Closing the Skills Gap in the Accounting Profession

Hanadi Khalife Senior, Director of Operations for IMA MEA & India
Taha Nasir – Assistant Director at the Business Engagement Office, and faculty member of the Department of Accounting & Finance, KFUPM

Small Business CFOs Must Build Ethical Awareness

JAN 2022 | J. Stephen McNally CMA, CPA – IMA
The incentive to cut corners, including ones requiring questionable ethics, has never been greater.

Importance of Cybersecurity in the Finance Function

DEC 2021 | Co-authored by: Hanadi Khalife, Senior Director of MEA & India operations, IMA
Atul Kumar Agarwal, CEO, Cosmos Global Ventures

Cybersecurity – Three Fundamental Steps to Safeguarding the Finance Function

OCT 06, 2021 | Mohamad Bachar Saidi, CMA, ACMA, CIPP™

Cybercrime has been at the center of so much media attention that it has become perceived as a kind of familiar, omnipresent, and inevitable ill force that everyone simply needs to accept and learn how to live with. In fact, nothing can be further from the truth. 

Six Ways CFOs Can Help Small Businesses Recover

Sep 06, 2021 | J. Stephen McNally, CMA, CPA, CFO – PTI Family of Companies

Many small- and medium-size businesses have been sailing through incredibly turbulent waters for over a year. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute about 52 per cent of the UAE’s non-oil GDP, according to Ministry of Economy estimates in December 2019.

Agility – The doorway to finance transformation in the digital age

AUG 20, 2021

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Never has Plato’s postulate been as relevant as it has been during the COVID-19 pandemic

Best practices for reviving the female workforce post COVID-19

APR 25, 2021

We see the men, but do you see the women? Not a question anyone of us should be asking at the start of 2021 but yet here we are – still asking it. One of the most striking outcomes of economic liberalization in the region was the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce.

Choosing to Transform

APR 20, 2021

There is no doubt that women make phenomenal leaders. Unfortunately, not many of them are given the opportunity to demonstrate their outstanding leadership skills, with many of being held back from achieving their full potential through a variety of hurdles and challenges.

Could the COVID-19 Pandemic Catalyze Arab Youth Unrest?

Feb 25, 2021

It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has, over the past year, exposed serious fault lines and vulnerabilities in societies, institutions, and economies all around the world.

Digitalization Brings Forth a New Area of Expertise for CFOs: Cybersecurity

Feb 14, 2021 | Margaret Michaels

It’s no secret – the role of CFOs is being transformed by the day. Changes imposed by digitalization were only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and brought with them mandatory skill sets needed to chart the course for the finance and accounting function, and even entire organizations.

Why Should Organizations Invest in their Finance and Accounting Teams?

Nov 25, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is that in order to survive, businesses need to focus even more on growth. While the pandemic revealed how vulnerable a globalized economy can be, the flipside is also true – more globalization may help companies grow beyond their domestic borders.

Mentorship: A Fast Track for New Pool of Women in Finance

Oct 15, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

LinkedIn’s labour market update for July revealed much welcome news this summer. It appears that the women hiring rates that had dipped during the early stages of lockdown had subsequently followed a U-shaped trajectory before making a full recovery in June and July.

How Workplace Gender Equality is Essential to Development

Oct 13, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

Every year sees the release of multiple new studies analyzing the staggering gap between genders and emphasizing the continued disparity between men and women in the workplace. These reports highlight the discrepancies in salaries and also the continued lack of female representation at the C-suite level.

The CFOs of Today are Key to Optimized Organizational Performance

Oct 12, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

Whether it is in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, global trade wars, geopolitical tensions, or simply the myriad complexities of business, we are seeing CFOs across companies and sectors in the thick of the action – salvaging a difficult situation or strategically planning for long term growth and very often both.

Six Lessons for my younger self

Oct 10, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife, Senior Director, Middle East, Africa and India operations

One of my favorite question to be asked lately is: what advice you would give to your younger self. For starters, I think it is really important to periodically reflect back on my career with a critical eye; one which, thanks to some 25 years of experience, has become equipped with the knowledge acquired from the countless challenges I have faced and conquered. 

