PEOPLE CONNECTOR
Beyond providing professional training for accountants, Leong Soo Yee uses role at global industry body to support small audit firms looking to venture abroad.
When Leong Soo Yee turns up for the virtual interview over Microsoft Teams, the executive director (markets) of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) “arrives” with her headphones on, attired for a real-life work meeting. The mother of one has been separated from her child who is finishing her final year at a university in the United Kingdom during the Covid-19 pandemic. If there is any separation anxiety, none comes across as she discusses her journey from an anxious young working mother to a confident professional who has learned to take risks and let go.
“I am practical by nature. In the early days when my daughter was younger, I was very hands-on. When June, my daughter, became a teenager, I had to learn the art of letting go,” Ms Leong says. “That learning was accelerated when she left for the UK when she was 17. I had to learn to let go in a significant way. My role is still evolving.”
Inspired by her late father, who became an entrepreneur in his late 30s, dealing with construction materials and travelling to Europe to build up his network of contacts, the 51-year old found courage to embrace risks in her life.
“Dad always said that for one to be successful, one needs to be ambitious and try new things,” Ms Leong says. That mantra from her childhood became the main force that drove her to study business at the National University of Singapore.
RITE OF PASSAGE
In the first 20 years of her career she focused on marketing. She landed her first marketing job at Shell and spent seven years there before leaving for other marketing jobs in various companies including Tricon Global Restaurants (now Yum! Brands), the American fast-food chain that operates KFC and Pizza Hut; Citibank and AIA. The latter was a rite of passage for the marketing specialist as it tossed her into roles outside her comfort zone. She had to do direct sales.
“The height of the financial crisis, in 200708, was actually a key milestone for me,” Ms Leong says. “I joined AIA and took roles outside of marketing. The job offered a more holistic perspective on management including operations, direct sales, customer service, risks and corporate culture.
“I underwent a personal transformation where I was more open to saying ‘yes’ to taking up opportunities rather than being risk-averse.”
When opportunity beckoned at ACCA — a global professional accountancy body focusing on education, working with youth and people looking to upgrade their skills — the decision to move was easy. “I jumped at the opportunity,” she says.
It has been eight years since Ms Leong joined ACCA as its Singapore head in 2012. The UK-based ACCA, founded in 1904, offers the Chartered Certified Accountant qualification. The primary function of ACCA is to educate and train its members.
Over the years, Ms Leong assumed various roles including director for Asia Pacific in 2015 and director of Asean, Australia and
New Zealand in April 2016, where she oversaw the development of the profession via ACCA’s contributions to the strategic and fast-growing markets of the two regions. “Currently, I have responsibility for our markets across the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Americas, the Asean region, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East as well as South Asia and the global sales and marketing function. It’s really been a journey of learning and excitement,” she says.
Listening to Ms Leong list all the places she travels to in her role to build ACCA’s growth markets, one can’t help but wonder how she juggles motherhood and work. But she says that it was a stroke of serendipity that the global responsibility came at a time when she became a “newly liberated parent”. Her daughter was older, more independent and was heading for London to study.
ACCA aims to provide opportunity and open access to people of ability wherever they are in the world. It seeks to promote the highest ethical, governance and professional standards, by qualifying and regulating members to the same high standard globally, with the ACCA qualification officially benchmarked to a Master’s level.
Ms Leong’s interest to provide opportunity, free from artificial barriers, and to connect people around the world sharpened after she received an unexpected call from a member in Dubai. The man had called to thank her for giving him free access to a conference in Singapore, a move that enabled him to network and eventually find employment as a chief financial officer. He has since retired and relocated to Malaysia, and has offered to be an ACCA mentor to the young students.
Says Ms Leong: “It was a small gesture on my part but it is a reflection on how a small step in providing any support can lead to an amplification of impact on those in times of need. It’s what I want to continue to do.
“I am very blessed to have a role in ACCA where I can play a part in further building this as a ‘people connector’, providing and amplifying that need.”
In Singapore, she has taken two concrete steps to support the community. One is a collaboration with the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) to provide free tax advisory service to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as they grapple with Covid-19. The other (also with the NTUC and with AI Singapore and the Singapore Accountancy Commission) involves helping small accountancy firms venture abroad and to make optimum use of technology.
To date, ACCA — which won the MemCom membership award for “Best social mobility initiative” for 2018 — has connected about 227,000 members and 527,000 accountancy students in 179 countries, maximising their employability, facilitating talent mobility, and helping employers to find the finance professionals they need.
The topic of ambition pops up a few times in the interview, with Ms Leong seeming to perk up each time. For many women, “ambition” necessarily implies egotism, selfishness or self-aggrandisement or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends. Few would admit to being ambitious. But not Ms Leong.
In her view, people, especially wome should be more bold and shouldn’t shy away from being their own biggest cheerleaders. “That’s the only way one can grow in life and career — always learning and learning from failure, being resilient and being ambitious.”
She is disappointed by a March report by the Council for Board Diversity, which found that the largest 100 primary-listed companies on the Singapore Exchange had achieved 16.2% of female board participation as of Dec 31 — just a slight improvement on the 15.2% recorded at the end of 2018.
On the bright side, there were fewer all-male boards: only 19 companies last year had no female directors, down from 50 in 2013.
