Will the Industry be ready for a disruptive ZiCA leadership?

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:02:49 +0000

By Kelvin chungu

Today, I will move away from discussing specific industry topics and focus on the current matters of interest to a number of accountants in the Country.

The Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants (ZiCA) will be having its 32nd Annual General Meeting in Livingstone on 29th April 2017 and at which event, there are a number of elective council positions available and that are currently being contested. ZiCA as stipulated by the Accountancy Act, 2008 is managed by a Council comprising of 12 members, 2 of which are nominated by the Minister of Finance.

ZiCA as a self-regulated body for the accountancy profession set up by an Act of Parliament of 1982 which morphed into the Accountants Act of 2008  has enormous statutory powers to regulate accountants in Zambia and is one of the well-managed institution in the Country.

With its principal mandate to promote the accountancy profession through the regulation of the accountancy practice as well as the education of ‘would be’ accountants and its members, this mandate has been enhanced by a legal requirement to register with ZICA for anyone or organization wanting to practice accountancy in Zambia. Therefore ZiCA can be a strategic force to re-engineer our profession to ensure we remain gate keepers for our industrial Zambia.

As such, as ZiCA goes to its elective AGM, it is important to dwell on some of the key trends that are impacting our profession, because we cannot treat them lightly. The time for incrementalism has given way for rethinking our profession to ensure that we remain the vanguard of our corporate ecosphere. Necessarily so, because at the time of elections, it is important that our choice of candidates for these elective offices must be those that account for this fluidity or we will be consigned into an abyss of irrelevancy in the not too distant future.

The ACCA Accountancy Future Academy ‘Technology trends: their impact on the global accountancy profession’ thought leadership had these predictions among others for this emerging era;

• Accountants will need to re-skill to retain their emerging role as the gatekeeper of corporate data.
• The profession must develop new ways to measure and value technology costs and benefits for the world of cloud computing and social networking.
• The accountancy profession will shrink as software vendors build progressively more finance expertise into self-learning products and services.
• The CFO of the future will need to know as much about technology as they do about financial management.
• Unless accountants embrace technology they will follow the dinosaur into extinction – individually and as a profession.
• By 2020 audits may well be real-time. Regulators will conduct them automatically pulling data in from business systems and sensors embedded in everything – from stock to livestock and even human beings.
• If accountants do not position themselves as subject matter experts on emerging trends such as crowdfunding and new payment platforms, then other professionals will.
• Accountants must exploit emerging technologies to attract talent and to develop and manage existing talent.

The trends above goes to show that it is becoming well acknowledged that data now represents a new post-industrial era and will rule in a world where the majority will connect in real time and thus specialist big data skills will be an important highly sought after skill to provide insight into this social fulcrum. That is why institutions of learning such as ours, must begin to relook at their curriculum to embrace this defining new order.

These trends have been enabled by the convergence of social, mobile and cloud that is expanding the capability by private enterprise to gather information.

Added to these trends is the falling cost of technology, which is increasingly beginning to provide a platform for machines and software to commence the process of substituting for humans. Organizations and others that can begin to harness and seize the opportunities offered by digital advances stand to gain significantly, while those who ignore this imperative by focusing on what they currently know best, will lose the competitive edge. This is more so, for us as an institute.

Therefore as we select our candidates, we need to be focused on the zeal and ambition among our candidates to engage the institute in exploiting the available technologies to take advantage of the different opportunities that are now being presented.

An important warning is that we cannot underestimate that this digital revolution is real and that it is affecting every industry. For instance, Goldman Sach’s New York headquarters has replaced 600 of its traders with 200 computer engineers over the last two decades because of automation, while Uber has started experimenting with driverless cars in Pittsburgh in the United States. The use of robots has become conventional in industries stretching from banking to manufacturing with robots now being used to offer advice on finance, as an example CNBC reported on 21 March 2017 reported that Goldman Sachs is building a robo-adviser geared to mass affluent customers.

While it is to be expected that there will be some lag in terms of global trends impacting institutions in the West seeing the light in Zambia, it remains critically important not to underestimate that these trends though lagging will be a factor to the domestic market.

So what can we do? The starting point in this era as in any, is the leadership. We need to elect members that will provide all of us the confidence that there are individuals advocating and encouraging a digital revolution at the institute. We need to be focused on electing individuals that are asking the right questions, and identifying the questions behind the question, to steer our institutions to build the right action plans.

The short of it is that Accountants are now being inadvertently provided with the opportunity to computerize and automate time-consuming and monotonous work so that we can engage more on value adding efforts that enhance our roles as advisers on finance and business.

That is why our institution must begin to look beyond our current strength to understand the external factors that are impacting on our ability to be a cost alternative institution necessary to provide the basic tools that our competitors are enabling.

Added to this, our members are trending you and are looking for opportunities and as is always the case, they are looking to the institute with questions, asking for the following among others:

• Less restrictive practice entry points that does not compromise our quality expectation. What can we do?
• More accommodating fees that don’t impact on members out of employments. What can we do?
• For the institute to be more engaged with the public sector in the way that we have been with the private sector, what can we do to address them?
• For tiered non-audit practicing certificate. How can we engage on this?
• For more opportunity for examinations. We have seen how some global institutions have moved in this aspect. What can we do? In all of these member’s requests, a central theme is that, with the new tools available, it is possible to meet half way on a lot of areas.

My platform as a candidate recognizes all these imperatives and also envisions an institute that embraces e-solutions such as CPD online platforms that delivers solutions to the member’s convenience. The need for student e-engagements that tracks student experiences and gives them a mentor to clutch on that is accessible and e-exam solution that enables more opportunity for students to become members.

My platforms also envisions an emphasis on advanced excel knowledge, data analytics, data modelling and data mining as an imperative for our graduates of tomorrow because the fourth industrial data revolution will not wait on us. Importantly, my platform also envisions a focus on new skills redeployment to our existing members through various online solutions.

It could be argued that this is utopia because of our current economic imperatives and so let me acknowledge the vulnerabilities confronting the Zambian economy, however when you look a little more closely at some of these economic forecasts, what they’re really telling us about the state of the economy is far more ambiguous. There is more for Accountants to harvest and we need to harness the skills now.

Truly, we have moved on from an era of uncontested election, from the time when we were headquartered in Rhodespark with a few enthusiastic staff, to this time when the Chartered Accountants Worldwide have embraced us. In all these moments, there have been passionate individuals fit for their era that played a significant role and now it is time for another era, a time to reimagine our profession, a time to rethink how we will embrace this age.

We need to imagine everything including new coalitions, new engagements. Our competitors need not be our competitors tomorrow. There is a lot to reimagine and I dare say that those longing to have access to excellence will cause them to seriously confront the need for change.

About the Author

Kelvin Chungu is an aspiring candidate for the vice president position of the Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants.