Latest / Difference Makers Podcast / Difference Makers Discuss Live - Accountants for Sustainability: An Insightful Discussion with Maria Teo

Transcript

Difference Makers Discuss Live - Accountants for Sustainability: An Insightful Discussion with Maria Teo · Difference Makers Podcast

• 0:00
  Sinead Donovan: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone who has dialed into this second Charged Accountants Worldwide podcast with Difference Makers.
• 0:09
  Sinead Donovan: Today I am talking to Maria Teo, the member nominated by the Institute of Singapore Charged Accountants, and I hope you will stay with us throughout the entire interview, because it's going to be a good one.
• 0:23
  Sinead Donovan: So hi there, maria, and thank you so much for agreeing to chat to me today on the podcast Charged Accountants Worldwide Difference Makers.
• 0:45
  Sinead Donovan: So, maria, let me introduce you to the audience.
• 0:47
  Sinead Donovan: You are an Associate Director of Risk Advisory in CLA Global TS, specialising in sustainability and risk advisory, but that's where you are now.
• 0:58
  Sinead Donovan: But behind all that, there's a litany of qualifications.
• 1:02
  Sinead Donovan: You are chair of the Young Professionals Advisory Committee for the Institute of Singapore Charged Accountants.
• 1:08
  Sinead Donovan: You're also a council member congratulations on that and you've got a long list of certificates to your name and diplomas, which we will delve into later, but so I find it hard to believe that you're still only in your 30s.
• 1:24
  Sinead Donovan: So, maria, do you want to talk to me a little bit about your journey, about why you chose Charged Accountancy and where you are today?
• 1:31
  Maria Teo: Yeah, thanks so much for that vote of confidence and I think it's my pleasure to be here as well to share a little bit of what career decisions I made and the things I did to get to where I am today, and hopefully this will be of some use to the people listening in on the podcast.
• 1:47
  Maria Teo: So I started out my career in Accountancy by starting an audit, which is a fairly traditional route for people in Singapore, and that was really because I really wanted to learn a little bit more, to cement what I have been learning in university and to get my foundation straight.
• 2:05
  Maria Teo: So I felt that starting an audit gave me a very solid foundation of skill sets, of being meticulous, of looking at details, of understanding financial transactions, and that has been invaluable in the rest of my career as well.
• 2:19
  Maria Teo: However, starting on an audit doesn't mean that I wanted to end up there or necessarily to do that for the rest of my career.
• 2:26
  Maria Teo: So when I had an opportunity to pivot into the technical and quality control department because the quality manuals were a new thing back then and people were moving into e-audits software I took this chance, because transforming business processes remains as something that's very close to my heart.
• 2:44
  Maria Teo: So when I took that chance and I learned a little bit more about what makes an audit department tick, or how do you rotate schedules around and how do you make sure everything gets done and signed on time.
• 2:56
  Maria Teo: I really learned a lot of interesting skills, I would say, in terms of managing people, managing myself, learning how to be a trainer, how to develop content for training and other sorts of things, and that really also made me progress in my career, and at this point that was when I had gotten my chartered accountant as well.
• 3:18
  Maria Teo: So I felt that having that basis in accounting skills and technical skills and some IT related skills as well gave me a very good basis on which to develop further in my career.
• 3:32
  Maria Teo: So from then on, I also had an opportunity to do a second one in UK, which I felt was very valuable, and from then on it gave me a very unique perspective of how audit is similar and yet different when it's done in different countries, and by sharing experiences and learning about how my UK counterparts were doing their job, I was able to bring back a lot of perspective to Singapore and to share.
• 3:56
  Maria Teo: What have we been doing differently, how could we improve on certain things that we've been doing and how do we learn from each other.
• 4:02
  Maria Teo: And some of the context that I made when I was on Sir Conman are still in touch with me today and we leverage on each other for work purposes.
• 4:09
  Maria Teo: So that has been a great learning experience as well, and I think after that, when I came back to Singapore, that was really when I started to go into the advisory side of things, to develop as a consultant.
• 4:21
  Maria Teo: So I was invited to join the Forensic and Litigation Support Department because my accounting skills were something that they wanted to supplement in the team, and from then I got exposed to a whole range of very interesting projects, cases, clients engagements dealing with forensic accounting and fraud investigation and that's also when I started to get my certified fraud examiner and other related certifications in this field.
• 4:46
  Maria Teo: So from then on I pivoted into sustainability and climate change because of the demand and the request from our clients, who needed a lot of help with this and didn't know where to get guidance.
