ICAN chief advises accountants to embrace new technologies

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria has told accountants to update their knowledge and competencies constantly to remain relevant in the competitive and digitally-driven market.

The President of the institute, Mr Razak Jaiyeola, gave the advice on Monday in Lagos at the first edition of the Accounting Technology Summit.

The theme of the summit is: Disruptive Technologies: the Game Changer for Businesses.

He said the summit served as one of the institute’s strategic initiatives to ensure that chartered accountants were adequately prepared for the fourth industrial revolution.

“Presently, we are witnessing unprecedented technological disruptions that are giving new meanings to how businesses should run.

“Many dedicated and repetitive tasks which were done by accountants like processing of accounts payable and receivables can now be easily handled by Artificial Intelligence.

“Failure to keep pace with the disruptive technological trend portends danger of extinction for any business entity or individual.

“Just imagine Blackberry that sold about 50 million devices in 2011, plummeting to selling just four million annually as at 2016.

“Its “business model” of physical keyboard could not compete with the touchscreen of the likes of iPhone.

“The same applies to a host of other businesses, who have failed to see the immense potential of disruptive technologies and ended up either recording a drop in sales or outright extinction.”

Jaiyeola advised accountants to embrace block-chain technology, which had already been used to streamline the procedures for shipping exports, reducing the processing and handling times for key documents and increasing efficiency and reliability.

Block-chain technology, he said, had immence potential to reduce accounting and financial fraud, due to its high level of resistance to manipulation through human interferences.

“This technology reduces the costs of maintaining and reconciling ledgers and provides a higher level of assurance on the ownership and history of assets thereby facilitating loan disbursement decisions.

“There are huge opportunities for those who would be bold enough to challenge the status quo and develop innovative ideas to meet customers’ needs.

“As accountants, our roles are now beyond crunching financial figures with out-modelled methods.’’

The accounting guru further urged accountants to be in the vanguard of creatively destroying existing models and developing new ones that would be both efficient and effective for the prompt discharge of responsibilities to clients.

The Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr Adebisi Shonubi, called for practical application of the knowledge received from disruptive technology in solving keys issues in the financial sector.

Shonubi advised participants to challenge speakers on how the application of disruptive technologies affected people.

He told the participants to expand their minds to accommodate several options available in real time payments, block-chain and other forms of technologies to address issues of duplication and identification in the financial sector.

“Banks now explore the options of using technology to address the issue of multiple addresses, owned by one account holder in several banks.

“I urge that accountants apply these emerging technologies to do same where it applies to them,” he said.