Chartered Accountants Global Update

Chartered Accountants Worldwide
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Stay connected, informed, and inspired with Chartered Accountants Global Update, the official weekly audio newsletter from Chartered Accountants Worldwide. Each episode brings you the latest from our global community of over 1.8 million trusted professionals — from must-attend events and upcoming webinars to fresh insights and articles exploring the key issues shaping the accountancy profession today. Tune in for highlights on: Major conferences and networking opportunities around the world.Practical guidance on navigating challenges like burnout, upskilling for AI transformation, and building inclusive workplaces.In-depth explorations of how Chartered Accountants are leading change across technology, leadership, sustainability, and more.Wherever you are, take Chartered Accountants Worldwide with you — pop in your earbuds, grab your coffee, and get your global update on the go.

  1. 5d ago

    Episode 12: Forks in the road, and the next generation of difference makers

    This month is all about purpose-led careers. We sit down with a Chartered Accountant whose path has taken her from consulting to Ethiopia to impact investing, and we introduce the six delegates representing our profession at One Young World 2026 in Cape Town. Difference Makers Discuss: Aisling McCaffrey on the forks in the road that shaped her career 📅 Thursday 15 October 2026 | 6:00pm to 6:30pm BST | Online | Free Every career has its crossroads. The safe option or the interesting one? Follow your passion or build your skills? Aisling McCaffrey has faced plenty of these. A Chartered Accountant and One Young World ambassador, she built a sustainability consulting practice at Grant Thornton, worked with UNHCR and UNDP in Ethiopia, and now works at the Impact Investing Institute in London. In this 30-minute conversation with host Sinead Donovan, Aisling will share: How to recognise a career crossroads and choose your pathHow the CA qualification opens doors in sustainability and impact investingUsing the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a personal purpose frameworkBuilding new service lines inside established firmsThe role of luck, timing and relationships in career progression"Every time you meet somebody, a little bit of yourself gets reflected back." Aisling McCaffrey Meet our One Young World 2026 delegates This November, the One Young World Summit heads to Cape Town, South Africa, bringing together young leaders from more than 190 countries. It's the summit's first return to Africa since 2013 and marks 50 years since the Soweto Youth Uprising. Chartered Accountants Worldwide is proud to send a delegation once again, continuing a tradition that spans more than a decade. Meet the six Chartered Accountants representing our profession: Talha Essop, CA(SA) Trainee: his research on tax barriers to bursary access has been submitted to National Treasury and SARSGift Mwewa, Advisory Professional: Best Overall Student, CA Zambia 2026 cohortKim Kreutle, Armstrong Watson LLP: ICAEW Council member and former Student Council ChairJemima Jacobs, ICAS: ICAS Top CA Rising Star 2026 and charity trusteeNtebaleng Twala, Finance Leader: SAICA Top 35 Under 35 Overall Winner and founder of the EduSnapper FoundationJoseph Grant, Bloomberg: Vice Chair of the Chartered Accountants Ireland ACA Professionals CommitteeFollow their journey to Cape Town on LinkedIn and Instagram.

  2. Oct 2

    Episode 11: Beyond the Numbers: Sustainability, Digital Leadership and Healthy Firms

    Beyond the Numbers: Sustainability, Digital Leadership and Healthy Firms In this episode of Chartered Accountants Global Update, we cover three developments that are asking the profession to look beyond the traditional numbers. A voluntary standard with global reach In July, the European Commission adopted a proposed voluntary sustainability reporting standard. It is for companies that don't have to report under the EU's main sustainability rules, the CSRD. The standard builds on EFRAG's voluntary SME standard and also protects smaller suppliers. Businesses with 1,000 employees or fewer can't be asked for information beyond what the standard covers. In its consultation response, ICAS called for four things: proportionality, disclosures that are useful for decisions, alignment with the EU's main reporting standards (ESRS), and practical guidance. Voluntary frameworks often pave the way for mandatory ones, and supply chains cross borders, so this matters well beyond Europe. Leading in a digital-first finance function Automation, AI and analytics are changing what it takes to lead in finance. On 22 October, CAW Network USA hosts Beyond Accounting: Women in Finance, Empowering Digital Leaders. It is a free online webinar with Nancy Chakabuda (Cummins), Linda Nel (Mohari Hospitality) and Shingi Gwindingwi (CrossCountry Consulting), moderated by Ryan Clacher (The Siegfried Group). The panel will look at the skills leaders need, how to build digital confidence across teams, and how to use technology to make better decisions. How healthy is your firm? Writing for Chartered Accountants Ireland, Sinéad Munnelly FCA notes that 55% of chartered accountants report stress or burnout. She argues that burnout is feedback on how work is structured. Clear decision rights, workloads that match capacity, a culture where people feel safe to speak up, and protected recovery time all help firms protect the judgement the profession depends on.