Can AI and Automation Replace Accountants?

Sep 24, 2020 | Loreal Jiles

While we await the mass distribution of self-driving/autonomous cars, one must acknowledge that automation, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have already begun making serious in-roads into the professional realm, including accounting. We have now entered a period where information technology and the physical world are intersecting to transform business value chains, forever changing the way we live and work.

How Can CFOs Drive Sustainability in Businesses?

Risk is something that every business must deal with, and, as the past 12 months have proven, risk is often due to circumstances beyond our control. December 2019 witnessed one of the biggest Australian bushfires, followed by Indonesian floods in January 2020, a volcanic eruption in the Philippines, locust swarms in East Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and epic wildfires in the western United States.

Transforming the Finance Function with RPA

In 2019, the IBM Institute for Business Value published the report “The enterprise guide to closing the skills gap” in which it indicated a staggering “120 million workers in the world’s 12 largest economies may need to be retrained/reskilled in the next 3 years as a result of intelligent/AI-enabled automation.” Perhaps more astonishing is how ill-prepared executives believe their countries and companies are to offer the development that millions of workers will require.

How to prepare for a post-pandemic job market

Sep 01, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

The ongoing pandemic has caused a lot of uncertainty and insecurity in our personal and professional lives. The instability of the economy has unfortunately left many professionals without a job or in fear of losing their current one; making change and uncertainty overwhelming and inevitable in the current economic atmosphere. 

Women in finance: Time for workplaces to stop adapting & start evolving

July 28, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

Diversity is no longer only about gender balance and respect for race, religion, or ethnicity; it is really about evolving into a diversity of thought. A progressive mindset that actually pays off in business performance.

Do CFOs Make the Best CEOs?

July 08, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

Not many are aware that Indira Nooyi – one of corporate America’s long serving CEOs and an Indian American business leader was interestingly the CFO of the company before she bagged the CEO job. She joined PepsiCo in 1994 and worked her way to CFO, a position given to her in 2001.

Management Accounting Profession – Creating Value Amid Global Chaos

May 07, 2020 | Hanadi Khalife

As we enter just five months into 2020, I can’t help but wonder what an unexpectedly eventful year it has been so far! But as the global economy continues to grapple with the impact of COVID-19, it also gets ready to commemorate International Management Accounting Day.

The Future of Work: 5 ways the Finance Professionals need to prepare for the future

May 06, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

According to many thought leaders, scholars, and researchers, we are at the dawn of yet another industrial revolution; only this one is unlike anything we have ever seen before!

Big Data at the Forefront of Digital Transformation

May 05, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

The concept of big data is not a novel one. In fact, it has been around for years. There is only one fundamental difference though: it used to be a manual process. We are talking spreadsheets analyzed by humans. Can you just imagine how time consuming it must have been to review and analyze data before the digital era?

How finance & accounting professionals can make the best out of working from home

May 05, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

According to the Corporate Affairs Ministry, almost about 11.89 lakh companies were active in 2018. Active companies are those defined as carrying out normal business activities and making their statutory filings to the stock exchanges on time.

From Classroom to Boardroom – Jumpstart your career!

February 17, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

When contemplating the endless hours spent researching, reading, studying and preparing to earn the chosen degree that will set your accounting career in motion, a moment of reflection: are you arming yourself with the right tools to hit the ground running?

What employers of the 21st century are looking for – Top skills companies want to hire

February 5, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

Global media has been going on about digital disruption and how it has transformed every sector with forecasts predicting the annihilation of some 70% of jobs this year.

Digital Transformation – A Blessing Disguised as a Tsunami

January 31, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

Whether you work in the public, corporate, governmental or academic sector, chances are you are dealing with a prominent buzzword being tossed around boardrooms and classrooms around the world: Digital transformation!

Stuck in a career plateau? How to jazz things up in the workplace!

January 31, 2020 | Rouba Zeidan

Let’s face it, we are entering a new era in the workplace where the very meaning of “work” is changing forever.