• 4:58
  Maria Teo: So essentially, what my team does now is providing a range of advisory services to companies both in Singapore as well as on an international scale, helping them to kickstart their sustainability program and eventually getting a report together to showcase what they've done in their company for sustainability.
• 5:17
  Maria Teo: So that's where I'm at now.
• 5:20
  Sinead Donovan: Wow, maria, that's a lot of pivots in a short period of time.
• 5:24
  Sinead Donovan: But well done and fair play to you.
• 5:26
  Sinead Donovan: That's incredibly interesting and we'll delve into a little bit more of those in a few minutes.
• 5:31
  Sinead Donovan: But on that word of pivots, you have the basis of charged accountants qualification, but you have taken the time to obviously try and find out what really kind of floats your boat and what to change sometimes is courageous.
• 5:52
  Sinead Donovan: Did you ever have a moment where it's like, oh gosh, am I doing the right thing here?
• 5:56
  Sinead Donovan: Or what was your driver to try all these various routes?
• 6:01
  Maria Teo: Right.
• 6:01
  Maria Teo: I do take the point that it's a risk when you want to change into a different portfolio or to take up a new line of services.
• 6:08
  Maria Teo: You don't know whether that's necessarily going to be a change for the better or whether it's a boiling pot into another pot of hot soup.
• 6:17
  Maria Teo: So I felt that what really helped me was being in that area with a lot of other professional advisors and consultants who had maybe experience, something like what I was doing, or were able to lend me some guidance or act as a mentor to me.
• 6:33
  Maria Teo: So usually how I would bridge that gap would be to first start out on a more of a secondment basis, to try out a project, to try out an engagement, to see whether I could understand the fundamentals of what this new portfolio was going to demand of me, and once I was comfortable that, yes, I am equipped at least to bridge that gap into the new department, that was when I would open a conversation to a more permanent transfer.
• 6:58
  Maria Teo: So that has also helped me because in a consulting or advisory firm I had that luxury to test it out before I permanently transferred into a new department, and I always encourage people, if you have the chance, to try it out, or to speak to someone who has done it before.
• 7:13
  Maria Teo: That's maybe the best way to understand if that is going to be your cup of tea.
• 7:19
  Sinead Donovan: I think that's brilliant advice, actually really really good advice.
• 7:21
  Sinead Donovan: So be brave enough to maybe take the pivot, but it's great if you have the opportunity to test it before you have to sign up to it.
• 7:32
  Sinead Donovan: That's great.
• 7:32
  Sinead Donovan: There's a comment to the UK.
• 7:34
  Sinead Donovan: Was that in London or where?
• 7:38
  Sinead Donovan: And you mentioned the differences in order, scene techniques.
• 7:40
  Sinead Donovan: I'm sure there was differences in culture as well.
• 7:42
  Sinead Donovan: What was your biggest learning from that move?
• 7:46
  Maria Teo: I was in London for about half a year and from then on we branched out to different parts of the UK, but mainly in Britain.
• 7:54
  Maria Teo: So I would say that one of the main learning points I learned was that the skills that you're going to learn or the type of clients you're going to encounter differ a lot country to country.
• 8:03
  Maria Teo: So I remember this conversation I had with some of the other associates and the seniors in London where they asked me what is it like to do an inventory stock take?
• 8:13
  Maria Teo: Because they've never had the opportunity to do that.
• 8:15
  Maria Teo: All their clients are based in the financial sphere or they're more of the investment type and they are not in the buying and the selling of things.
• 8:24
  Maria Teo: They don't do manufacturing and things like that.
• 8:26
  Maria Teo: So I felt like, wow, that's really different from what we do in Singapore.
• 8:29
  Maria Teo: We've got a lot of retail clients, food and beverage clients and things like that, and a stock take is something that we all spend our New Year's Eve doing.
• 8:38
  Maria Teo: It's pretty much normal to us.
• 8:41
  Maria Teo: So, sharing that kind of experience, learning that in different countries or in different cultures, the way you do audit is going to be slightly different that was really one of the key takeaways I had.
• 8:51
  Maria Teo: So I felt that having that network to leverage on and having counterparts in different areas to learn from is going to be invaluable in our growth as an auditor as well.
• 9:03
  Sinead Donovan: That's hilarious because I think back to my training days, and I spent many a New Year's Eve as you say it always was New Year's Eve down in Ballena, which is in the very west of Ireland, counting a builder's supplier yard, so it was freezing, it was snowing and I still had to drive three hours across the country, so maybe they didn't miss out too much by not doing the stock takes.
