10. TRUSTWORTHY

IRBA CEO Imre Nagy highlighted as standard setters, regulators and enforcers, it is important for CFOs to promote the value of audit: “Audit is integral in the finance ecosystem. Corporate failure has created a lot of mistrust in the profession, so we need to bring people together and work together to restore trust in financial reporting,” he explained.

Everyone involved needs to ensure that integrity is at the heart of the process. Imre suggested bringing awareness and education to the legitimacy of the profession and being agents of trust for a system that benefits South Africa. “Let’s lift our game and lift audit quality,” he said.

IIA SA CEO Julius Mojapelo said that all finance professionals should be determined to protect the economy and make it thrive. “You don’t work for an organisation, you work within an organisation for the economy,” he elaborated.

Fasset CFO Zakariya Alli also put forward ways to gain trust: “Ethics need to be high on the agenda and embedded in everything we do.”

For Dzunani Makgopa, head of finance and corporate services at the Independent Power Producers’ Office, the world’s energy poverty encouraged many countries to rely on burning fossil fuels, which contributed to the detrimental effects of climate change. She advised attendees to choose sustainable ways of doing business, and support the climate through recycling and mining companies to use renewable companies for their power use.

Weighing in on the effects of climate change, Sean Doherty of Transaction Capital said it was important for companies to take climate change seriously. “We acknowledge that our most impactful influence is to manage and reduce the carbon emissions in our financed minibus taxi portfolio,” he said.

“The physical effects of climate change and environmental degradation, as well as the transition to a low-carbon and more circular economy, present both financial risk and certain opportunities to the group. Furthermore, we recognise that our investment decisions and capital allocation have both social and environmental impacts,” he added. l

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