  3. Sep 25

    Episode 10: Why your next opportunity is hiding in your weakest connection

    Difference Makers Discuss – Kingsley Aikins – Why your next opportunity is hiding in your weakest connection Ask most people to describe their network and they will describe their friends, their family and a handful of close colleagues. Kingsley Aikins calls that the inner concentric ring, and he argues it is the least useful part of your network. The opportunities sit further out, among the loose associations and the people you have not spoken to in three years. In this episode, Kingsley joins host Sinead Donovan to continue their conversation on networking and to widen it out to something much bigger. There are now 305 million people living outside the country they were born in, roughly double the figure in 1970. Kingsley has written diaspora strategies for national governments, for regions and for cities, and he explains why so many of them have come round to seeing the people who left as national assets rather than lost actors. Along the way he makes the case that networking is neither an art nor a science, but a process, and one that can be learned. He sets out what companies quietly lost when their networks shrank during the pandemic, why the technical skills that won you your first job matter less as you rise, and the practical tricks that make walking into a room full of strangers survivable. What you will take away Why weak ties and loose associations are where opportunity actually sits, and how to rebuild an outer network that has quietly shrunkThe five challenges bringing companies to his door: less business development, less learning on the job, less serendipity, thinner loyalty and weaker culturePractical techniques for working a room, from why you should look for ones and twos rather than groups, to the quiet usefulness of standing near the barWhat the global diaspora phenomenon means for countries, regions and cities, and why around 120 countries are now building strategies around itThe four fundamentals of a network: personal, strategic, operational and onlineWhy the skills that earn you a job early in your career are not the ones that carry you later

  4. Sep 16

    Episode 9: What Six Difference Makers Can Teach Every Chartered Accountant

    What Six Difference Makers Can Teach Every Chartered Accountant On Friday the 25th of September, Chartered Accountants Worldwide is hosting Difference Makers Discuss: Best of Season 4, a free one hour broadcast hosted by Sinead Donovan that brings together six standout conversations from across the year. The stories range from entrepreneurship to sport to social enterprise, but they all point to the same conclusion. The skills that create lasting impact are the ones that are hardest to measure and easiest to overlook. Connection compounds Kingsley Aikins built the largest Irish business network in any city in the world, starting from a twelve person dinner club in Sydney. One letter to a stranger became a professional relationship that lasted twenty one years. Aster Thackery built a community of around two thousand parents from a single coffee meetup she started in London, alone, during lockdown. Neither story started big. Both prove that influence is built one conversation at a time. Resilience shows up under real pressure Caitriona Jennings qualified for the 2012 Olympic marathon while working full time at PwC, balancing two demanding commitments at once. Manuel Rodrigues, CFO for African Operations at EDP Mozambique, described how a simple change in payment timing, from annual to every thirty five days, transformed household economies for over seventy five thousand farming families. Different scale, same principle. Structure and commitment turn pressure into progress. Judgment still belongs to people Nick Riemer of The Invigilator and Liswaniso Namatama both spoke to the same point from different angles. AI can support academic and professional assessment, and it can support audit, but humans must retain the final call. As routine work becomes more automated, professional judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Why this matters for you None of these six stories are about technical skill in the traditional sense. They are about the qualities that sit alongside it: patience, resilience, honest judgment. For chartered accountants navigating AI, client relationships, and career pressure all at once, that is a timely reminder. Registration for Difference Makers Discuss: Best of Season 4 is free. Full details and speaker profiles are available on the Chartered Accountants Worldwide events page.

