards, and ultimately be assured against those standards as well. Indeed. The sustainability reporting standards are very critical when it comes to accounting or being accountable, as it were. Now, these reporting standards, or sustainability reporting standards, are now being introduced in Nigeria. You want to tell us more about their introduction in Nigeria? What's your view on that?
Sure. Well, first of all, I say I've long been a supporter of international reporting standards, be they financial or sustainability, because we think consistency is key to fair trade, to investment, to giving investors confidence in the markets where they are. And if you have consistency of standards, then it's much easier for that commerce to happen in a smooth way and for it to be efficient. The sustainability reporting standards under the IFRS Foundation, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, S1 and S2, we're delighted that the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, FRCN, is recommending the adoption of those standards which will be coming in over the next couple of years. And we think that will put Nigerian business again on a fantastic footing to compete globally. Most importantly though, to remain sustainable within the economic environment we're in now.
Indeed. The other area that we are hearing about is the application or impact of artificial intelligence in a professional like career, accounting, or accounting profession. Our Chief Executive Officer, Mrs. Victoria James, is a good proponent or exponent of that. Is this something that the body is also focusing on at the moment? Yeah.
Of Victoria's one of our most esteemed members. I'm glad to hear that she's promoting AI. Look, we see technology of all sorts, including AI, as being the ultimate enabler for the profession now. So, it's not a question of learning technology over here and accounting over here. The two are integrated with sustainability themes that I was talking about earlier. So, when you put technology, finance, and AI together, you have a very powerful mix. One thing to say about that, of course, is that the ethical standards of the profession have always been at the heart of what it means to be a professional accountant. And where we see the role of professional accountants going forward is actually applying that ethical lens to the use of AI. We know that there are risks associated with AI. It can produce bias. It can give false information. It needs the professional oversight and skepticism of a human being and what better human being than a qualified professional accountant who has that ethical DNA. But we see bringing great opportunities. If those risks are managed, then there are great opportunities. It frees up the professional accountant to do more strategic work, to be that finance leader within an organization where data and information can be produced so much more quickly and actually so much more accurately going into the future. So we see this as a great opportunity, a great enabler of the profession.
