Our latest Spotlight is on FairWise Partners, a premier financial and tax consulting firm based in China. Managing Partner Philip Chen answers our questions.
In your opinion, what is the future for your profession?
Professional services have become an integral part of commercial society and personal life, so I do not doubt that our accounting/tax profession will have an optimistic future. Like the medical profession, some of our practitioners will be specialists, whilst the rest become generalists. The involvement of specialists or generalists may vary depending on different levels of client service needs. However, both types play critical roles in business society. The success of accounting/tax firms partly lies in whether they have adopted appropriate specialist or generalist business strategies based on their strength and capabilities.
What is your growth strategy?
In the past years, we have always defined ourselves as a client-oriented boutique firm, and we will continue to adopt a generalist style to serve most of our SME clients. Marketing-wise, we will stick to the peer/existing client referral initiative, as we have found this to be the most effective marketing strategy we have ever had. Therefore, we will continue to be more active in international association activities and interact more closely with existing clients.
Where do you see your firm 5 years from now?
We expect more experienced client service partners with notable client portfolios to join our partnership, and more interactions across different service lines will echo our generalist-biased service style. I’m also expecting more cross-border cooperation, especially in the Great China Region. Lastly, I hope our integration of Shanghai and Hong Kong teams will go well and we can fully integrate business across mainland China and Hong Kong.
What is your biggest challenge?
Our biggest internal challenge will be the talent shortage. It is easy to hire staff to support your work, but it is challenging to develop them to be more self-motivated, self-disciplined, and work with more ownership, which is essential to our professional team.
Our biggest external challenge will be the market recognition of boutique accounting firms. Accounting/tax professional services are relatively new to the market in China, so people link service quality with firm size. It will take time for more people, especially our potential clients, to realise that truly experienced practitioners can sit in smaller boutique firms and offer high-quality services as most other developed economies worldwide do.
What percentage of your work is international?
As international cooperation is one of our partner team’s strengths, nearly 50% of our assignments could be labelled as “international” prior to the pandemic period. Due to the limitation of the pandemic period, currently, roughly 1/3 of our engagements are labelled as “ international.”
What business advisory services do you offer?
We offer financial/tax/commercial due diligence, valuation, sell-side financial advisory, capital market readiness advisory, tax advisory, etc, under our business advisory service line.
What was your main driver for being part of BOKS International?
One of the main drivers is being able to connect to international peers in desired regions to meet our clients’ cross-border service needs. In addition, we expect to assist other members in extending their service to the Great China Region. As I said, international cooperation is one of our advantages, and joining BOKS International can fully utilise our advantage in international collaboration.
Where do you see BOKS International 5 years from now?
I can definitely imagine wider coverage around the globe. However, more importantly, I’m really interested in seeing deeper and more frequent interactions within members.
How would you describe your typical client?
I believe we have a high-potential client portfolio. 1/3 of our clients are MNCs in smaller size, next 1/3 are investment institutions and their portfolios and the last 1/3 are start-ups with high growth potentials.
Tell us about a recent international assignment
Our Shanghai and Hong Kong combined team has a group audit engagement for a fast-consumption product group with a complex group structure. The reporting entity is a HK domiciled holding company, so our HK CPA firm will be the signing firm. However, the head office of the group is based in Beijing, and the major business sector is based in mainland China, so our Shanghai team is responsible for the substantive audit work of mainland China operations. In the meantime, the group also has different businesses in some overseas countries, some of which have become significant components in recent years. Therefore, our HK team also performs site visits to those overseas significant components. Our combined team cooperated smoothly in the fieldwork and reporting stages, and our service is well-recognised by the client. In the future, there will always be significant overseas components year by year; we will consider involving BOKS members in those regions to improve our audit quality in the overseas areas.
How do you target clients who are looking for international services?
We usually pay attention to potential clients whose management (especially the finance head) has Big-4 experience, so these companies may become familiar with our firm much more easily. Our ex-colleagues in Big-4 firms and our schoolmates are also major client sources. Of course, currently, more and more existing clients are willing to introduce our firm to other companies they know because we can offer satisfactory services to them.
Do you specialise in a particular sector or service?
As we mostly adopt a generalist style in our service delivery, we build our internal teams to cover a comprehensive range of services. We also have leading partners for each major service line, so I can say that at the partner level, we have partners specialising in particular assurance and financial advisory, tax, or valuation services. But firm-wise, we offer a full range of services like other typical accounting firms do.