  5. Sep 10

    Episode 8: Four Events Worth Your Calendar Space This Autumn

    Four Events Worth Your Calendar Space This Autumn If you're a chartered accountant trying to keep pace with where the profession is heading, the next few weeks bring a genuinely useful cluster of events, on sustainability, ethics, and the broader question of what transformation means for finance leadership. First up, Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand continues its CA Sustainability Community webinar series on 22 September. Running since 2023, it's built for finance professionals who need practical, ongoing grounding in ESG topics rather than a one-off briefing. Three days later, on 25 September, CCAB hosts a free virtual session called Ethics in the Digital Age. It walks through CCAB's draft statement on the ethical use of AI, using real scenarios that touch on confidentiality, professional scepticism, and accountability when a tool gets something wrong. Speakers are drawn from all five CCAB bodies, and CPD hours are on offer, though registration is capped at 1,000 places. On 7 October, ICAS brings its Sustainability Summit to Edinburgh, in a hybrid format for anyone who can't attend in person. Rather than treating sustainability as a compliance box to tick, the summit frames it as a genuine driver of commercial value, with keynotes and panels from voices across the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, GSK, and Swire Pacific, among others. And closing out the run, ICAEW's Annual Conference lands in London on 16 October, themed Thriving in Transformation. It's a full day covering AI's effect on finance leadership, cyber security, and Making Tax Digital, with Professor Hannah Fry delivering the keynote and afternoon streams tailored to practice, industry, or policy. Taken together, these four events point to a pattern worth noticing: sustainability and AI keep showing up side by side, not because they're the same issue, but because both are forcing the same underlying question, what good judgment looks like while the rules are still being written. Full details and registration links for all four are linked below, and you can catch the full conversation on this week's episode of Chartered Accountants Global Update.

  6. Sep 3

    Episode 7: Systems, Trust, and the Judgment That Ties Them Together

    Change rarely announces itself politely. It shows up as a career crossroads, a new technology, or a shift in what clients and the public expect of us. Two recent pieces from Chartered Accountants Worldwide look at change from very different angles, but land on the same conclusion: the profession's real strength has never been in the tools we use. It is in the judgment we bring to them. A career built on systems thinking Kate van der Merwe's path into the profession does not follow a predictable line. She studied social science in South Africa, qualified as a chartered accountant in Ireland, and spent years working in pharmaceuticals and technology, including a stint at Google. By most measures, that is a complete and successful career. Kate did not see it that way. She returned to study, this time a master's in renewable energy and environmental finance, and used it to move into sustainability work, first at the NGO Trócaire, and now across a range of advisory and board roles focused on climate and social enterprise. What stands out is not the list of roles. It is her thinking. Kate argues that environmental and social goals are not separate line items to manage independently, they are deeply interdependent, and treating them as isolated boxes to tick is exactly how organisations lose sight of the bigger picture. As she puts it, "The existing system is dying. It is going to change and what we do now will determine the new system that emerges." That is a big claim, and it puts financial professionals right at the centre of it. Someone has to model the numbers, test the assumptions, and hold organisations accountable for the sustainability commitments they make publicly. Kate's story is a reminder that a chartered accountancy qualification is not a narrow path. It is a foundation flexible enough to carry someone into work that genuinely shapes how organisations respond to the biggest challenges of our time. Trust in the age of AI The second piece takes on a very different kind of change: artificial intelligence, and what it means for trust in the profession. The core argument is refreshingly clear. AI can meaningfully strengthen how accountants work, but it cannot replace professional judgment, scepticism, or ethical accountability. That responsibility stays with the accountant. It does not transfer to a vendor or an algorithm, however capable that algorithm appears. The risks are real and worth naming: automation bias, where AI-generated findings get accepted too readily; gaps in understanding how client data is stored and used; a gradual erosion of the scepticism that has always defined good accounting; and the "black box" problem, where a system cannot explain how it reached a conclusion, making that conclusion hard to defend to a client or regulator. None of this is a case against adopting AI. It is a case for adopting it properly, built on three foundations: human accountability that never gets delegated away, governance frameworks that are documented rather than assumed, and cybersecurity practices strong enough to protect the confidentiality clients rely on. The common thread Whether the change in question is a career redirected toward climate impact or a new tool reshaping daily practice, the constant is the same. Chartered accountants are trusted because they exercise judgment, uphold ethical standards, and take ownership of the work with their name on it. Technology and causes will keep evolving. That part of the job will not.