• 9:23
  Sinead Donovan: But, camille, tell me, did you manage to hop over to Ireland when you were in London?
• 9:28
  Maria Teo: I didn't have the chance to, but Ireland's always been someplace I really wanted to go because I felt that it's such a beautiful country and I really wanted to just take a walk through it, soak in the atmosphere and things like that.
• 9:39
  Maria Teo: But I'm really hoping to have a chance to go back to your part of the world one day and meet with your cameraman person.
• 9:47
  Sinead Donovan: Oh you will, and you'll be welcomed with open arms.
• 9:49
  Sinead Donovan: So do let us know.
• 9:50
  Sinead Donovan: So let's move on to what you're doing currently, maria.
• 9:56
  Sinead Donovan: So sustainability, let's focus on that for a bit, if that's okay, because obviously a huge topic.
• 10:01
  Sinead Donovan: I think, anywhere that anyone is sitting in the world listening to this podcast, we are being exposed to the effects of climate change, but sustainability is so much more than just that.
• 10:15
  Sinead Donovan: Talk to me a little bit about, I suppose, why you branched into that and kind of what are the key, the fascinating points that you experience at the moment.
• 10:28
  Maria Teo: Okay, I felt that one of the triggers for me to consider a pivot into sustainability was the one young world conference I attended, and I think we'll come back to this, maybe circling back.
• 10:38
  Maria Teo: So, essentially, what I had was the chance to see how, on a global platform, other people were either benefiting from or suffering from the effects of climate change, and I felt that this was really a game changer for all of us, whether we are an accountant or in some other kind of field, where right now, if we don't do something about climate change and the effects that it's going to have on the globe, in 30 years we won't have anything much to pass down to our next generation, and that's a very chilling thought.
• 11:06
  Maria Teo: So, in what can we do?
• 11:08
  Maria Teo: In a developed country, or as a professional consultant, in an advisory role?
• 11:12
  Maria Teo: Moving into this space was really my way of giving back or to help companies who would like to do better, who would like to change their business model, to input a little bit more of a sustainable age or to change the way they've been doing things traditionally, and that was what I felt was the best way for me to help and also to leverage on the skill sets that I've developed.
• 11:37
  Maria Teo: So if you're an accountant or if you are in the financial space, you know every decision whether it's sustainable or not is going to lead back to dollars and cents, and that's a very critical linkage that I've seen in my portfolio right now, where everyone's going to ask does this make business sense?
• 11:54
  Maria Teo: What does it mean for my company?
• 11:56
  Maria Teo: What is it going to look like five years, ten years down the road?
• 11:58
  Maria Teo: And they want the accountants to somehow answer this question.
• 12:02
  Maria Teo: If the accountants don't have at least some grasp on what sustainability means for their business, that's going to have a lot of difficulty for them.
• 12:12
  Maria Teo: Some hard questions need to be asked.
• 12:15
  Maria Teo: Or are they going to still be able to give their shareholders what they want to know if they don't know anything about the sustainable goals of the company?
• 12:26
  Sinead Donovan: Okay.
• 12:26
  Sinead Donovan: So really, I think what I'm hearing you say is that the role of the accountant is, in your mind, so much more than just reporting, so much more than just data capture.
• 12:36
  Sinead Donovan: It's about leading, and I mean, I do think that's something that maybe, as a profession, we need to own and move forward on.
• 12:46
  Sinead Donovan: What are some of the things that your scene companies do on their journey towards trying to achieve better sustainability, or their carbon zero journey, or whatever it may be?
• 12:59
  Sinead Donovan: What are some of the key things you're seeing?
• 13:01
  Maria Teo: Some of the trends that we are seeing right now is really about, first of all, establishing a baseline when am I at?
• 13:07
  Maria Teo: What are my peers doing?
• 13:09
  Maria Teo: And you need information for that.
• 13:11
  Maria Teo: So I think leveraging on your consultants and advisors is a very natural first step, or whether it's your auditors or someone who's helping you to analyze things and things like that, where's your company at?
• 13:23
  Maria Teo: So understanding where you are with regards to sustainability is always going to be important, and then marking out where you want to be.
• 13:31
  Maria Teo: So charting that roadmap is a very kind of a.
• 13:35
  Maria Teo: It's a good first step, because it then lays out what you haven't done, where you want to be, what you have to do to get there, and then the trends that I'm seeing for people who are moving in this direction circle around greenhouse gas calculations, creating that inventory.
