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Qualifications
BA (Hons) University of Durham, UK
PhD London South Bank University

Memberships
European Engineer (Eur Ing)
Chartered Engineer (UK)
Fellow of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales
Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, UK
Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors, UK
Fellow of The British Computer Society
Chartered Information Technology Professional, UK
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK

Andrew is author of Chambers Corporate Governance Handbook (6th ed., May 2014, Bloomsbury, ISBN 978 1 78043 482 7, 1,100 pages), The Operational Auditing Handbook - Auditing Business & I.T. Processes (2nd ed., Wiley, April 2010, ISBN 0470744766, 884pps) , Tolley’s Internal Auditor’s Handbook (2nd ed., 2009, ISBN 9781405735674, 750 pps), and seventeen other books on these subjects plus translations. He was twice mentioned in House of Lords’ debates as an authority on corporate governance and by The Times as ‘a worldwide authority on corporate governance’. He was Dean of the leading Cass Business School where he is professor emeritus. Appointed in 2010 as the Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords’ Economic Affairs Select Committee’s Inquiry into Auditors: market concentration and their role that led to the current audit market reforms. Andrew was one of a seven member UK committee that in 2013 published enhanced ‘Internal Audit Guidance for Financial Services’. Since 2008 he has been a member and now chair of Fédération des Experts Comptables Européen’s (FEE’s) Corporate Governance and Company Law Committee: FEE is the pan-European association of three dozen professional accounting bodies.

The Risk Conversation at Board Level

RISK

By Professor Andrew Chambers

Andrew Chambers is Academic Director of FTMSGlobal. He chairs FEE’s Corporate Governance and Company Law Working Party. FEE (www.fee.be) is Fédération des Experts-comptables Européens – (Federation of European Accountants). Professionally qualified accountants frequently chair and are members of audit committees of boards and attend audit committee meetings in their capacities as external auditors, chief financial officers, internal auditors, compliance officers and risk managers. The views below are those of Professor Chambers based on his remarks at an ecoDa/FERMA/AIG conference in Brussels.


Abstract:
Risk management is about systematically identifying events and situations that may threaten the entity and positioning the entity to be able to exploit potential opportunities that may arise in the future.

Much has been written on approaches to risk management but much less on how the oversight of risk should be dealt with at the level of the board of directors. A common failure is that the board accepts management’s assessment of risks with too little robust challenge. Another is that oversight of risk is handled almost exclusively at board committee level without in-depth discussion and challenge by the board itself. Handling the interface between the board risk and audit committees is another issue.

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Exclusively for FTMSGlobal MBA students & FTMS Faculty

Exclusively for FTMSGlobal MBA students & FTMS Faculty

Each time our Weekend MBA students are with us, we stage one of these events after classes on Fridays. Our full time day MBA students join in, as well as our faculty members.



We have a distinguished speaker to address us each time the Weekend MBA students come in for scheduled classes. This is followed by dinner in a smart restaurant, together with more discussion.
Each event is designed to broaden the experience of our students beyond what they will cover within their MBA studies.

In the past twelve months, these have been some of the topics for our Networking Dinner talks:

Business Development in Emerging Markets.
Options for Funding an Entrepreneur’s Business.
The Future of Fossil Fuels.
Why is Internal Auditing Important?
The Ideal Business Process.
An Accountant’s Professional Ethics.
Approaching Risk Management.
Managing Architectural Practices and the Future Built Environment.
Key Areas of Focus During a Mergers and Acquisitions Due Diligence.
Mitigating Cyber Crime Risk.

And the speakers (not in this sequence) have included:

Carl Athayde: Founder of CAadvisory Pte Ltd, a Boutique Advisory Firm founded in 2010 and headquartered in Singapore.
Andrew Chambers: Professor Emeritus, Cass Business School, London.
Eric Lim: President of The Institute of Internal Auditors Singapore and Head of Internal Audit, DSO National Laboratories, Singapore.
Tony Lim: UK-trained Architect with many years project experience throughout Asia.
Professor Patrick KS Ong: Owner, Strand Technologies.
Gurdip Singh: Adjunct Faculty, Singapore Management University.
Jenny Tan: Director, Risk Assurance, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Singapore.
Kon Yin Tong: Member Singapore Accountancy Commission (SAC) Board, Chairman of Singapore QP Learning and Assessment Committee and Managing Partner, Foo Kon Tan LLP.
Stefano Demichelis: Associate Managing Director, Investigations & Disputes, Kroll, Asia Pacific Region.