  7. Aug 27

    Episode 6: AI Agents, Insider Trading, and the Fight Against Greenwashing

    AI Agents, Insider Trading, and the Fight Against Greenwashing The profession is facing three fast moving fronts at once, and each one comes back to the same core skill: judgment. Chartered Accountants Worldwide, working with member institutes and Ipsos, has opened wave two of its global study on AI and the future of the profession. Wave one set the baseline, and this round digs into how attitudes are shifting on traditional AI, generative AI, and agentic AI, the systems that carry out tasks on their own rather than simply assisting with them. The point of the exercise is straightforward, the findings will shape strategy and leadership decisions across the whole global profession, so it's worth the fifteen minutes to have your perspective counted. Responses are anonymised and aggregated, and the survey link is in the show notes. From there, a story that puts two unlikely topics side by side. EY's Richard Harrison has been discussing how audit firms are deploying AI agents to take on more routine work, which raises a genuinely open question: how much can automation reliably own, and where does professional judgment stay non negotiable. In the same conversation, Polly Tsang flags a separate risk worth watching, prediction markets, where people trade on the outcome of real world events. It sounds abstract until you hear that a Google employee reportedly made over a million dollars trading on inside information through one of these platforms. Existing insider trading rules were never built with this in mind, so finance professionals working on anything market sensitive could be exposed without realising it. Different problems, same root cause, technology is outrunning the frameworks meant to govern it. Finally, greenwashing, and why Chartered Accountants are increasingly the ones asked to separate genuine sustainability claims from spin. As sustainability reporting has gone mainstream, so has the temptation to oversell it, vague language, unsupported net zero pledges, and selective disclosure that shows the good numbers and buries the rest. The consequences are real. Volkswagen's emissions scandal wiped out a fifth of its share price and roughly thirteen billion euros in market value, and regulators are catching up fast, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority can now fine misleading environmental claims up to ten percent of global turnover. The same scepticism and evidence standards Chartered Accountants apply to financial statements are exactly what's needed here, which is why the profession's role in this space keeps growing. Three different stories, one consistent message: as the tools and the claims get more sophisticated, it's professional judgment, not the technology itself, that keeps the profession trustworthy.

  8. Aug 21

    Episode 5: Trust in Transition: Stablecoins and Climate Risk Reporting

    Trust in Transition: Stablecoins and Climate Risk Reporting Two very different stories made headlines in the accounting world recently, and together they say something important about where the profession is heading. The first is about stablecoins. They have moved from a niche corner of crypto into serious policy conversations, yet some fundamental questions remain unanswered. Should a stablecoin sit on the balance sheet as cash, an intangible asset, or something else entirely? The answer matters more than it might seem: classify it wrong and a bank could lose the ability to use it for liquidity at all. Layer on unresolved tax treatment (should every coffee paid for in stablecoin really trigger a taxable event?) and a patchy assurance landscape, and it becomes clear that mainstream adoption depends less on the technology and more on the profession's ability to build the trust infrastructure around it. The second story is about climate risk reporting, and it is maturing fast. The days of longer and longer disclosures are giving way to a sharper focus on materiality: what genuinely matters to stakeholders, and why. Investors are asking for less noise and more signal. Responsibility is shifting into finance functions, audit committees are paying closer attention, and the hardest challenge of all remains translating long range climate scenarios into numbers that fit a three year planning cycle. On the surface, stablecoins and climate disclosures could not look more different. But both are really about the same thing: building confidence in areas where the rules have not fully caught up with reality yet. That is not a new job for chartered accountants. It is the job. It is just showing up in some genuinely new places. We unpack both stories, and what they mean for practitioners, in episode 5 of Chartered Accountants Global Update. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

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Stay connected, informed, and inspired with Chartered Accountants Global Update, the official weekly audio newsletter from Chartered Accountants Worldwide. Each episode brings you the latest from our global community of over 1.8 million trusted professionals — from must-attend events and upcoming webinars to fresh insights and articles exploring the key issues shaping the accountancy profession today. Tune in for highlights on: Major conferences and networking opportunities around the world.Practical guidance on navigating challenges like burnout, upskilling for AI transformation, and building inclusive workplaces.In-depth explorations of how Chartered Accountants are leading change across technology, leadership, sustainability, and more.Wherever you are, take Chartered Accountants Worldwide with you — pop in your earbuds, grab your coffee, and get your global update on the go.

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    Chartered Accountants Worldwide
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    99
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    © 2026 Chartered Accountants Global Update
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