• 13:50
  Maria Teo: Am I going to go to net zero?
• 13:52
  Maria Teo: Is that a 2030 goal, a 2050 goal or, I don't know, a 2100 goal?
• 13:57
  Maria Teo: So having that in mind is going to be pretty critical for companies to devise a climate strategy.
• 14:05
  Maria Teo: Even aside from climate strategy that, I do have clients who also want to focus on either the social or the governance aspect of things, so some of our clients are very much pro-human rights, for example, and they want to build on this foundation when they're coming up with sustainability strategy.
• 14:23
  Maria Teo: And that's also not a bad place to start, because a lot of us are depending on our employees, our human capital, to kickstart our business.
• 14:31
  Maria Teo: So, coming from that angle of making sure that I'm pro-human rights, that I have covered all my bases in terms of what my employees need, how can I help them develop it maybe is also a very common place to start, and a lot of companies already have a HR department, so getting them to provide more information and more data is also something that's quite readily available.
• 14:54
  Maria Teo: So I would say that most of the companies I'm looking at now either start from a greenhouse gas perspective or they're looking to capitalise or build on their human resource capabilities as well, so that could be two areas where companies are coming from.
• 15:11
  Sinead Donovan: It's good, it's heartening to hear and I suspect it's a really rewarding place to work or sector to work in, because you actually see in companies and people trying to do the right thing and make better amends.
• 15:25
  Sinead Donovan: I suppose the other side of that is sometimes we hear about greenwashing.
• 15:30
  Sinead Donovan: We hear about the negatives associated with that.
• 15:33
  Sinead Donovan: Have you come across that or what's your view on that?
• 15:36
  Sinead Donovan: Or where can Charter Counten's help in all of that?
• 15:40
  Maria Teo: Yep, it's going to be a very fine line between portraying something in the best light and then going over that line into greenwashing, where you're starting to misrepresent what your company is actually doing.
• 15:53
  Maria Teo: So a company would come to us and say you know, I've got this and I want it to be the focus point of my sustainability report.
• 16:00
  Maria Teo: What can you do about that?
• 16:02
  Maria Teo: And that may not necessarily represent what they're doing.
• 16:05
  Maria Teo: So, in the concept of balance, reporting is something that carries over from financial reporting into sustainability reporting, and we always try to keep this balance between the positive and the negative side of things.
• 16:17
  Maria Teo: So, yes, if you want to highlight that you've contributed money to charities and you've planted thousands of trees, that's fine, but you also do need to be aware that the workplace accidents that you've had, or whether you've had to pay a fine for some non-compliance those are also things that need to be put in so that you're portraying an even and balanced view to your shareholders.
• 16:38
  Maria Teo: So, in terms of greenwashing, I think the number one thing that we've had to do to prevent that is really to make sure that companies don't just focus on the good things that they're doing, or even inflate the good things they're doing, but rather keep a perspective on things, make sure that it's factual and, you know, it's supported by actual evidence.
• 16:59
  Maria Teo: We're doing things on that, so that the claims of greenwashing don't contain the sustainability report.
• 17:07
  Sinead Donovan: Okay, I love that balanced reporting.
• 17:09
  Sinead Donovan: I'm going to use that.
• 17:10
  Sinead Donovan: I'm going to use that in my life as well as anything else.
• 17:13
  Sinead Donovan: It's great.
• 17:13
  Sinead Donovan: I like that and I think your point there on that balance, reporting on that, real reporting on that, keeping it honest, I do think the Charged Accountants has a huge role to play in that.
• 17:26
  Sinead Donovan: I mean, we are one of the most trusted professions in the globe, as was cemented again by the Adelman Trust Barometer Evaluation Trust in the accountancy sector for Charged Accountants.
• 17:37
  Sinead Donovan: You can read that at your leisure audience, but it's really positive.
• 17:41
  Sinead Donovan: We are one of the most trusted professions.
• 17:44
  Sinead Donovan: So I do think there is a role for us to play in this and call out the good behaviors and call out the not so good behaviors.
• 17:52
  Sinead Donovan: So, maria, just sticking on sustainability for a little bit, because I get such a huge topic and I know it's one of the core pillars of Charged Accountants worldwide at the moment, you obviously are doing this primarily in Singapore.
• 18:07
  Sinead Donovan: Have you seen any different aspects of this internationally or have you had exposure to that?
