ITFA Annual Conference – Announcing one of the Speakers – Mr. Etienne Welgemoed

The ITFA Board is delighted to announce that Mr. Etienne Welgemoed, from Ernst and Young, will be one of the speakers at this year’s ITFA Annual Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. The session Etienne will be presenting is about New standards in accounting and how it will affect the trade finance market: IFRS 9.

Etienne Welgemoed qualified as a chartered accountant having previously worked at one of South Africa’s investment banks before joining Ernst and Young London in the transaction structuring and accounting team. Etienne is responsible for providing technical accounting advice and structuring solutions for a wide range of clients including, SMEs, challenger banks, FTSE 100 financial service entities, private equity houses, hedge funds and insurance related companies.

He has worked on a number of buy-side and sell-side transitions and holds the role of a subject matter expect for the audit of one of the large UK commercial banks.

IFRS 9’s recent adoption on 1 January 2018 has resulted in sweeping changes across the financial services industry as the substance of transactions as well as management’s expectations and intensions are placed under the spotlight.

While there has been significant work undertaken in anticipation of the adoption of IFRS 9 there are still a number of grey areas, which has resulted in differing views in industry. Given the recent adoption of IFRS 9 a number of these issue still go untested as firms enter into their first rounds of audit applying IFRS 9.

Specifically, areas such as financial instrument classification, derecognition and the nuances of accounting for credit risk mitigants by the insured party have been discussed in detail both at a big 4 level and the IASB.

Etienne will be discussing how one needs to approach the change IFRS 9 has introduced in relation to these specific areas as well as the commercial and technical thinking entities need to apply when assessing the business model test, the cash flow variability assessment, and other technical aspects of IFRS 9.

We look forward to welcoming Mr. Etienne Welgemoed in Cape Town, and we look forward to seeing you all very very soon.