Host
- Philippa Lamb
Clips featuring
- Iain Wright, Chief Policy & Communications Officer, ICAEW
- David Williamson, Chief Political Commentator, The Express
- Frances Haque, Santander Chief Economist
- Neil Hare-Brown, Founder, STORM Guidance
- Michael Hoare, partner, Kekst CNC
- Paul Guess, Case Management Officer at CABA
- Riaz Shah OBE, Professor of Practice, Hult International Business School
- Tony Moore, Lecturer in Finance, Henley Business School
- Polly Tsang, Senior Financial Services Regulatory Manager, ICAEW
Producer
- Natalie Chisholm
Transcript
Philippa Lamb: With Christmas round the corner, welcome to a special Best of 2025 episode of Behind the Numbers. What better way to notch up a spot of CPD over the festive break? It has been a big year for the podcast. We made our 100th episode in May, and we released a special all about trust to mark the event. Our guests had plenty to bring on that one, but one name kept on coming up, Donald Trump. Here's David Williamson, Chief Political commentator at the Express, with his take on the most powerful man in the world.
David Williamson: He does delight in wrong footing people, and always has throughout his career. And in retrospect, perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised, but he does seem to have come back in his second term, almost as somebody – you know, he comes from a background in television as much as from business, and it's as if he's surprised to have got a second series commissions. And off the back of that, it's like, well, this one is going to be memorable.
PL: and he knows there won't be a third...
DW: Well, well, his outriders, to an astonishing degree, are talking up the possibilities of this still, which is terrifying for constitutional experts who thought, well, no, this is done and dusted, but this is exactly the type of hairs he likes to set rubbing.
PL: And here's Iain Wright, ICAEW's Chief Policy and Communications Officer, with his thoughts on how Keir Starmer has dealt with the US President.
Iain Wright: I think we are one of the first to have a trade deal with the US. I think that's a good indicator of how we thought of in the White House. I've been on this podcast with you before Philippa, and I've said, you know, what do we sell to the states? And we sell Bentleys and Land Rovers. We sell stuff from GSK and AstraZeneca. We sell Rolls Royce engines. And if you look at the beneficiaries of the trade deal, it's automotives – really good deal. It's aerospace, particularly focused on Rolls Royce engines, and it's the life sciences and pharma sector. So all credit to our negotiators on behalf of the UK, focused on our strengths, focused on where we can have really strong wins and have gone and delivered on it. There are some losers. So in my old patch of Teesside, there's the bio ethanol sector, and that is the raw material for a lot of other parts of the chemical industry. Really important part of chemical manufacturing in Teesside. By removing tariffs and allowing the US to come in, that might be at risk, so that we need to be careful of that.
PL: Yeah, but as you say, other than that, sectors that have been identified in the industrial strategy, which is key for us, have done pretty well, haven't they?
IW: I think the focus on where are we good, what are we strong on? You know, that's to be commended from the UK government. I think what you had in early April was this enormous shock when he announced tariffs across the board across the world. And now there's been some rowing back of that. And I think we've been, as a country, the beneficiaries of that with the US deal. So we are sort of reverting, in a quiet way to where we were before the beginning of April.
PL: So much for the US, but what about closer to home and our own government's performance on the economy? Speaking a few episodes later, Santander Chief Economist, Francis Haque, wasn't hugely impressed with their communications.
Frances Haque: I mean, if you want growth, yes, you have to have productivity, and you need, obviously, investment, you need to think about your skills base, and it just sort of felt as if they've alienated the one area that you need. You really do need business because the government can't carry, as you say, we haven't got the money. And actually, that's not the most efficient way of doing it. It's much more efficient for businesses to pick up and to do the investment and all the rest of it, but you're not setting the right conditions for that to happen.
PL: or tone.
FH: Well, this is the problem with U turns. Okay, so at what point are you then going to turn around and this isn't going to happen? I mean, I think the industrial strategy is one way of trying to mitigate for that by saying, right, this is what we're going to go after. And that's the right play, because at the end of the day, we're a small economy, you have to pick winners, and to a certain extent, those winners would have been known. It's not as if the government were plucking, you know, things out of the air. We're strong in life sciences, we're good at cleantech, all those sorts of things we already knew. So, you know, they're just trying to enhance that. But that, you know, might be one thing that could turn out to be more positive given the environment that they've created. And I'm afraid they created that, rather than necessarily inheriting all of that.
PL: Along with the economy, cyber crime has been a regular in the media this year. We all know the victims, M&S, The Co-Op, schools, nurseries, airports and more recently, Jaguar Land Rover, which experienced what's now being called the most costly cyber attack in history to date. But how much do we know about the individuals and organisations behind those attacks? Neil Hare-Brown of Storm Guidance and Michael Hoare, now a partner with crisis advisors Kekst CNC, formerly director of National Security Communications for the UK government, they both put us in the picture.
