Thrust on ensuring financial discipline and accountability

Country's future accounting and finance professionals must acquire competencies to provide strategic insights, in place of traditional scorekeeping duties, to the firms as their role are shifting from financial controller to financial business partner across the world.
This observation was made at the CFO Conference-2014 organised by the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of Bangladesh (ICMAB) at a city hotel Tuesday.
Hedayetullah Al Mamoon, ndc, Senior Secretary, Ministry of Commerce, was the chief guest at the inaugural session, which was addressed, among others, by Mohammed Salim, FCMA, ICMAB president, Muzaffar Ahmed FCMA, chairman of seminar and conference committee and past president of ICMAB, and Abu Sayed Md Shaykhul Islam FCMA, vice president of ICMAB.
Around 100 chief financial officers (CFOs), senior officials of the accounting and finance departments from different companies participated in the day-long conference.
The conference theme was "Learn, Lead and Succeed."
Opening the event, Mr Mamoon laid stress on playing due role by the financial officials in ensuring financial discipline and accountability in the corporate sector.
The conference is a platform to have valuable discussions on the issues from the corporate leaders and scholars, taking the professionalism to a new level.
Aubrey Joachim, Past President of Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) presented a key-note paper on "CFO's Role in Corporate Management" at the function.
In this presentation, Mr Joachim said, "The roles of finance and accounting professionals have changed over the last few years and will continue to change in the future."
In place of the tradition scorekeepers and tabulators, he said, "Both accounting and finance personnel now find themselves operating in cross-functional teams working to identify new business opportunities, streamlining operations, contributing to decision making and improving profitability."
To transform them to add value to the organisations and become business partners, he strongly suggested the future finance professionals to acquire excellent analytical skills in customer and market analysis besides financial analysis.
"They will also have to acquire skills to use multi-disciplinary team approach to inform key decision making as well as the ability to integrate inputs from diverse non-financial sources," he said.
The financial professionals also need to have strong commercial acumen characterised by strong product, process and market knowledge, he added.
Three separate panel discussions on "CFO in Next Decade", "Meet to the CFOs" and "Journey from CFO to CEO- Listening to the Story" were held at the conference.
The discussants at the plenary sessions were M. Ruchira Asanka Perera, finance controller, Hi Fashion Holdings (Pvt) Ltd, Imtiaz Ibne Sattar, CFO, Standard Chartered Bank, Md. Kausar Alam, Group CFO of Rahimafrooz, Mahtab Uddin Ahmed, COO of Robi Axiata, Arif Khan, vice president of ICMAB, Imtiaz Ibne Sattar, CFO of Standard Chartered Bank, Ali Nawaz, CFO of Beximco Pharma, and Elias Ahmed, CFO of Coats Bangladesh, officials said.
Some other discussants, they said, were Supun Weerasinghe, CEO of Robi, Bhuvnesh Khanna, managing director and country head of Commercial Banking, HSBC, Dr Swapan Kumar Bala, managing director of Dhaka Stock Exchange, Dr Jamal Uddin Ahmed, secretary general of Economic Samity and Past President of ICAB.
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