ICAEW Global Ethics Day – “Trust in the Digital Age”
Keynote – Gabriela Figueiredo Dias, IESBA Chair
Chartered Accountants’ Hall, London – October 23, 2026
(as prepared for delivery)
Neil, thank you for your warm welcome. Malcolm, thank you for your kind introduction.
Sophie Parkhouse, Chair of ICAEW’s Ethics Standards Committee; Mark Babington, of the FRC and my colleague on the IESBA Board; David Wray, also an IESBA Board member, whom you will hear later today;
Ladies and gentlemen,
A very warm thank you to Alan Vallance and the ICAEW leadership for inviting me to open this Global Ethics Day, in this outstanding building in particular.
Chartered Accountants’ Hall opened in 1893. The Institute was just 13 years old, already had 1,700 members, and had already been led by names that would come to shape the largest firms of the century that followed: Cooper, Whinney, Deloitte, Waterhouse and, later, Peat.
On the walls of the old Council Chamber – today the Main Reception Room – they painted four virtues: Truth, Prudence, Wisdom and Justice.
The founders literally built trust into these walls. And the question that brings us together today is whether that trust still holds in a very different world.
So where do we stand on trust today? Every year, the Edelman Trust Barometer asks people in 28 countries how much they trust their institutions to do what is right.
In the UK, only 44% of people trust the four main institutions – business, government, media and NGOs – among the lowest of the 28 countries surveyed, against a global average of 57%. Only 36% trust government. And only 14% of Britons believe the next generation will be better off.
But the report offers another important conclusion. Trust hasn’t disappeared. It has shifted: closer to people, and to people we feel are more like us.
Asked how recent events changed their trust, more people say they lost trust in distant institutions – national government leaders, major news organizations – and gained trust in what is close: their coworkers, their own CEO, their neighbors. Employers are now the most trusted institution: 78% of employees worldwide trust their employer, 75% here in the UK.
And trust has become more insular. Seven in ten people worldwide say they are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who is different from them, with different values, different sources of information, or a different way of life. In the UK, it is three in four.
In developed economies like the UK, trust is not collapsing; it has stagnated. And as economic anxiety, geopolitical tension and technological disruption intensify, it is retreating into smaller, familiar circles.
Edelman explains trust as the result of two ingredients: competence and ethics. As you know, both speak directly to the IESBA Code and its five fundamental principles: integrity, objectivity, professional competence and due care, confidentiality and professional behavior.
Our challenge, then, is how to bring these principles to life in a world where people are less willing to trust – especially what is different.
Accountants work where trust now lives: inside organizations, and in direct relationships with their clients, shaping together the information that investors, and citizens more broadly, need to trust.
And accountants, from the preparer to the auditor, share a single responsibility that gives them their special place in society and their license to operate: acting in the public interest.
That is an opportunity, and, I would even say, the profession’s one truly irreplaceable characteristic.
Yet globally, trust in professional services as a whole – while positive – ranks only 14th of the 17 sectors Edelman measures. It cannot be taken for granted.
And trust in firms is particularly exposed. In recent years, failures in audits, in conduct and in independence have shown how quickly reputations built over decades can be damaged. When one firm makes the headlines, the whole profession is judged by it.
What may seem a paradox to many is exactly where the answer lies: not only in each professional’s proficient use of the fundamental principles, but also in the culture and governance that support those calls. No individual choice is made in a vacuum.
This matters even more when AI is being increasingly embedded in operations and as new ownership structures of firms and automated processes make individual accountability harder to see. Proper culture and governance enable the individual to make the right choices, and us to trust the individual – and, through the individual, the organization: from the right judgment on a transaction, to the responsible use of AI, to the confidence that someone will speak up when the public interest is at stake.
These observations are very much in line with what we are hearing from stakeholders and see in the market as we work on IESBA’s 2028–2031 strategy. From this work, there are five dimensions I would like to highlight today.
The first is a shift from a focus on individual conduct and accountability to the institutional environment where they operate. In public practice, reflecting this broader trend, accountability is moving to a greater extent from the individual professional to the firm. Regulators increasingly look at firms’ systems and at how governance can prevent problems, not just detect them after they materialize.
Both private equity and technology are bringing innovation – sometimes disruption – in organizational structures and drawing greater attention to governance.
This means governance and culture now carry more weight. The firm’s ethical culture becomes a critical factor in preventing unethical conduct, helping to avoid overregulation and shaping the profession’s reputation.
The second is greater volatility and uncertainty. Economic and geopolitical uncertainty is high: inflation is rising again, and global public debt is heading towards 100% of GDP. When economies and businesses are under strain, the pressures on accountants’ work rise. At the same time, powered by technology, fraud is getting faster, larger and more sophisticated.
These pressures land first on preparers: CFOs and controllers. When pressure rises, trust depends on both lines of defense: preparers who report with integrity, and auditors who assure the information with independence and skepticism.
The third dimension is rising climate and social risks. Climate change is a financial risk, and it will not diminish, whatever the politics. These risks are becoming more important than ever, and we must not make the mistake of dismissing them because regulatory burdens are lightening.