We are very grateful to all these speakers for giving so generously of their time and expertise, for the considerable benefit of us all.

 

weekendmba 1 weekendmba 2 weekendmba 3

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MBA Overview and Experience: The Class of 2015

MBA Overview and Experience: The Class of 2015

Every two weeks or so I start a new chat on this blog, so make sure you keep in touch by keeping this link as one of your favourites and checking it regularly. I will always like to hear from you by email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and will do my best to reply each time. I’m FTMSGlobal’s Academic Director. I used to be the Dean of a leading UK university business school located in the centre of London. Sometimes my blog will relate directly to our work at FTMSGlobal, as this time. My other blogs will tackle important business topics.

You can still read my earlier blog at: 
Weekend MBA offered by Anglia Ruskin University

MBA Overview and Experience: The Class of 2015

I asked our ‘class of 2015’ MBA students to feed back to me their impressions about studying for their MBA at FTMSGlobal – and this blog is the result - warts and all, as they say, but mainly very favourable! Most were students who chose to combine their weekend studies at FTMSGlobal in Singapore (plus the Leadership Weekend at our state-of-the-art Kuala Lumpur campus) with their executive roles which were often in other countries.


Students say they found the course good value for money, as indeed it is! We also had positive feedback about the payment arrangements for the course fees which for some aided their budgeting. They also told us they appreciated the highly committed, high calibre and professional lecturers and mentioned by name one student support person who ‘went the extra mile’ for them.

Not surprisingly they highlighted their management of personal time as being their biggest challenge, but clearly they succeeded in managing their personal time as they emerged at the end of 2015 with a completed MBA and a strong impression that the year had been very productively spent. They expect their MBAs to enrich their careers going forwards but one confessed that during the MBA year he might not have been so energetically engaged in his parallel executive responsibilities within a leading multinational. Aside from the subject-oriented learning of the MBA, clearly ‘time management’ has been a transferable skill which students have honed through their experience of this MBA and this will tide them very well as their careers develop further.

Another challenge that students reported back to us was the successful handling of group work. In our experience, students are always vexed by this, and in this MBA it has been particularly challenging due to the geographical spread of our student body across the Far East. As with successful time management, managing work in groups is an important transferable skill for rising executives to have: we are pleased that clearly this MBA exposes students to this challenge! In defence of FTMSGlobal, assessed group work accounts for only about one quarter of the assessment on just two of the modules, with the rest of the assessments, including all of the major project, being for individual student work. Students appreciated that they were assessed by coursework rather than by examinations.

Having sparked off each other during the year, students reported back a widely held intention to network with their colleague students in the years ahead.

How can we improve?

We operate a programme of continuous improvement. Hence the Optional 6 Months Paid Executive Training in Malaysia.

We will also need to see what we can do to address the issue that student assignment deadlines tend to be bunched together, but our room for manoeuvre iss limited by Anglia Ruskin University’s imposed deadlines. Meanwhile, it is important we impress on our students that they need to set their own staggered deadlines ahead of ARU’s - so that they are more than ready to meet ARU’s bunched deadlines: again, this is a matter of time management.

Because the weekends at FTMSGlobal are intensive, there has been a student plea for consistent on-site catering arrangements so that they can always take lunch and dinner on campus.

To learn more about this our MBA programme please go to FTMSGlobal delivered MBA programme
To learn more about the optional 6 months paid executive training, please click here. 

And please pass on the good news to others!

andrew chambers signature

Academic Director, FTMSGlobal Academy

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Weekend MBA offered by Anglia Ruskin University

Weekend MBA offered by Anglia Ruskin University

Every two weeks or so I change my talk on this blog, so make sure you keep in touch by keeping this link as one of your favourites and checking it regularly.  I will always like to hear from you by email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and will do my best to reply each time.  I’m FTMSGlobal’s Academic Director.  I used to be the Dean of a leading UK university business school located in the centre of London.

Sometimes my blog will relate directly to our work at FTMSGlobal, as this time.  My other blogs will tackle important business topics.

We are excited about our newly structured MBA.  We have now had three cohorts of students entering the programme so we have ironed out the bugs, few though they were.  We are excited because the programme is attracting such high quality students.  This means we can teach to a high standard.

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