In September 2013, voting members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (ICAA) and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA) received a proposal to create a new trans-Tasman entity that would be greater than the sum of its parts. Framed around three pillars of pre-eminence, relevance and reach, the amalgamation sought to create a stronger membership body that was better positioned for the future.

Following three months of consultations, more than 54,000 members cast their vote and, with 77% of ICAA and 69% of NZICA approving the merger, the two accounting bodies officially came together on 31 December 2014 to form Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ).

“Voting was open for a month and no-one would tell me how the result was looking,” recalls Tim Gullifer FCA, who was president and board chair of ICAA when the merger was proposed. “They said, ‘We’re not going to tell you, because you’ll either walk around with a big smile on your face, or you’ll walk around looking upset’.

“We could see that combining the might of both institutes would create a stronger membership body that was better positioned to meet future global challenges and opportunities.”

Joining forces

Initial discussions for an amalgamation started shortly after NZICA began collaborating with the ICAA on education in 2010. However, it took time to reach agreement on a proposal.

Grant Ellis FCA, current CA ANZ president, was involved in the mechanics of the merger in New Zealand and says he had early reservations.

“I started off as a bit of a ‘doubting Thomas’ and certainly these views were shared by a solid percentage of the NZICA membership at the time,” he says. “If we merged with Australia, would we lose control or influence? Would New Zealand just be a ‘PS’ on the radar screen, rather than front and centre? There were genuine concerns that New Zealand interests wouldn’t be properly looked after.

“New Zealand and Australia are two distinctly different countries,” adds Ellis. “How would we get by with different tax regimes, different types of government structure and so on? There was some of that kind of thought going on and, I suspect from the Australian viewpoint, there may have been questions like, ‘Why do we want little old New Zealand tagging along when we can cope very well by ourselves, thank you very much?’.”

The benefits of an amalgamation outweighed any initial concerns and Ellis says there were a number of “strategic drivers” that led the initial discussions.

For example, NZICA and ICAA members were demanding more advanced services and education offerings. The composition of membership bodies around the world was also changing, with the unification of accounting designations taking place in Canada, as well as a joint venture between the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Alternative qualifications were also cluttering the market, driving a need to strengthen the value of the chartered accountant designation in the eyes of employers and decision makers.

“On both sides of the Tasman, we could see that we needed to be bigger,” says Ellis. “We needed to be able to spread the costs of our resources across a wider membership base and to be better heard by other accounting bodies around the world.”

Merger success

Peter Vial FCA, CA ANZ group executive, New Zealand and the Pacific, says the amalgamation has resulted in an equation of “one plus one equals three.”

“We have more heft internationally as a professional accounting organisation, more synergy and more collaboration across the Tasman on various aspects of the work we do,” says Vial, who leads the CA ANZ advocacy team in New Zealand. “I always come back to the fact that CA ANZ has four roles. It’s a membership body, an educator, a regulator and a public-good advocate, and I think all of those areas have been strengthened through the merger.

“We are now approaching 140,000 members, which is substantially more than the sum of the parts that the two previous bodies had,” says Vial. “I also think that, as a public-good advocate, we’ve got a stronger voice for advocacy in each country and globally. We obviously have different laws and policy settings in each country, but there’s also a lot of similarity and we’ve strengthened our positions by learning from each other’s jurisdiction.”

Simon Grant FCA, CA ANZ group executive, advocacy and international development, says members experienced an immediate benefit from the merger. For example, a digital transformation consolidated outdated systems into a unified and secure platform for member services.

“Being a bigger organisation, we were able to bring two balance sheets and two P&Ls together, and this gave us scope to do more things,” says Grant, who leads the advocacy team in Australia. “One of the major benefits was we reduced the membership fee by $150 [at the time] and then a further $50.

“Another benefit was expanding our presence globally,” Grant says. “Bringing the two organisations together, we had about 4200 members in the UK, many of whom are quite influential in their roles, which helped build our brand.”

Pamela Lee FCA, CA ANZ community investment relationship manager, agrees that the merger has resulted in greater global influence.

“I believe our relationship with international bodies is far more substantial than it was prior to the merger,” says Lee, who joined ICAA in 1986. “We’ve also had an incredible initiative on how we can attract more young people into the profession. There has been an amazing campaign [Make Epic Things Happen] which has been really successful, and it’s drawing young people into the profession and giving them opportunities to undertake the CA Program and in alternative ways.

“We’re a much stronger body than we were,” says Lee. “I think that is one of the great benefits of a merger if it is successful, and this one certainly has been.”

Collaboration and learnings

The amalgamation has also enhanced opportunities for cross-border collaboration.

“In 2013, when I started at NZICA, I was the New Zealand tax leader and I already had a relationship with the Australian tax leader who was working for ICAA,” says Vial. “So, we were already collaborating on an informal basis, but the merger brought us and our teams together and we were able to share ideas and share our thinking about policy direction, about legislative direction and about the need for legislative reform.

“We’re never going to have laws that replicate each other, but there is a lot to be gained by seeing what the other country is doing,” adds Vial. “How should the policy lever in each country be used to produce better law, better policy settings? It’s been hugely beneficial in an advocacy sense and not just in tax.”

The amalgamation has also enabled the exchange of ideas in areas like anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing. Obligations have extended to accountants in New Zealand since 2018, while members in Australia are expected to be impacted from 2026.

“New Zealand was ahead of Australia in that regard, so there have been a lot of learnings in New Zealand that our Australian colleagues and members can benefit from,” says Vial.

While New Zealand’s early leadership in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting has also assisted Australia in addressing similar challenges, Grant adds that there may be future opportunities for New Zealand to learn from Australia’s approach to sustainability reporting, which is based on the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB) two sustainability disclosure standards.

“New Zealand had already developed sustainability accounting standards before [the ISSB standards] and that left two regimes in place, because we now comply with international standards in Australia and New Zealand has its own set of standards,” he says. “I suspect that harmonisation will happen over the next five or 10 years to bring New Zealand in line with international standards, so there will be opportunities to exchange learnings.”

“This kind of collaboration is a key ingredient of the amalgamation’s success,” says Ellis.

“One of the wonderful things about CA ANZ is that we do consider ourselves a united group,” he says. “That was evident right from the beginning – an absolute willingness from both sides to work together, despite the initial reservations. Clearly, everybody had the intent to make it work and to work together and stay together. I think that’s been an integral part of our organisation for the past 10 years. It’s a true spirit of Anzac.

“We've come a long way in 10 years,” adds Ellis.

“In my current role as president, I have a lot of people approaching me on all sorts of issues, but statements like ‘Hey, we’re in a merger that hasn't worked’, certainly isn’t one of them. It’s been a very successful merger from whichever way you look at it.”

ICAA and NZICA merger in numbers

• The vision and strategy of the new institute were first presented to members during a period of consultation from 7 May 2013 to 12 July 2013. More than 10,000 ICAA and NZICA members provided feedback.

• More than 54,000 members cast their vote, with 77% of ICAA and 69% of NZICA approving of the merger.

• Following the amalgamation, membership fees were reduced by $150 and then a further $50.

• At the time of the vote, ICAA had 73,000 members and NZICA had 33,000 members. The new institute was set to represent the interests of more than 90,000 members and more than 17,000 provisional members. Today, CA ANZ membership stands close to 140,000 members.