MH: The capabilities of threat actors is definitely increasing, and we're seeing that in the incidents that we work on, cyber security has improved, and we shouldn't sort of neglect that, that businesses have got better at taking some of the basic steps that they need to take. But unfortunately, threat actors haven't paused and waited for people to improve their defenses. So now we are seeing more incidents, we're seeing tactics change, and we're seeing the impact therefore on businesses change.
MH: Well, I think one of the interesting things that we've seen incidents that we work on is that the threat actor landscape has fragmented a bit. So there was a period where there were a few threat actors that really dominated, and we saw them repeatedly on incidents, partly because of law enforcement action and partly because of unwanted attention that these guys were attracting. They have fragmented, and you have seen them splinter and so now there's more threat actors out there, unfortunately, with still a very high aggregate effect.
PL: Yeah, they've really stepped up, haven't they? I mean, we know a lot of hackers are offshore, we know some that are highly organized. Now, do you have any sort of sense of what sort of organizations they are?
PL: For accountancy professionals, of course, all these threats and uncertainty pile on the pressure as they steer their businesses and their careers through increasingly choppy waters. So is anyone looking out for you? Yes. Paul Guess Case Management Officer at CABA, the mental health charity specifically for accountants. He joined us in October to talk about the challenges accountants face right now and how Caba can help.
PG: We are seeing an increase in the number of people coming to us, an increase in the severity as we're trying to fill the gap between waiting for local NHS services to be available, and we're also seeing a drastic increase in the number of sessions we're offering. So we've gone from five or six a person, to up to eight to ten. So it's tripled, quadrupled. It's been very encouraging. Hopefully it's part of people becoming more aware of mental health and following Covid, I think that's certainly a message people have been getting to, they were locked up in their homes for months on end and stuck with family members, and even after Christmas, we start to see a little bit of strain. So after months and months of enforced lockdown, people really started to become more aware of their mental health, of their danger signs, and started looking for what could be done to help them.
PL: There's that, as you say, there's the root causes, the understanding, the awareness, the willingness for people to come forward, but there is also increasing pressure for people, this through line of uncertainty. I think I'm right saying you don't directly ask people why they've come to you, do you? So I suppose what I wanted to ask you was, is your sense that it's personal or professional drivers or a combination of two?
PG: That's correct. Part of the reason we don't like to interrogate clients when they come in, making that first step, admitting that you need help and admitting it's in an area that for so long has been quite stigmatised, that is an act of supreme bravery on their part. We don't want to put another block in their way, that they have to have this conversation, they have to justify why they need help, right? So we are there to help them make that transition from inquiry to an expert in the field. So when I do speak to clients, because I do get a mix, I get a mix of people who just want to get the service, they don't want to discuss it. They're not ready yet. Then other clients will use that first conversation with myself as their first session. They've got someone who is prepared to listen to them, and that is such a rare thing.
PL: Talking of challenges and opportunities, we can't look back at 2025 without talking about AI. In that same episode, Riaz Shah OBE, former partner at EY and now Professor of Practice at Hult International Business School, talked us through his vision of the AI enabled future for accountants, where, rather than stealing jobs, tech might actually do away with grunt work, speed up training and make the whole working environment more exciting.
Riaz Shah: Certainly from a professional point of view, AI gives us the opportunity to make the entire industry much more exciting for people, much more attractive for people. When I was an audit junior, I did, you know, accounts data circularisations, what 12 times or so? And how many times did I really need to do that to get it? Probably three. And everybody says across the profession that we take really bright students and we dumb them down over three years. So I think AI gives us, and technology generally gives us this opportunity to change the model entirely, to reinvent accounting, really, to help us get smart graduates more school leavers, and train them much quicker, having them do much higher level work much quicker, which they're fully capable of, not dumb them down, and that makes the industry much more attractive to them, because they're talking to clients at a higher level right from day one.
PL: It's interesting how ideas and thinking are evolving around AI, because initially, I think, you know, for a long time, it's been talked about as a threat, a direct threat to accountancy, audit, you know, the jobs at the front end of the profession will disappear. Lots and lots of chat about that, Jeremy Hunt, you know, talking about the end of accountancy, you know, rather more encouraging, Kemi Bay not disagreeing and saying, I think your line–there's always going to be room for expert analysis and advice.
RS: Absolutely. But I think he's right in a way. What he's saying is that the accountancy profession isn't going to be attractive anymore, or lots of stuff is going to get replaced. That's true if we imagine the accountancy practice as it is today. That's why we've got to reinvent accounting.
PL: And finally, one of my favorite conversations of the whole year and a real education, to me at least, the history of money, what can it tell us about its future? Tony Moore is Lecturer in Finance at Henley Business School. He joined us in August with his thoughts about this question, and he's thought about it a lot.
Tony Moore: To boil down, 6000 years into a few sentences, we can see the origins of money, particularly as a unit of account, maybe, in kind of ancient Mesopotamia, in what's now modern Iran and Iraq. How did they do it? Well, initially, they were coming up with ways of keeping records. And of course, finance and accounting has always been about, well, counting and keeping records. So they came up with the idea of basically representing items and values using tokens. And initially you would have a token that represented a sheep or a cow or an amount of grain that you could use to record transactions. And then eventually, somewhat later, they standardised these units. And so if we think of the Latin 'peccatum' for money actually comes from the word for cow. So they initially standardised the unit of cattle, and then you could value items in relation to this unit of account.
