Nexia BT, the Swatar-based professional services firm, is to host a meeting in Malta at the end of the month to lay the ground for a business advisory group which aims to boost Nexia International’s service offering.
“Across its network, Nexia has well-established, separate groups for tax and audit,” Nexia BT head of advisory and management consultancy services Anita Aloisio told The Times Business.
“Nexia BT came up with the idea to establish a formal business advisory group and we discussed the concept with the chairman and the chief executive of Nexia International, who were very receptive. The group would generate possibilities and opportunities for the member firms to participate and share knowledge, especially where larger projects are concerned. We also seek to share best practice.”
The business advisory group will be launched at the meeting on September 29 and 30 when delegates from Nexia member firms will discuss the way forward and share their expectations of the concept. Participants will travel from the UK, India, Dubai, Romania, Hungary and Egypt.
Nexia International’s members are ranked among the world’s top 10 accounting firms and associations, and total around 20,000 professional staff in 590 offices in 105 countries.
The Malta meeting will seek to find ways of combing the Nexia network for professionals with knowledge, skills and experience that can be pooled within the specialist group. Ms Aloisio hopes the eventual working group will be able to identify individual professionals’ strengths in sectors as diverse as shipping, communications, fund business, or enterprise risk management which can be tapped as Nexia draws up bids for international business.
The idea for the business advisory group, conceived by Nexia BT partner, tax and international client services Karl Cini and Ms Aloisio, was floated with member firm professionals who were asked to identify disciplines at which they were specialists.
In Malta, delegates will be able to brainstorm and strategise the scope and the terms of reference of the business advisory group at the first session of the chaired by Ms Aloisio.
Smith and Williamson director Stephen Drew of the UK and CRG Nexia managing partner Luminita Ristea of Romania will give presentations on due diligence.
Nexia BT’s supervisor, specialist advisory services, Edward Curmi will focus on cost and regulatory accounting, and Ms Aloisio will deal with EU funding.
Peter Baldacchino, head of department and senior lecturer at the University of Malta, will give a small country perspective on internal auditing, its effectiveness and development. Control reporting is the focus of Andreas Tartoras of A3T SA Luxembourg.
SKP India’s Deepti Ahuja will share his own firm’s experience in business advisory services, after which Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority chairman Francis Farrugia will showcase quality infrastructure in Malta.
The minutes of the Malta meeting are to be presented at the Nexia regional conference in Paris in November.
Ms Aloisio believed Nexia would benefit from an international pan-network team to win business, rather than member firms competing against each other as was the practice in some networks.
“That is the beauty of being a small network,” she pointed out. “It is easier to pool strengths together for the purposes of a bid. We will be pro-active and identify opportunities ourselves. We have already identified markets and pockets of opportunities where we can offer business advisory services.”
Target sectors include funding application procedures and requirements under different regimes like the World Bank.