A Word from the President

It is a great privilege to welcome you all to our first UK Chapter newsletter. The newsletter is scheduled once every quarter where we want to hear you share your thoughts and experience. We created this newsletter as a way of communication between us as IMA UK members but happy to have participation from other members regardless of which Chapter you belong to or where around the world you are located. 

To give you a little bit of history about the UK chapter, the chapter has been in creation since 2014. Many meetings and discussions took place to understand what you as members want as well as how to add value to the profession in the UK. Below is the Chapter timeline where I thought it would be interesting to share with you: 

Late 2016: IMA sent a call for Board member nominations, interested UK members submitted their profiles for Board roles and online voting took place. 

October 2016: Official Founding Board was announced based on IMA UK members’ votes.  

February 2017: Official inauguration event in Hilton Hyde Park, the full day conference included the UK Chapter charter ceremony as well as four guest speakers from IMA, BDO and Jaguar Land Rover who are highlighted in the "Speakers line-up" article in this newsletter 

 

We understand our role to support members with earning CPE hours and also understand that for some members it is a challenge to travel across the UK to attend events so as the UK Board we thought why not bring some chapter events to members instead which is what we did in our following event. 

March 2017: UK Chapter held the first European online platform event for a chapter, Financial Fraud: Detection and Prevention by a field expert Juan Carlos - IMA UK Chapter VP of Membership  

Then we thought what do members need? We understand the importance of international experience and networking, we encourage it and would like to support you and play our role as Chapter in providing a platform for that.  

April 2017: The first Regional Chapter event in IMA history, the UK and Cairo Chapters held a joint webinar to set such important initiative where there was impressive attendance from Europe, Asia, Middle East and US.  The Topic was Management Accountants Driving Value which was presented by the great Dennis Whitney, Senior VP at IMA 

May 2017: First UK Chapter newsletter which is a start of a quarterly newsletter. 

June 2017: Next activity is the launching our official UK Chapter Website which is also the last activity for this Fiscal year. 

 

In this newsletter we are speaking about several topics. Our priority is that we would like to know you so we thought to interview the UK Board members for you as a first step so you can know us better and start a conversation from here. We also have Andy Logan from Wiley speaking about why the CMA certificate stands out in the market, its benefits as well as giving you some advice on studying.  We have several other articles covering our speakers, how analytics is redefining strategic finance, why volunteer and what to expect next from the Chapter. 

In the inauguration event the Board pledged to “start strong, stay strong and finish the year strong”, the Board also committed itself to an activity/month and we made sure to deliver – Thank you for supporting us and please do let us know your thoughts! 

I would love to hear more about your thoughts and suggestions, please feel free to email me on ima.uk@outlook.com  

 

Fatema El-Wakeel, CMA, MBA  

IMA UK Chapter Founding President