The long story short…
During the year 2007-2014 I was trained at various professional audit firms including BDO and Bakertilly. My assignments started with accounting, tax and statutory audit, then slowly move away to focus on internal audit and risk advisory.
Currently: In-house Group Management Audit Department, AEON Financial Service Co., Limited (AFS Japan). Part of the AEON Group (AEON). Both AFS Japan and AEON are listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange, and have subsidiary companies listed on other stock exchanges also, such as Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.
I have served clients which comes from a wide range of different industries including online advertising, e-commerce, manufacturing, retailing, education, hospitality, securities brokerage and now financial services, mainly the provision of credit to retail customers.
I was also involved in other specialized audit engagements such as pre-IPO due diligence reviews (PN21), US-SOX audits and IT system control audits.
My in-house internal audit experience started in the year 2014 when I started work at Kerry Logistics Network Limited, a multinational logistics company listed and headquartered in Hong Kong.
I worked there from starting from a junior role to an assistant internal audit manager when I left, during my career at Kerry Logistics I managed a smaller team, and have travelled to all major countries of the world to advice on risk management and internal controls business best practices, during which I was exposed to a variety of different industry practices, legal systems, and social and business management culture.
I also have professional service firm experience, during my training years as well as subsequently in the year 2018 when I started working at Tricor Services Limited, managing a small profitable team (~annual revenue USD500K) of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) experts, that provided a wide range of services including risk advisory, internal audit and ESG reporting to corporate listed on Stock Exchange of Hong Kong.
I have a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) from the Manchester Metropolitan University in UK, a Postgraduate Diploma on Professional Accountancy from Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Bachelor (BSc) in Computer Science from University College London in UK.
I am a fellow member (FCPA) of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants (HKICPA), an Fellow Chartered Accountant (FCA) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), as well as a Certified Information System Auditor (CISA) of the Institute of the Information System Audit and Control Association (ISACA).
I am fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
The long story
In the summer of 2002, I graduated from a computer science degree from University College London. I have loved science and computing ever since I was a kid, and have always wanted to learn more and be a master at it.
The graduation was a dream fullfilled for me. But life does not stop there. After graduation we all had to think about what to do with our careers.
Being a computer science graduate, I thought it was quite natural to look for an IT related job. While I did not quite understand at the time why most of my friends were looking for a jobs in investment banks, I looked and I landed in a job as a web developer in an online news publishing company in London.
The guy who hired me was one of the founder of the company. The company had miraculously survived the crash of the dot-com bubble, but it was struggling to survive, there were no growth in subscribers and it was difficult to earn advertising revenue.
The company was acquired by a US-listed company not long after I was hired. After the acquisition, many who I have worked with in the company had left (some were angry because they were asked to resign involuntarily) and I was integrated with another team in the new company.
The new team members were nice and IT development work was fun. However, having seen the corporate restructuring and layoffs during the acquisition, I felt deeply that there is much more than science and computing that I should learn if I was survive and have a career in this ruthless corporate world.
I eventually quit and subsequently tried a few other IT related jobs. However I was still confused about what I wanted to be pursuing in life at that point.
With my career going nowhere, out of desperation in the beginning of 2005, I decided to leave the UK and go back to Hong Kong, wanting to start all over.
At first, I looked and tried but was not enable to land on any job business related. So went back to web development while study for a postgraduate degree in accounting part-time. The postgraduate degree allowed me to supplement my lack of business knowledge at the time, and also enabled me to take the CPA exam without a business degree.
One year later, I graduated from the postgraduate degree, and pretty soon I hit gold and found a junor auditor job at a small local CPA firm. My accounting career had since started there. In the next five years that followed, I finished my CPA exam and got certified, changed job to a larger international auditing firms, and was introduced to the world of internal auditing.