PL: And what were those tokens made of? Were they valuable in themselves?
TM: No, so the tokens had no value. They were just clay that was then fired in a kiln so that it couldn't be sort of changed in an early form. Again, we'll be talking about cryptography, an early form of fraud prevention, because you couldn't then alter the tokens once they had been fixed and fired in the kiln.
PL: So at what stage then did money become valuable in itself?
TM: We then fast forward about 2000 years to the Greek city states, who introduced what we would probably call the first coin. So first recognisably modern concept, where we had a physical item that embodied value, a physical item made of gold or silver, precious metals which had an intrinsic value and which were then cut into a standardised weight and shape, stamped with the kind of, the insignia of the particular city state to show its kind of authenticity. And really this was introduced effectively to pay mercenaries. Previous systems of the unit of account was more tied to credit if you had continuing relations with people, you didn't necessarily need your media of exchange to have intrinsic value.
PL: Okay, but the mercenaries were mobile?
TM: Yes, the mercenaries were mobile. One year you might be fighting for Sparta, the next year you might be fighting for Athens. And then if you had what we would today call fiat currency from Sparta, that would not be particularly useful if you were now fighting against them. And that's when we kind of get the development of what we think of as coins. And in one sense, money today. In the modern sense, we can think of the pound, the British Pound, and indeed, most currencies were valued, were expressed in means of weight. So a pound sterling is a pound of sterling standard silver. Obviously it's not anymore, but that was the origin and the French livre and so on. So these currencies were developed based on this notional idea of a pound. They never had any coins that were literally a pound of silver, for obvious reasons, so they were split up into Pence in the old fashioned 12 Pence and a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound system.
PL: And that's not all the Mesopotamians did for us. Ever wondered how tokenisation really began? Here's ICAEW's Polly Tsang talking to Tony Moore about that.
Polly Tsang: Everybody's talking about tokenisation right now. And why is that? The reason is, the idea is you can remove all the middlemen in the financial system currently. So we have custodians, we have brokers, we have banks. Why? Because of trust. The idea of tokenisation is you put your real world asset onto an asset rail, blockchain. You put your money on money rails, blockchain, and then combined with smart contracts, it just executes itself when the circumstances are fit. You don't need the middleman. So that's very exciting. However, in order to do that, we need money in a digital form that does not currently exist. You're probably thinking: well, when I go to the supermarket, I tap already. It's really easy. But the problem is the system is not sufficient for tokenisation. Tokenisation… you need something that's faster. Currently, there's a lot of friction in terms of cross border settlements. If you're a company, it's slightly easier because you've got swift but as an individual, it still takes days to settle.
PL: I mean, that's interesting too, isn't it, because as consumers, we kind of think we have frictionless transactions now, because it feels that way at the point of sale, doesn't it? But as you say, not really.
PT: Not really. Try transferring money to Canada. It takes a few days. But I mean, the other thing is, it's really costly. So the idea of digital assets, using them for cross border, it's just a lot cheaper. And we can already see it with AI companies. Most AI companies, they pay their employees overseas with stable coin, because it's cheaper, it's faster. Makes a lot of business sense.
PL: But that takes us to the place of trust, doesn't it? Because obviously, long before digital we had a whole bunch of iterations in currency over time. Do you want to fill us in, Tony– I was fascinated to know that China got to paper money centuries before anyone else?
TM: Yeah, so what we can kind of see in the evolution, and in fact, that perhaps is not a particularly good word, because when we think of evolution, we think of an end point. We think of things evolving, developing, changing to reach where we are today. But of course, the past was a much more uncertain series of events. And in fact, it's very easy to fall into this teleology of things continually get quicker, more efficient, more advanced. In fact, what we see through history is things tend to change in waves. We have a wave of innovation that then causes, often, some kind of a reaction to that. We can talk about bubbles and scams, and then you have regulation to try and restore trust. And then you'll have a new innovation that kicks off the cycle again. So we can see these kind of repeated waves or patterns, and often what we see throughout history is what we think of as new today is, in fact, not something that's new at all, but simply a different iteration of something that was tried in the past and that maybe now is the right moment for something.
PL: If you'd like to hear any of those episodes in full, you'll find links to all of them in the show notes, and of course, you can find the entire back catalog of behind the numbers on any podcast app. If you're not yet a regular listener, why not have a rummage through the episodes, see what takes your interest and subscribe to the series. That way, a twice monthly half hour of CPD will land in your inbox to keep you up to date on all things accountancy, next time you're on a run or stuck in a traffic jam, we'll be back with you in early January with our annual look at what's ahead for the economy, for business and for politics in the new year. Our regular economic SWAT team of Iain Wright, Francis Haque and David Williamson will be back with us for that one, and if you've heard their New Year predictions before, you already know they'll be well worth listening to. Meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the whole podcast team. Thanks for being with us this year.
