As the curtain comes down on WCOA 2010 I’d like to echo the sentiments of every single one of the delegates that I have spoken to this last week in Kuala Lumpur in saying what a splendid event this has been for our profession. The theme of the whole congress, ‘sustaining value creation’, reflects the quintessential role of the modern accountant.

It was perhaps fitting then that the final plenary session on the last day of WCOA addressed a forward-looking theme with long-term relevance to all CIMA members: Accountants in the next decade – embracing change and seizing opportunities.

I was joined on the panel by the chief executives of IFAC’s other member bodies ACCA, ICAEW, AICPA and CPA Australia and the session was chaired by Dr Ian Ball, President of IFAC. One of the primary areas of discussion centred on the essential needs for boards to really understand their own business models. As a requirement for long-term sustainable businesses, accountants must provide and interpret the right information, assess risk and mitigate against it, measure performance, tell the business ‘where we are’ and ‘how we go forward’ but they must also be relied upon to support their respective boards.

There are both challenges and huge opportunities in the private and public sector for accountants and we must achieve ongoing flexibility to meet these, changing as the world changes. Today we are driven by factors like technological advances, globalisation, a rising population and the need for sustainability in business. We must also assess what we have learnt from the financial crisis, enhance our skills, keep communicating properly and retain our objectivity.

I believe firmly that there has never been a better time to be a management accountant. Financial management is critical to any business, indeed the language of business is finance – the crisis made that quite clear.

I see the management accountant as being the ‘corporate navigator’ of the business, providing the board with direction and the right information for the journey, but also the ‘guardian of the business model’. A company’s CFO should absolutely be the person responsible for saying ‘this is where the business is’.

There does remain within this then an inherent conflict. On one hand the CFO must be part of the team, entrepreneurial and driving strategy with the board, but also remaining unflinchingly objective and prudent on the other. Doing the right thing when no-one is looking is critical in this profession and integrity is key. My colleague Dr Ball summed this up well later when he stated that we accountants ‘must not waver from the truth’.

Transparency in all that we do is actually forcing better management of businesses. Organisations can create meaningful value that supports ethical decision-making. It’s a tone that needs to be set from the top and reinforced across the whole business.

As we at CIMA greet both the challenges and opportunities ahead for our profession, I look forward to the next WCOA in 2014 with great anticipation.

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'Improving Decision Making' – CIMA’s series of reports on changes in the accounting profession can be found here:
http://www.cimaglobal.com/decisionmaking