Accounting ending up as a line item in someone else's product.
Leigh Stallard's read is that this cannot be dismissed. There is nothing stopping a software company building a good hiring and training package for ACCA graduates, or finding qualified staff overseas, and plugging them into the platform. Firms have been moving the other way for years, and businesses like Mazuma already run more like a software company than a practice. Uprise is doing a version of this in the US.
John Toon's caution is that nobody has made it work at scale yet. But compliance is already being commoditised, and a number from the same week is worth sitting with: across ACCA, CIMA and ICAEW, student numbers are down around 9%, with big falls at ACCA and CIMA offset by growth at ICAEW.
If compliance commoditises while the pipeline into the profession thins, the question stops being who owns the software and becomes who owns the client.
From the episode with John Toon, Kendrick Hair of Fishbowl and Leigh Stallard.
Digi-Tools in Accrual World is The Loop's weekly accounting tech podcast, hosted by Ryan Pearcy, John Toon, Indi Tatla, Eriona Bajrakurtaj and Ian Gregory.
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