Businesses will benefit immensely from the new competencies and skills the foremost management accounting body, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), is set to empower its students with.

CIMA said professional management accountants and finance professionals will henceforth, enjoy a more robust and all encompassing certification following the review of its syllabus for its professional qualification exams.

The new syllabus will enable students acquire new skills and competencies that are relevant to a digital market place.

The new syllabus, unveiled last week, updated the Professional Qualification and CGMA Competency Framework and addressed emerging digital skills gaps, a development that was necessitated by a study it carried out, which showed a clear need for a review.

Executive Vice President, Academics, Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, Dr. Noel Tagoe, said: “The updated CIMA Professional Qualification, which focuses extensively on digital finance to deliver finance professionals who can harness the full power of technology and data to create and add organisational value while supporting businesses to mitigate new risks, including cybersecurity threats,” Tagoe said.

He added that the CGMA Competency Framework was also updated, “which both adds and incorporates the new area of digital skills to the four core existing knowledge areas of technical, business, leadership and people.

The third is the Digital Mindset professional development course to enhance competencies and skills through a free CPD Bundle based on automation, blockchain, cybersecurity, data analytics, and ethics.”

According to CIMA, over the course of 18 months, it consulted finance professionals from over 2,000 public and private organisations of all sizes in 150 countries, including through face-to-face interviews, roundtables and a global survey.

The goal was to bring together different organisational views, to understand and build a composite picture of the role finance professionals play in business, identify competencies and skills employers expect and map how these are changing in a digital world.

The study, ‘Re-inventing finance for a digital world’, showed that over 50 percent of finance leaders globally say the competencies of their teams must ‘change significantly’ over the next three years as new technologies take over traditional tasks. The upside is that businesses expect a stronger focus on value creation with the automation of repetitive tasks.