The UK has taken a comply-or-explain approach to sustainability reporting by listed companies. The EU has dramatically cut how many companies must report on sustainability. Different routes, same direction: less prescriptive regulation, and more reliance on the integrity and objectivity of those who prepare and assure the information. Less regulation requires more ethics – and I suspect this is part of the conversation we will have later today.
The fourth trend is simplification and deregulation. Governments want policies that support economic growth. Among other measures, here in the UK and across Europe, they are reviewing how much companies must report and to what extent their disclosures must be assured.
Simplification can help, for sure. But if not done properly, it can raise the cost of doing business across borders and invite riskier choices – with a heavy toll on trust when problems arise, as history shows. The perimeter of what is reported and assured can move. The integrity of what is reported cannot.
Neglecting ethics in the name of simplification is fundamentally misguided – these are not conflicting objectives. A strong ethical baseline is what allows simplification, and even deregulation, to advance without undermining the trust that professionals’ work must inspire. Simplification done well builds trust; done badly, it erodes it.
The fifth and final trend is rapid technological transformation. Technology accelerates everything we do, but it also raises trust challenges of its own. I will name three specific challenges to accountancy:
Business models and fees: AI compresses hours and fees, with a risk of over-reliance on automated tools and a lesser exercise of professional judgment;
Opaque, hard-to-explain outcomes: professionals remain accountable for outputs they may struggle to fully explain, while adoption runs ahead of competence and governance; and
Concentration, ethics and independence: the speed and scale of business tie-ups between large audit firms and AI providers raise new questions about market concentration, due care and independence guardrails.
Technology can expand capabilities and business opportunities, but only people can provide the judgment that safeguards ethics – and, thus, trust. Responsibility, in the end, cannot be delegated to a machine.
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So, how can we win trust?
At the IESBA, we are not waiting for the new strategy to start acting. Listening to stakeholders and to the market, in September we decided to concentrate our resources on four areas until the end of 2027, with a clear focus on implementation support, proportionality and principles-based approaches.
First, simplification: making the Code easier to use by all. Targeted simplification of the Code, where warranted, is under discussion for the next strategy cycle. But work has already started on what can be done now: making the Code more usable and accessible, its proportionality easier to understand, and better supporting preparers and CFOs.
Second, firm culture and governance – a complex issue that lies at the foundation of public trust in firms. We are developing a single, overarching requirement directed at “the firm”: an evidence-based global baseline – principles-based, proportionate, supported by practical guidance, and complementary to quality management frameworks.
Here in the UK, FRC’s Audit Firm Governance Code, built on the original code developed by ICAEW and FRC in 2010, was a trailblazer. By strengthening governance, accountability and ethical culture within audit, the Code has helped enhance audit quality and public confidence in the firms.
Our aim is to establish a global baseline for firm culture and governance, building also on the FRC experience and setting a benchmark for all firms globally. We aim to approve an exposure draft in December.
Third, technology. We keep pace without chasing every new tool, through three pillars: a technology-neutral Code, strengthened in 2023; horizon scanning, from AI to digital assets and cybersecurity; and practical guidance – a first staff publication on emerging technologies came out in July, with guidance on generative and agentic AI coming early next year.
I am glad to see the same conviction here in the UK: again with a front runner approach, the FRC’s guidance on AI in audit and the CCAB’s statement on the ethical use of AI both make clear that accountants cannot abdicate responsibility for the outputs of the tools they use.
Fourth, private equity. As a global standard setter, we are neither for nor against it: capital is welcome, but ethics and independence are non-negotiable. We are therefore addressing three questions. Who controls the decisions? How do investors’ return on investment expectations affect the judgments accountants make on engagements? And do the independence rules reach the new layers of ownership? We expect to report early next year. Evidence will decide whether the Code’s principles remain fit for purpose.
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Ladies and gentlemen, let me close with a message that is not easy to hear.
Trust, ethics and independence have never mattered more. And they have never been under such pressure.
This is why IESBA exists. Not to add standards for the sake of standards, but to give every professional accountant and every firm a rock to stand on at the moment of pressure: the CFO asked to make the numbers look better, the auditor asked not to look too closely, the adviser asked to stay silent, the leadership pressured, or pressuring others, to cut a corner or turn a blind eye.
Which brings me back to where we began.
Those who placed Truth, Prudence, Wisdom and Justice on these walls could not have imagined the world we live in now: artificial intelligence, automated decisions, information travelling around the world in seconds.
But they understood something that no technology can change: the responsibility of those whom society entrusts with its information.
When technology can offer results at unprecedented speed, the real test of trust is whether professionals have the judgment, independence and courage to stand behind the integrity of those results, especially when doing so may come at a cost.
That is when ethics matters most.
Trust is not something we inherit from our predecessors, or something we can guarantee through rules alone. Trust is built every day, and each one of us in this room has a role to play: through our judgments, our decisions and, sometimes, our willingness to say no and do the right thing.
That is the fundamental responsibility of every member of this Institute and every other professional accountant.
We know that global standards only work when they live locally. ICAEW’s own Code is built on ours, a connection we value deeply.
So, engage with us: on our culture and governance exposure draft, on our 2028–2031 strategy consultation, which we expect to publish around the turn of the year, and, more broadly, on all our work.
Let’s build trust, together.
Thank you.