Ethics isn't a policy document — it's a muscle, and muscles need exercise. In the final episode of The Evolving Role of the CFO, the panel gets practical about keeping ethical leadership sharp.

The panel unpacks:

•     Workplace simulations and role-play refreshers that make ethics engaging rather than a tick-box exercise

•     Topical case studies — and a Sunday reading list cascaded through the whole team

•     Alan Mulally's famous stoplight charts at Ford: when every department reports green while the company loses billions, the dissonance is the ethics signal

•     What disciplinary case reports teach — and why those stories belong in the C-suite conversation

•     The AI green light problem: why projects labelled "AI" shouldn't get waved through, and the value of being the one who says "hang on"

It all comes back to the same foundation: honesty, and the trust it earns. That's a wrap on the series — watch the full webinar at cawnetworkusa.com.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

Ask any CFO whether the pressure has increased in recent years and you'll get the same answer: absolutely. The harder question is what you do when that pressure turns ethical — when you're asked to act against what you believe.

In part 5 of The Evolving Role of the CFO, Nikita Klassen and Bambo Bamgbose unpack:

•     Why pressure keeps rising — and how enjoying the build, and seeing progress, makes it sustainable

•     The honest limits of codes of conduct and guardrails: you can't control humans with policy alone

•     What actually helps in the moment: strong leadership relationships, peer forums — and a surprising new sounding board, an AI "board of directors" that debates the issue for you

•     The moral compass test: navigating demands where you're effectively asked not to believe your own eyes

•     Real examples of professionals who chose to walk away rather than comply — and why that courage matters to the whole profession

Essential listening for anyone who has ever felt conflicted at the top table.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

AI is already inside the finance function — writing the code finance teams couldn't write themselves, doubling personal productivity, and compressing years of experience into moments. But leverage cuts both ways.

In part 4 of The Evolving Role of the CFO, the full panel unpacks:

•     Matthew Williams on unlocking non-ledger data with warehouses, Power Query and AI-written SQL — and why the narrative must never outrun the data

•     Bambo Bamgbose on the double-edged sword in government contracting: cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and AI-drafted bids that miss the compliance quirks only experience catches

•     Nikita Klassen on doubled efficiency — and the fear of not bringing the team along, as research tasks that once developed juniors get answered in seconds

•     David Wray on over-reliance: why the graduating generation could leapfrog today's leaders, and why the real job now is teaching people how to think and to form expectations for the data

•     The new specialisms — data engineers and analytics experts — reshaping the finance function the CFO relies on

Essential listening for leaders working out how to capture AI's upside without losing judgment — or the next generation.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

Cybersecurity. Data governance. People leadership. Strategy. None of these were on the syllabus when most accountants qualified — and yet they now land squarely on the CFO's desk.

In part 3 of The Evolving Role of the CFO, David Wray, IESBA Board Advisor, unpacks:

•     The functions CFOs must now understand beyond finance — from cybersecurity and data privacy to data governance and HR

•     Why "soft skills" is the wrong name: people skills are the hard ones

•     The journey from technical leader to people leader to strategic leader — and why no accounting program teaches it

•     A question straight from IESBA's global round tables: is it ethical to accept a CFO role when you don't yet have every skill it requires?

•     Managing the gap — knowing what you don't know, relying on the right people, and closing it deliberately

Essential listening for anyone stepping up to a CFO role — or deciding whether they're ready to.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

The fractional CFO isn't a new idea — but it has never been more common. One finance leader, several organisations, many hats. And with those hats comes a complex of competing interests that has to sit at the front of your mind.

In part 2 of The Evolving Role of the CFO, Bambo Bamgbose, fractional CFO and Head of Executive Services at British-American Consulting, unpacks:

•     What the fractional CFO role really involves, inside one organisation and across several

•     How conflicts of interest arise when duties to different clients start to compete

•     The new pressure in US government contracting, where shifting administration priorities are rewriting the rules

•     The hardest dilemma of all: what to do when your ultimate customer demands something that collides with your ethical obligations — and the survival of the business is on the line

A short, sharp episode on holding the line when the ground keeps moving.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

The CFO's job description is quietly being rewritten. What was once a role built on financial stewardship now stretches into enterprise strategy, data, people, risk and trust — and most of it was never taught in an accounting program.

In this opening episode of our 6-part series, The Evolving Role of the CFO — recorded live in New York with the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA) and Fordham University — host David Powell introduces your panel: David Wray, IESBA Board Advisor; Nikita Klassen, CFO of The Westaim Corporation; Bambo Bamgbose, fractional CFO and Head of Executive Services at British-American Consulting; and Matthew Williams, Divisional CFO at Everest Insurance.