• 18:13
  Sinead Donovan: Or maybe that's coming in your career?
• 18:17
  Maria Teo: Well.
• 18:17
  Maria Teo: So I think where I am at in Singapore is actually a very good confluence between the Asian market as well as the European and US market.
• 18:26
  Maria Teo: So within our network we've been establishing a center of excellence for sustainability, and that gets me involved in issues that other people may be facing as well.
• 18:36
  Maria Teo: So, for example, I've consulted with my colleagues in UK or in US in terms of how to best implement the EU's CSRS directive that's coming up and, of course, issb is an issue that has been faced that all of us are facing with that ticking clock.
• 18:53
  Maria Teo: So I feel that this is sustainability is not an issue that you can deal with in isolation.
• 18:58
  Maria Teo: It's not a case of one country is going to be able to solve the problem, or just by reducing the greenhouse gases in one area, you can, you know, equitize the entire greenhouse gas problem.
• 19:11
  Maria Teo: So it's really something that we've got to collaborate with with our other counterparts to work with and to see how we can best put together that value-added solutions for our clients, because it's very rare nowadays to find someone who's just operating out of one country.
• 19:26
  Maria Teo: Even if they are, they're probably buying and selling from other countries as well and, as we know, that sustainability problem is going to extend up and down the supply chain, so inevitably you're going to have to start asking other people.
• 19:39
  Maria Teo: Hey, can you help me with some information in this country?
• 19:42
  Maria Teo: Can you tell me what this company is doing?
• 19:44
  Maria Teo: And that collaborative effort is going to have to get on for us to move on with the program.
• 19:50
  Sinead Donovan: Great.
• 19:51
  Sinead Donovan: And look, I think you've made some really good points there and it does need to be a global effort and a combined effort.
• 19:58
  Sinead Donovan: And to that point, maria probably brings me nicely to something you mentioned earlier, the one young world.
• 20:04
  Sinead Donovan: So you were the Singapore representative in 2019.
• 20:08
  Sinead Donovan: Yep, again in London, wasn't it?
• 20:11
  Sinead Donovan: Yeah, everything seems to come back to London, but that's a global community where I know that young people come together and they discuss topics, they discuss issues.
• 20:24
  Sinead Donovan: What did you experience there?
• 20:28
  Sinead Donovan: What were your takeaways?
• 20:30
  Sinead Donovan: Yeah, the impact it had on you.
• 20:34
  Maria Teo: Well, I think when we talk about the one young world, I would just also like to say when I'm going into it, I didn't really know what to expect, because I was just thinking it's going to be a kind of a conference.
• 20:44
  Maria Teo: Everyone's going to be there listening to some speakers, and I know that the headline speakers are all very illustrious and big names in their own right.
• 20:52
  Maria Teo: So when I went there, I was actually really shocked.
• 20:54
  Maria Teo: So, first of all, the charter accountants will put together a delegation of all the other representatives from the different areas and countries and I felt like, wow, okay, we're putting together a delegation.
• 21:05
  Maria Teo: This means business.
• 21:06
  Maria Teo: We're representing the finance and accounting folk.
• 21:09
  Maria Teo: We have a role to play in the economics of the sustainability of our countries and our companies under us.
• 21:16
  Maria Teo: So learning from these people was also very interesting.
• 21:19
  Maria Teo: Why were you there?
• 21:19
  Maria Teo: What are you doing in your country?
• 21:21
  Maria Teo: What does a chartered accountancy look like from different parts of the world?
• 21:25
  Maria Teo: And then, when you have this delegation going together to participate in this international forum, where people are just walking up to you and asking, hey, who are you, what do you do, what's your pet project, and then sharing what they are doing in their own right.
• 21:40
  Maria Teo: It was a lot more immersive and educational than just sitting there and listening to a speaker.
• 21:46
  Maria Teo: And even the speakers that they curate are not just necessarily country leaders, which there are as well.
• 21:52
  Maria Teo: They are leading huge conglomerates.
• 21:55
  Maria Teo: They are also people from third world countries who are trying very hard to bring their community or their villages out of poverty and very extreme circumstances.
• 22:05
  Maria Teo: So I felt that having this very broad perspective and varied perspective into things really woke me up, because from where I am in Singapore, we don't get insights into these types of things.
• 22:18
  Maria Teo: So I felt very privileged to be able to hear from people who were experiencing this, came to share what they were learning and also to network and to learn from my fellow charter accountants.
