ICAS’ newest office bearer is Vice President David Cruickshank CA. The former Global Chair of Deloitte reflects on four decades with the Big Four, the challenges of social mobility, the hurdles accountancy must overcome and why the economy needs a blend of large and small firms

Words: Ryan Herman

The not-so-great British summer makes a rare appearance when CA magazine meets David Cruickshank CA in Victoria, London. It’s the week after ICAS students have attained record scores on their exam results. The new syllabus will be fully rolled out in September, the ICAS 2030 strategy is in full flow and applications for the ICAS Foundation are at a record high.

So, it seems a good time to talk to the former Global Chair of Deloitte about his career, as well as becoming ICAS’ newest office bearer, having recently taken on the role of Vice President. The profession has challenges, however – and they are keeping Cruickshank energised at a time of life when he could easily have taken a step back, following four decades with Deloitte and his fair share of other board roles.

As we learn throughout a conversation that spans his career, and sees him outline his ambitions as an office bearer, he is keen to address what he sees as the key hurdles facing the profession, for smaller practices and big firms alike. 

What made you decide to become an office bearer?
In a word, payback. My training and qualification offered me opportunities I would never have had without ICAS. So, for me, it’s about trying to pay back the institute and the members. I want to see if I can use all my skills and experience gained over 40 years in Deloitte to help with a lot of the change programmes that are going on – such as the new 2030 strategy execution – and to give more people opportunities of the sort that I had.

I first got involved in ICAS Council in 2020. So I’ve lived through the development of the 2030 strategy. The education and training particularly excite me, with the content development making the qualification itself right for the 2030s. And the way it’s delivered – if you’re sitting on a bus on the way home from work, you could access a module on there, and it will be properly digitally enabled, more than just text on the screen.

What do you see as your objectives, firstly as Vice President but also potentially beyond that as an office bearer?
Over the next year, I see myself in a support role to [President] Alison [Cornwell CA] and [Deputy President] Karen [Scholes CA] and to help them where I can. So I can give input, particularly with the strategy, and help to continue the pace of execution with the executive team. I’ve never had a problem being a team member and a leader because you wear different hats at different stages in the cycle.

The three things that I put in my application for the office bearer role are, firstly, the execution of the strategy and making sure that all our objectives are achieved. Most strategies fall over because they’re not well executed, not because there’s something wrong with the strategy per se.

“ICAS has a well-respected voice that we can use to influence policy developments and make sure there’s a progressive and proportionate regulatory system in the UK”

Secondly, when I wrote my paper for the Council, I didn’t know there would be a general election around the corner. At a time of political change, we have to provide a voice for our members and all our other stakeholders. ICAS has a good, well-respected voice that we can use carefully to influence policy and regulatory developments and make sure there’s a progressive and proportionate regulatory system in the UK. The ICAS point of view carries a lot of weight in that.

The third area, which is broader, is around AI. I’m not an expert but I use AI and I can see what it can do, and the way it’s going to enable people to do things differently, faster and better, and help them gain better insights.

However, people I talked to who are real experts in AI, including academics, say that one of the areas where we all need to spend a bit more time is with its governance. Who ultimately changes algorithms? How do we make sure the algorithms aren’t teaching themselves bad things? Because that can happen, and has already happened in some places.

I was at a small meeting with two leading professors of AI who were very excited about its potential. But often there aren’t really any governance structures in place. So that is going to become an increasingly important area for ICAS.

Going back to the start of your career, what inspired you to study business and economics at Edinburgh University?
I went to a small school in Anstruther, Fife that only had about 350 pupils. One of our teachers organised for us to do a weekly business game, and our results were sent away every week. I think it went into some sort of external computer – we didn’t have one at school because it was the 1970s – and it gave us an analysis of why our decisions had been good or terrible, and how they could have been better. I remember thinking around that time I really wanted to go into business.

Why via accounting?
It is a fantastic passport into business. Even if you’re not sure what you want to do it’s amazing training for all sorts of businesses, different industries, different specialisms. Did I have any thought to stay in the same firm for 40 years? No, had somebody suggested that, I would have thought it a bit crazy.

You started at Deloitte in 1979. Was there anything you learned in those early days that stuck with you or shaped your career path?
I was lucky because I trained in an office that was relatively small in those days – around 50 people. But we got to do everything. We had a variety of clients. I thought I was quite privileged in getting sight of all these clients and doing all these different things. After three years, I was much better organised and much better disciplined in my thought processes. I still think it’s a great training process. In terms of the growing-up phase of life, for me it was huge.

How much of a culture shock was moving to London from Edinburgh?
I wanted to work with bigger companies and to specialise in tax. I looked at other options, such as going overseas, but I moved to London and I went from an office of around 50 people to 2,500. It was huge!

