Today, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) announced a partnership with Tezos Southeast Asia (TSA) to explore the use of blockchain in the accounting industry. TSA is a non-profit that supports Tezos, a top ten public blockchain.
The two organizations plan to establish training courses on blockchain for accountancy at the end of this year or early next year, with preference given to members of the ACCA. Additionally, they will explore use cases and form a working group to build blockchain solutions for accounting.
“The potential applications of blockchain technology in the accounting sector are extensive, ranging from better validation procedures in auditing to accelerating settlement times for transactions, and automating and streamlining compliance processes,” said Reuter Chua, Head of ACCA Singapore.
A massive proportion of time spent by book-keepers is on reconciliations. That’s checking supplier statements match to company records, or bank statements match the balance the company believes it has. If this data is stored on a shared ledger, the need for reconciliation potentially disappears. But most of this sort of sharing is done via private blockchains, whereas Tezos is public.
UK-based ACCA is a global professional accounting body and offers the ‘Chartered Certified Accountant’ qualification. Anyone describing themselves as ‘Chartered Certified Accountant’ must be a member of the ACCA. The primary function of ACCA is to educate and train its members.
While the TSA will share its blockchain expertise, the ACCA will provide its accounting knowledge for addressing pain points in the industry.
“With this immutable standardization adopted in accounting practices, auditors will be able to verify larger amounts of data more efficiently, requiring less paperwork and with greater confidence,” said Caleb Kow, President of Tezos Southeast Asia. “We believe that by partnering with ACCA, there can be mutual understanding to find solutions that could help reduce pain points and benefit finance functions for practitioners within the accountancy sector.”
Meanwhile, TSA is a non-profit based in Singapore, tasked with driving adoption of the Tezos blockchain in the Asia-Pacific region. Tezos is an open-source public blockchain protocol, and its governance model distinguishes it from other blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In 2017, Tezos raised a record-breaking $232 million from an ICO of its crypto tokens called ‘tezzies’. It ran into some legal troubles soon after.
Last year, BTG Pactual and Dubai-based Dalma Capital announced they would use Tezos blockchain for the tokenization of investments.
Elevated Returns and Securitize announced plans to use the Tezos blockchain to tokenize $1 billion of real-estate assets in the USA.