• 22:33
  Sinead Donovan: Okay, I was up there in Belfast this year a few months ago meeting the charge countants worldwide delegates and yeah, I mean I think the word that a lot of them use was is kind of humbling, and it's the people you hear from and the experiences that they have gone through.
• 22:46
  Sinead Donovan: It really A makes you grateful, but B is a huge learning as to what we need to do together.
• 22:53
  Sinead Donovan: But Camere, I love that line.
• 22:55
  Sinead Donovan: When you got there and there was a charge countants worldwide delegation and you realized this means business, I love that and actually shout out to charge accountants worldwide.
• 23:05
  Sinead Donovan: The program of sending delegates to one young world, I think is amazing and something that we should really champion and cherish, and congratulations on being that.
• 23:16
  Sinead Donovan: Are you still in touch with the people you've met there?
• 23:18
  Sinead Donovan: Has it become your little global tribe?
• 23:20
  Maria Teo: Yes.
• 23:20
  Maria Teo: So what happens is that now we are looking at people grow in their career, get married, have children, and we're all celebrating these little accomplishments together, and I think technology has really facilitated that.
• 23:32
  Maria Teo: So, whether it's on Instagram, linkedin or just on WhatsApp, there are so many modes of communication for us to keep in touch with.
• 23:39
  Maria Teo: So I'm really grateful for that and to have known so many incredible people.
• 23:44
  Sinead Donovan: Yeah, it's brilliant.
• 23:45
  Sinead Donovan: It's brilliant and well done, and keep linked in with those people, because they are your global tribe and I call it the family of accountants, and I'm very proud to be part of the family of accountants.
• 23:56
  Sinead Donovan: I mentioned at the start, the introduction, that you had a litany of qualifications behind your name.
• 24:03
  Sinead Donovan: I'm going to read out a few of them Certificate in sustainability for finance, certified fraud examiner, certified privacy manager and international privacy practitioner.
• 24:13
  Sinead Donovan: I'm sure there's more, but obviously what is clear is that continuous education is really important to you, and talk to me a bit about that, and maybe do you have plans for more, or are you done now?
• 24:27
  Sinead Donovan: Are you done with exams?
• 24:29
  Maria Teo: I would like to tell you I'm done with exams, but I think that's far from the truth.
• 24:32
  Maria Teo: So what happens is that I think the learning journey for me has been very much concurrent with my work experience.
• 24:40
  Maria Teo: So as things develop and new standards come out and the business landscape changes, our clients will always come to us and say hey, can you help me out with this problem as well?
• 24:51
  Maria Teo: Can you also help me to put in place certain processes surrounding this topic?
• 24:55
  Maria Teo: And I think they see us as someone who is, of course, a trustworthy and B in a subject matter expert on more than one area.
• 25:06
  Maria Teo: And so as I acquire that work experience, I then also acquire the certifications or the qualifications that get me accredited so that people internationally recognize that these are areas that I have the skillset in.
• 25:19
  Maria Teo: So I feel that it's always good to go hand in hand if you're able to do some work experience on that while you're learning.
• 25:26
  Maria Teo: I've always found it a lot easier to take the test once I know what I'm actually doing.
• 25:30
  Maria Teo: So I think the next step for me will be to look into more of the sustainability certifications or whether it's internal audit, which I also do as a portfolio, being a certified internal auditor, for example.
• 25:42
  Maria Teo: That's something I'm looking into as well.
• 25:44
  Maria Teo: So it's going to be a constant journey of learning.
• 25:48
  Maria Teo: I think Combining that book learning with what you're going through in your career is a good way to cement the knowledge in your head.
• 25:57
  Maria Teo: I think so.
• 25:57
  Maria Teo: I was never one for just taking exams and memorizing stuff, but somehow when you're studying something that you are actually doing in your work, that makes it a lot more relevant and easy to remember.
• 26:07
  Maria Teo: So that's the way I incorporate the knowledge into my life.
• 26:12
  Sinead Donovan: That's great.
• 26:12
  Sinead Donovan: So a combination of education and practical development, and I think, yeah, as you said, it makes it real, doesn't it?
• 26:18
  Sinead Donovan: So it makes it more enjoyable.
• 26:21
  Sinead Donovan: Maria, so you are a council member of the Institute of Singapore.
• 26:28
  Sinead Donovan: Did you have to stand for election for that, or what made you, what drove you to do that?
• 26:34
  Sinead Donovan: I mean, I'm delighted, thrilled.
• 26:36
  Sinead Donovan: I was a young council member as well, so you never know.