Up until 1979, we had exchange control in the UK, so international business was restricted. It was managed. The Treasury had a say in everything. That carried on for a bit into the new government elected in 1979. But then the deregulation of London happened and globalisation went through a big spurt. I guess I was fortunate to be around at that time.

Why do you think you were able to rise all the way up to Global Chair at Deloitte?
When I moved to London, I worked with some great partners who gave me lots of challenging opportunities and some fascinating clients. In turn, I chose some wonderful people to work with me in the teams I had serving those clients. I then took on a leadership role in the mid-1990s in the tax practice, which led to me serving on the firm’s executive and board, and I was elected Chair of Deloitte in the UK in 2007 where I served two terms before being elected as Global Chair. Throughout, from my client-serving teams to my boards, I have always worked with tremendous people who gave me a lot of confidence in what I was doing. 

One of the great things about Deloitte was there was never a shortage of people to tell me if I got something wrong. If you did something people didn’t agree with, you knew very quickly – which meant you could course-correct quickly as well. I am a good listener and I think I was good at making our plans happen.

At what point did you start to become more interested in social mobility and opening up the profession?
I had a small group of colleagues from different parts of the firm but all at a similar level. We used to talk about the impact of scale, and the people we were recruiting. Inevitably, as the firm moved to online recruitment, there would be more filters in the early stages before somebody had an interview.

In my generation, my first meeting would be with a partner, and they could see somebody in the round, good bits and bad bits, and take a view based on that.

So the talent we recruited [under the new system] was maybe not as diverse as it used to be. The firm in the UK now does amazing things with the school-leaver programmes, [which helps with] recruiting people from different backgrounds. That started in about 2010 through my colleague David Sproul.

It comes back to having great teams, and the more diversity you have in your teams, the better the results are. On a purely commercial basis, great client service equals happy clients equals fees. If you have diversity in your teams, you get better answers. 

The accounting profession performs well in this area, with many financial services firms ranking high on the Social Mobility Index. But why do you think there is a still problem with social mobility in the UK, with multiple reports saying it has stalled?
It is a huge conundrum. In an age when there’s so much more information available, when employers are doing their utmost to reach out to more diverse groups, why is it that so many school students think that something is not for them?

We had a group of teenagers coming into the Deloitte offices around 2010. We partnered with a couple of schools in east London and I remember talking to some of the students who were about 16–18 years old. They spent the whole day with us. Two things stick in my memory from that: they said people seem to actually be enjoying themselves [at work], and also that a lot of people there were like them. These students were in schools that were only six miles and two postcodes away, but it was a whole other world and something they hadn’t been exposed to before.

“We all need to spend more time on AI governance. Who ultimately changes algorithms? How do we make sure they aren’t teaching themselves bad things?”

I’ve spoken to people in the education charity I chair who are more skilled than me in this area. All of their programmes are designed to deal with the challenge of “you can’t be what you can’t see”. And it is clear that unless you remove some of those barriers you’re not going to get this unleashing of talent with all the people seeing all the opportunities they can access. And that would just be a huge waste.

Why do you think young people are put off accounting or professional services even when they may have the necessary talent?
Perhaps it comes down to branding. Professional service firms, for example… that’s a bit intangible for somebody in a school in a disadvantaged area. It’s not from a lack of effort by the firms.

Looking at the profession right now, what do you think it does well? And where is the scope for improvement?
Maybe it is a case of “well I would say this”, and it’s for others to challenge me, but I think the standards in the profession are very high.

As we said earlier, understanding how we embrace generative AI is going to be very important. But also the cost of operating for smaller firms who serve their markets is something that concerns me. Sitting on ICAS Council, you hear all about these things, and you see a massive amount of market consolidation taking place. I do wonder about that in the long term.

There’s something about having professionals in local towns who are part of the fabric there, know the environment, know the business and are available to talk, whether that’s local banks, lawyers or accountants. But it has become a lot more complex and costly to operate those local firms.

I don’t have any smart answers, but that should be on the agenda. If you think, like I do, that not all the growth in the country has to come from the big cities, and that it should come more generally from around the country, then you have to be concerned.

And finally, ICAS has just released its exam results. What advice would you give somebody who has just passed their exams and is about to become a newly qualified CA?
Keep learning, keep your technical skills relevant and keep adding to them with related skills. Never assume you should stop learning and being better at what you do. Make yourself relevant to the market.

The other thing is to invest [time] in developing your networks, both within your firm and the friendship networks you might have built up, such as the people you’ve studied and trained with to become a CA. Because they become very, very valuable to you in later years.

Read about the ICAS 2030 strategy