The journey that’s brought Alan Vallance back to ICAEW has been long and varied. He started his career with Ernst & Whinney (now EY) in 1986, training as an ACA in its London audit team. His career has taken in more than 20 countries and has included everything from dealing with natural disasters to designing stamps, as well as working alongside LDC to create a successful software company for international architects and builders.

“If they’d asked me at Ernst & Whinney where I thought my career would take me, I would never in a million years have guessed I’d have such a rich and varied experience of so much of the world.”

He qualified as an ACA with first-time passes in 1989. “I didn’t wake up thinking I want to be a chartered accountant – I’m not sure anybody does,” he says. But he knew he wanted to get into business and had ambitions to become a chief executive some day. “It was before MBAs became popular. The ACA was, and to some extent still is, the pre-eminent business qualification. You see how lots of different businesses work, while progressing up the hierarchy and getting more interesting assignments and greater responsibility along the way.”

Perhaps subconsciously predicting the future travel his qualification would bring, Vallance’s training focused on the travel sector, including the audit of British Airways. And, after qualifying, he moved into the corporate finance department and got his first taste of the world opening up for him. The Berlin Wall had just come down and he was sent to Budapest, to carry out due diligence on a state-owned confectionery company for United Biscuits: “Ernst & Whinney’s office was a converted residential building with bedrooms turned into offices. It was the very early days of western companies going into the East – such a fascinating time.”

From there he took up an internal audit role at Hertz Rent-A-Car, which at the time had two businesses – America and the rest of the world, which was based in London. Wanderlust meant he joined the latter and spent the next two years “living out of a suitcase” all over Europe, the Far East and Australasia: “I didn’t see a winter for two years.” Potential acquisitions were part of his remit, so he gained further due diligence experience.

Down under

In 1992, he emigrated to Australia, joining ICI’s internal audit team in Melbourne, covering Australia, New Zealand, Pacific countries, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. “That was an incredible experience – those cultures are so fascinating.”

ICI was UK-headquartered and (possibly as a result) there were four ACAs in the internal audit team. After two years, he moved to Australia Post, the Australian equivalent of the Post Office. He joined the group finance team, recruited by the group financial controller who was an FCA. “That speaks to the diaspora of UK chartered accountants around the world with successful careers.”

In fact, he only worked for the financial controller for two weeks. He moved into a property division that was being set up to run the vast and varied corporate real estate portfolio the company had across Australia. Over 15 years at Australia Post, Vallance had 13 different roles, including heading up group retail and working in sales, finance, strategy, warehousing, logistics and e-commerce.

“I even ran the stamp business, which designed and produced the stamps – it was fascinating. It was about moving around the organisation to get the broadest experience possible.” He also gained more M&A experience, carrying out due diligence on a freight company in New Zealand, which Australia Post ultimately didn’t acquire as the view was it was overvalued.

In 2009, still based in Melbourne, he joined the Bureau of Meteorology as chief operating officer (COO). It is similar to the UK’s Met Office, but deals with bigger-scale weather events over bigger areas. As COO he ran the back office. The executive team of five comprised an atmospheric chemist, a hydrologist, a meteorologist, an oceanographer and a chartered accountant. “It was a different kind of organisation, but right at the forefront of climate change, fighting natural weather disasters.”

In 2011, they were simultaneously dealing with flooding in Queensland and New South Wales, fighting bush fires across three states, plus a plague of locusts, while keeping an eye on the moving radioactive cloud from the Fukushima nuclear power station, which had been hit by a tsunami. “We were really on the frontline and it brought home to me the impact of climate change.” 

There were about 1,500 staff members at the Bureau, working in different silos, but any barriers broke down when it came to dealing with the different catastrophes. “You saw a completely united team, with one noble purpose – to protect life and property. But of course you can’t operate on emergency standby like that 24/7 long term.”

During two years at the Bureau he spoke at the United Nations in Geneva and testified before senate committees in the Australian Parliament about the effects of climate change. While that concerned the actions of the science community, he could see the importance for future business of accountants being at the forefront of understanding sustainability and developing sustainability reporting standards. “It is a huge challenge and still current. To solve it requires international collaboration. There are 1,200-plus data points in the European reporting standards. Audit firms have to look at how they can give assurance on that information. Chartered accountants are the best placed, I think, to use their analytical skills to apply to non-financial sustainability issues.”

Sustainable futures

Vallance says work needs to be done to bring certainty about best practice around sustainability reporting. “We have just over six years to deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals by the end of 2030. It’s a big opportunity for the profession, but the clock is ticking.”

On the corporate finance side there is a whole host of concerns around funds and how they value the impact of climate issues. “This is actually a real opportunity for the profession. If you accept the argument that chartered accountants have been at the forefront of financial assurance for the past 150 years, we need to ensure we are there for the next 150. There’s lots of work being done by the big firms, across the profession and at ICAEW itself on this.”

These are obviously issues for corporate financiers and investors, too. He says to help mitigate the effect of climate change there needs to be harmonisation of the definition of green investment funds: “Investors want to know they can trust the information they use for decision-making. There’s a whole range of ethical considerations, too.” 

From the Bureau, Vallance’s next move was long-haul back to the UK. He took on the role of chief operating officer at The Law Society, where he spent three years before moving to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He was appointed chief executive in 2016, a position he held until 2022 (see Dealmaker, below). He then had a brief spell as chief executive of the Chartered Insurance Institute, before joining ICAEW this year.

“I have developed an expertise in running long-established professional bodies, facing the challenge – be it regulatory or technological – of taking the best of their past into a brave new world,” he says. “Each tends to consider themselves unique because they sit atop their profession. But on closer inspection these professional bodies all face quite similar issues. Everything I see at ICAEW I’ve seen before, but the mix of issues is different. The big attraction for me was that ICAEW was my professional body. I have emotional equity in the game because I am a proud ACA.”

While being an ACA has helped his understanding of what ICAEW means to members, Vallance is conscious that it’s been more than 30 years since he worked on an audit. To help, one of the first things he did on joining was to shadow a Big Four audit team: “The bedrock of why we do an audit is still the same, but I wanted to understand how a modern audit is planned and executed and how technology is used, and compare the interaction with the client to what I remember.My detailed technical accounting expertise isn’t as current as I would like simply because my experience in practice is now dated, but I have a wealth of business experience and the ACA training has served me so well over the course of my business career. I still use the skills I was taught 35 years ago in how I analyse a business proposal or consider a financial situation.”

Harnessing tech

One big future challenge for ICAEW and its members is artificial intelligence (AI) and technology. What will be the impact of this brave new world of AI? How should our member organisations use and invest in it? What are the ethical implications of AI? What are the issues around data and data integrity? 

“Our skills of professional judgment, scepticism, questioning minds and objectivity need to still be applied in how we use these new tools, and how they change the audit and corporate finance professions over time,” he says. 

There are specific questions for the corporate finance world, he adds: “How will it impact the way deals are done and due diligence processes? How can it improve deal origination? How will it speed up a deal? And make some elements easier? 

“And then, how will AI help deliver synergies and growth at the integration stage? I’m keen to make sure that the Institute gives members more knowledge about best practice around technology advances.”

And with a new government, capital markets reforms and further post-Brexit reforms on the horizon, he says: “There’s going to be a massive amount to do and ICAEW and the corporate finance faculty are going to be at the front of all that thinking in the future.”