• 26:38
  Sinead Donovan: I suspect you may be interviewing people in 10 years time as president of the Institute of Singapore.
• 26:43
  Sinead Donovan: Interview and other people, but talk to me about why you joined council.
• 26:47
  Maria Teo: Okay, it is an election process and how this usually happens is that the council does look at the diversity quota and whether or not they've got enough representation from the young members.
• 26:59
  Maria Teo: So they approached me on whether I was interested to stand for election this year because they felt that my viewpoint or what I was doing with the younger professionals would be very valuable, and I think that's the kind of the causes I'm championing both the sustainable movement as well as the younger accountants career development choices.
• 27:18
  Maria Teo: So, after getting appointed to the council, that also showed me what the accountancy industry is doing in my country.
• 27:27
  Maria Teo: It's a higher level.
• 27:28
  Maria Teo: You know, not just being focused on what your team is doing, not even just what your firm is doing, but on the whole, what is the country facing?
• 27:37
  Maria Teo: How are accountants playing into this, and getting to interface with both local and international parties has been very valuable as well.
• 27:44
  Maria Teo: So I felt that once you have that, you have to be competent in your own work.
• 27:51
  Maria Teo: You have to know what your firm is doing and then, moving on to knowing what your country is doing and what the accountants at large are doing, that really gives you a lot of perspective into what your role is.
• 28:03
  Maria Teo: How do you want to develop your career?
• 28:05
  Maria Teo: Where are accountants moving towards, and what kind of skill sets do you need to be where you want to be?
• 28:12
  Sinead Donovan: And what was the election process like?
• 28:14
  Sinead Donovan: Was that?
• 28:14
  Sinead Donovan: Did you have to go and do lobbying and kind of manifestos and everything?
• 28:19
  Maria Teo: Well, it wasn't.
• 28:20
  Maria Teo: It was nothing as complicated as that.
• 28:21
  Maria Teo: I think I was fairly lucky in the sense that I had to prepare all the election documents and apply and things like that.
• 28:28
  Maria Teo: But this year there were quite a few people who were retiring from the council and so that was a pretty straightforward process of that I think.
• 28:37
  Maria Teo: Interestingly enough, my managing director was applying for it a year or two ago and back then competition was fierce and you had the lobbying and the voting stuff going on.
• 28:47
  Maria Teo: So it really depends year on year how that's going to look like.
• 28:51
  Sinead Donovan: Well done.
• 28:52
  Sinead Donovan: Well done you for A put yourself forward and B pick in a year where there wasn't a big election, good timing yeah.
• 28:58
  Sinead Donovan: Yeah, but that's great.
• 29:00
  Sinead Donovan: And how many years are you?
• 29:01
  Sinead Donovan: What's the term of a council member?
• 29:04
  Maria Teo: So I've just rotated on this year and it'll be a six year term.
• 29:09
  Sinead Donovan: Great, great.
• 29:10
  Sinead Donovan: Well, look the best to look with that and hopefully the two institutes we may cross paths over the next few years.
• 29:17
  Sinead Donovan: So, Maria, what's next for Maria Cho?
• 29:21
  Sinead Donovan: I mean, you've accomplished so much in your short career to date.
• 29:26
  Sinead Donovan: What's next?
• 29:27
  Sinead Donovan: Or, if you don't want to say, that's fine, but maybe a little inkling of where your Northern star is.
• 29:34
  Maria Teo: Well, I wouldn't say it's a case of not wanting to say, but sometimes I guess one of the driving factors for me is really not wanting to lock myself in too far in the future.
• 29:43
  Maria Teo: So, for example, when I was an auditor, people were asking do you want to make a partner, do you want to be an audit partner one day, signing those financial reports?
• 29:52
  Maria Teo: And I was like that's kind of the long way down the road and I don't think I want to lock myself down for the 10 or 15 years it would take to become a partner.
• 30:01
  Maria Teo: So where I am right now is that I see roughly the development goals that I want to set for myself as to develop my skills in sustainability, to learn a little bit more about what people are doing, to help companies who are on the journey or who want to start the journey in sustainability, as well as to really get young accountants interested in what we're doing, to see that there is life beyond auditing, for example, to see that they could really build a career in what we do.
• 30:31
  Maria Teo: It's not just black and white or just calculators and Excel spreadsheet.
• 30:35
  Maria Teo: So I felt like, going on this angle or with this in mind, that's going to shape my career in the next five to 10 years, because this is what I'm interested in championing and helping younger people get into what we're doing right now or helping companies to move into a better space in the sustainability realm.