An advocate and supporter of diversity in the workforce and in leadership positions, Ms Leong believes there is room to improve female representation and diversity in Singapore, but acknowledges that change will not happen overnight. Instead, it will require time, even five of 10 more years where gender diversity is concerned.
“Still, we need to take tiny steps. It requires the whole ecosystem to be active. While progress has been disappointing, the key is that diversification is still on the agenda,” says Ms Leong, who was the first Asian to join the executive team at ACCA.
FIRM REALITY
ACCA’s values — accountability, diversity, integrity, innovation and opportunity — have never resonated more strongly these days. The accountancy profession is facing unprecedented change and challenges as the world questions the role of accountants and auditors as well as the quality of their work, in the wake of a spate of audit failures and other corporate financial woes. In Singapore these have included signs of trouble at Carillion, BHS, Patisserie Valerie and Rolls-Royce overseas and in Singapore, high-profile collapses including Noble Group, Hyflux and more recently, Hin Leong.
The world will demand even more of such professional services, Ms Leong believes. The need is growing for professional accountants who can deal with reporting on factors far beyond the financials, and demonstrate even deeper strategic insight.
“It boils down to the ecosystem; the standards, regulators, management and board, stakeholders, auditors all have to play their respective parts,” she says.
“Accounting standards and rules are constantly evolving as businesses become increasingly more complex. The debate on that continues.”
This is a golden age for the sector and to instill the right values in young talents.
As ACCA sees it, professional accountants of the future will need a changing combination of professional competencies: a collection of technical knowledge, skills and abilities, combined with interpersonal behaviours and qualities — or professional quotients (PQ). Regulation and governance, digital technologies, expectations and globalisation will drive significant changes in the accountancy profession.
There are seven “professional quotients” accountants will need to adopt in response to change, according to an ACCA report: technical and ethical, intelligence, creative intelligence, digital, emotional intelligence, vision and experience.
“They will need these seven quotients in every role to work in a team, anticipate problems, function in diverse cultures and lead transformation,” Ms Leong says. “You have to have the mindset to be ambitious to be ready for the next opportunity.”
Technical and ethical capabilities remain at the core of the professional accountant’s skill set; however, the report shows that a combination of the remaining quotients will enable people to succeed and add value to their employers and clients in the years to come.
These seven professional quotients or competencies form the basis of ACCA qualification, and programmes are designed to draw out these essential technical, ethical and interpersonal skills every accountant of the future will need. Its qualification develops the skills needed for the future while still retaining the high standards of rigour and robustness that members — and employers — demand.
“The qualification’s continued evolution and relevance has ensured that we continue to deliver the forward-looking, strategic-thinking financial professionals tomorrow’s world will need,” Ms Leong explains.
Technology, she says, has relieved accountants from the traditional book-keeping role and transformed the job, allowing them to let go of the more tedious tasks and add value. This is especially so in Asia, given the region’s soaring consumption and its integration into global flows of trade, capital, talent and innovation.
“As Asia continues to be an economic powerhouse, there will be significant demand for professional services, be it accountants or auditors,” she says.
An ACCA report on accountancy careers in 2020s sees five career zones for accountants to shape the future of organisations in this digital age — the assurance advocate, the business transformer, the data navigator, the digital playmaker and the sustainability trailblazer.
In fast-changing, digitally disrupted markets, the assurance advocate can help organisations manage risk appropriately and ethically.
With business models ever evolving, the business transformer can support businesses by leading operational change programmes on the finance side or wider business transformation initiatives.
The data navigator can act as a strategic adviser, helping to develop and apply rich data sets and analytical tools to provide real-time insights into how to create and sustain longterm value.
It is no longer a vertical climb but there’s a lot more mobility in career growth, which offers continued agility for lifelong learning. Definitely, a golden opportunity ahead
The digital player can act as a technology evangelist, identifying the potential of robotics and machine learning to transform finance, and working with tech teams to drive productivity and better decision support.
Last but not least, in driving value and transparency, the sustainability trailblazer can set frameworks that capture, measure and report on activities that truly drive value, providing more meaningful and transparent information about the organisation’s performance.
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
Professional accountants can use digital tools and technologies to transform the risk, reporting and internal control landscape to create and preserve value. They can also support responsible business practice, and drive transparency and trust in the organisation.
“It is no longer a vertical climb but there’s a lot more mobility in career growth, which offers continued agility for lifelong learning. Definitely, a golden opportunity ahead,” Ms Leong beams.
Even so, life, like being a parent, is a constant learning journey.
“As we work through the challenges of the pandemic, it is not easy. You can’t be a super human being,” says Ms Leong.
“You need balance — be aware of mental health and don’t overwork. There must be a clear boundary between work and life as well as healthy time spent with the family.”
She finds time to do some brisk walking three times a week along a park connector near her home and was also in the midst of a 21-day meditation challenge when the interview took place. Just don’t ask her to bake — she tried it once, and won’t be picking up another rolling pin or pastry brush anytime soon.
Business Times
The (Chartered Certified Accountant) qualification’s continued evolution and relevance has ensured that we continue to deliver the forward-looking, strategic-thinking financial professionals tomorrow’s world will need