Together they unpack:

•     What IESBA's global round tables reveal about the shift from financial steward to strategic leader

•     How you prepare for responsibilities — cybersecurity, IT, people management — that no accounting qualification covers

•     Why strategy, capital, risk and controls should work like a traffic-light system: no green lights, no go

•     What changes in SMEs and government contractors, where the CFO wears every hat from day one

•     Getting ahead of the numbers — putting data in decision-makers' hands sooner, and stopping business models built on a napkin figure

Essential listening for any finance leader whose role keeps growing faster than the job description.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.

Foreign trusts are where some of the most expensive surprises in cross-border tax live. A trust quietly settled overseas — sometimes years before anyone in the family imagined moving to the United States — can trigger deemed realization events, punitive throwback taxes, and reporting obligations that catch families completely off guard.

In the final episode of Navigating the Expatriate Tax Maze, Peter Trieu of BDO walks through:

• What actually makes a trust "foreign" in the eyes of the IRS (the control test and the court test)
• The critical difference between foreign grantor trusts and foreign non-grantor trusts
• How distributions to US beneficiaries are taxed — and why the throwback tax regime is so punishing
• The 5-year rule that pulls pre-immigration trusts back into the US net
• The deemed-sale trap when a foreign grantor trust converts to a non-grantor trust
• Form 3520 and 3520-A reporting requirements every US beneficiary and grantor needs to know

A fitting close to the series — and a reminder that with foreign trusts, planning ahead is everything.

If anything in this series raised questions about your own situation or your employees', Dave Zydek and Peter Trieu welcome a direct conversation. Contact details and the full series are available at cawnetworkusa.com.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with BDO.

The US gift and estate tax is one of the most misunderstood areas of cross-border planning — partly because "resident" means something completely different here than it does for income tax. You can be a US income tax resident and still not be domiciled in the US for estate tax purposes, and that distinction can be worth millions of dollars.

In part 4 of Navigating the Expatriate Tax Maze, Peter Trieu of BDO lays out:

• The domicile test for estate and gift tax — a facts-and-circumstances analysis very different from the income tax bright-line rules
• The $15 million lifetime exemption available to US-domiciled individuals
• The much smaller $60,000 exemption that applies to non-residents
• The 40% rate that kicks in above the exemption thresholds
• The curious dual treatment of US stocks — tax-free to gift as intangibles, but fully taxable in the estate at death
• Planning moves for non-residents holding US-situs assets

Short, sharp, and essential for anyone with cross-border family wealth.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with BDO.

Giving up US citizenship or handing back a long-held green card sounds like a clean break — but the US tax system has other ideas. Since the HEART Act of 2008, expatriating Americans and long-term green card holders can be hit with a mark-to-market exit tax that treats nearly everything they own as if it had been sold the day before departure.

In part 3 of Navigating the Expatriate Tax Maze, Dave Zydek and Peter Trieu of BDO unpack:

• Who counts as a "covered expatriate" — and the three tests that pull you into the regime (tax liability, net worth, and certification)
• Who qualifies as a long-term green card holder (the 7-year rule)
• What the mark-to-market exit tax actually looks like in practice
• The 30% tax on future distributions from non-grantor trusts to former covered expatriates
• The 40% inheritance-style tax on US persons receiving gifts or bequests from covered expatriates
• Planning moves to avoid covered expatriate status — including primary residence sales, lifetime gifting, and spousal transfers

Essential listening for anyone considering expatriation or advising clients who are.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with BDO.

If you're a foreign national living in the United States and you hold a mutual fund, hedge fund, or private equity interest outside the US, there's a very good chance you own what the IRS calls a Passive Foreign Investment Company — or PFIC. The rules around PFICs are among the harshest in the entire US tax code, and getting them wrong can be enormously expensive.

In part 2 of Navigating the Expatriate Tax Maze, Dave Zydek of BDO walks through:

• What actually makes a foreign investment a PFIC (the income test and the asset test)
• The three tax regimes you can fall under: the default method, the QEF election, and the mark-to-market election
• Why the default method can push your effective tax rate above 40% or even 50%
• The Form 8621 disclosure requirements — and why missing one can leave your US tax return open to audit indefinitely
• Common exceptions, including PFICs held inside treaty-recognized retirement plans like UK SIPPs

Practical, plain-English guidance for anyone managing foreign investments while subject to US tax.

Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with BDO.