• 30:54
  Maria Teo: Those are the two kind of key things that I want to promote in my career.
• 31:00
  Sinead Donovan: And that is fantastic, and I think you are absolutely an ideal role model to young people looking at accountancy as a career, that it's not just about the numbers.
• 31:11
  Sinead Donovan: It gives you the platform to pivot into many spheres, and sustainability is really a key topic at the moment.
• 31:20
  Sinead Donovan: So, yeah, I mean attractiveness of the profession is a big issue for us all, so keep championing that for us.
• 31:26
  Sinead Donovan: You're doing great Beginning.
• 31:31
  Sinead Donovan: To wrap up, if you had and this may be a bit of an unfair question, but if you were given a wish list or the ability to say to governments or anyone what you would like them to do on the sustainability journey, is there one or two things that you just would like to say they should invest in, or they should try and direct us in or guide us in?
• 31:57
  Maria Teo: Well, I think one of the sad things I'm seeing nowadays in being in sustainability is that a lot of people are telling me that they don't know what sustainability is about.
• 32:06
  Maria Teo: So knowledge is a huge barrier to people getting into this.
• 32:10
  Maria Teo: So I really want to break down this barrier and to make sure that people have access to what they need to know about sustainability on a timely basis in a digestible manner.
• 32:20
  Maria Teo: So, in terms of education or getting accessibility to this kind of information, I feel that everyone can work on breaking down these barriers, whether it's providing the causes or making standards understandable.
• 32:35
  Maria Teo: How do we get people to really understand that it's not something that is huge or undoable?
• 32:41
  Maria Teo: It can be done if everyone would take baby steps or to do a little bit towards this global problem.
• 32:47
  Maria Teo: And, of course, maybe some industries or some players may have a larger chip or larger stakes in the game, but I think all of us have a role to play, even if it's as basic as knowing what the sustainability problem is and how can we, in our own capacity, deal with this.
• 33:05
  Maria Teo: So I think breaking down the education barrier is something that I'm very much keen on doing right now.
• 33:13
  Sinead Donovan: Yeah, you're so right.
• 33:14
  Sinead Donovan: I think what quite often happens is it's such a large topic that some people just and some companies just kind of switch off because they can't get their head around how large it is or where they can start.
• 33:24
  Sinead Donovan: So I think that's really, really sage advice.
• 33:27
  Sinead Donovan: Final comment or final question from me if you were to give advice to your 20 year old self, what would it be?
• 33:42
  Maria Teo: Honestly, I've been asked this question before and it always comes back to the point about having a support network in place.
• 33:50
  Maria Teo: So I was a fairly isolated auditor and even in the early years of my career, I felt that I could go it alone or I would be able to power through problems and eventually things would get better and I would learn what I needed to learn.
• 34:03
  Maria Teo: Now, in hindsight, knowing what the chartered accountancy community does and knowing what the institutes do in each country, I feel that it was a little bit silly of me not to have tapped on these resources or to reach out to people who were in similar situations to me and then to learn from the mistakes that have been made, to learn how I could have done things a little bit better.
• 34:24
  Maria Teo: You know, really just building your network from an early stage to understand that you're not alone in these problems and to get support from your peers.
• 34:33
  Maria Teo: I would have done that a lot differently if I could turn back the clock.
• 34:36
  Maria Teo: So, yep, I fully support anyone who would like to reach out to whether it's their associations or institutes, in order to get either that learning resources or to tap on the young professionals bodies that they have.
• 34:50
  Maria Teo: I think those can be invaluable to you.
• 34:54
  Sinead Donovan: That is brilliant advice and, look, I think that's one of the key no-gets and the key takeaways that the audience can maybe take from this today.
• 35:02
  Sinead Donovan: Maria Cho, I want to say thank you so much for talking to us today.
• 35:07
  Sinead Donovan: You are, without doubt, a difference maker, you are without doubt a superstar, and keep going on your journey and I have no doubt that you will reach bigger and greater things.
• 35:19
  Sinead Donovan: So thank you so much, maria, and to you for waiting till the end of the podcast.
• 35:27
  Sinead Donovan: Thank you so much for listening to us.
• 35:29
  Sinead Donovan: I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you're able to join us for the next podcast, which will be coming up shortly with another international member of Charles DeCountains worldwide.
• 35:38
  Sinead Donovan: Thank you very much and have a good day.