Thomas Thoomse Smith, Project Director at the FRC Lab views the digitalised future as having an increasing variety and quantity of data. This will be much more than the financial information that many of today’s auditors and accountants can handle.
It will include data on the environmental footprint of a company or its human resources.
Mr Smith sees a clear, necessary direction for the profession: “We need a significant evolution of the role of accountant and auditor. We’ve got to expand on our current expertise and skills to be able to create value from these new forms of information. Including data on the environment or consumers will give us important insights into a business.”
“Digital Day 2018 talked about the ‘expectation gap’ – the gap between what people think our profession does and what it actually does. A lot of the potential services we could offer in the future sit within that gap. For example, around wider forms of assurance – being the third-party trust provider for everything from AI systems to blockchain.”
He has a clear idea of how to seize lasting value from digitialisation: “We need to quickly evolve to become multi-skilled professionals. At our core, we are experts in our profession and its standards. Layered around this core, will be a very wide skill set, which will understand a business while considering its human capital, climate metrics and data technology.”
“As you gain more expertise via professional development, you start to create overlapping layers of skills. This is where you start to get the ideas that can lead to impressive developments and innovations, leading to new services and value.”
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