Prince Kofi Amoabeng

Prince Kofi Amoabeng (left) is quite frank that after completing his degree in business administration, he chose to study CIMA simply because it was the only accountancy qualification then available in his country’s capital, Accra.

But though I chose CIMA by default, I grew to love it,’ he says. ‘Unlike the post mortem type of work that you have with other accounting bodies, with CIMA you actually make things happen before the results are captured after the action. I didn’t want to be a number crunching accountant at the end of the year. I wanted to be in a management position, where the figures are the means of informing me what to do.

Prince Kofi explains that CIMA training has stood him in good stead throughout his professional life. The crowning achievement of this was being chosen as ‘best entrepreneur of the year 2010’ at the inaugural Ghana entrepreneur awards and in the very same year being named as Ghana’s most respected CEO for 2010.

He also led one of Africa’s first reverse takeovers when UT Financial Services, founded in 1997, acquired in 2008 the medium sized BPI Bank. In 2010 he merged the two operations to create the larger, fully fledged UT Bank.