Core courses and electives

Through this course you will gain a deep understanding of:

• the most complex items in corporate financial reports,
• how the standards governing those items change and are developed in a political environment
• how you can and should advocate for changes in financial reporting standards.

Ensuring that investors have access to decision-relevant, reliable information is crucial to well-functioning capital markets. Because of incentives and opportunities to provide misleading information, governance mechanisms have evolved to enhance the trustworthiness of financial reporting. The external audit is arguably one of the most important of these mechanisms. But is audit living up to its potential and delivering on its societal benefit? How can audits be implemented more effectively in organisations? How are technologies like AI impacting the substance and economics of the audit? These are the key questions we explore in this module.

Learn the essential concepts in probability and statistics upon which analytical techniques to be learned and applied later in the programme are built.

Basic probability, statistical inference, hypothesis testing, and statistical distributions will all be covered.

This course will cover the ways in which organisations of different types use data to measure, motivate, and improve performance.

The goal of this module is to equip you with the skills, theory and practice skills to engage in change management processes.

It incorporates fundamental psychological principles to help you develop implementable skills to gain leverage in negotiating favourable support for change initiatives.

Descriptive analytics is a set of tools that will enable you to summarise data sets to explore their contents and draw conclusions. Statistical and visual methods will be covered.

Predictive analytic techniques look for relationships between variables to predict outcomes of interest. Regression and other algorithms will be covered in this course.

Sustainability reporting has rapidly evolved from a largely voluntary practice into a mandatory requirement in many parts of the world, yet these regimes differ in their intent, scope, and approach. Critics have highlighted concerns about compliance costs, political motivations, and the inability of sustainability reporting to ever amount to more than greenwashing. This module explores the key question at the heart of this debate: do the potential benefits to stakeholders justify the significant costs of mandatory sustainability reporting, or is the whole thing a waste of time and effort?  

This course will require you to apply data and statistical techniques you learned in prior terms to settings related to financial information such as financial reporting and internal audit. We will focus in particular on the areas of anomaly detection and risk assessment.

Learn techniques to analyse and interpret the data in financial statements to ‘tell the story’ of a firm.

The ability to develop strong relationships is crucial in managing and leading effectively. Through this experiential course, you will refine your soft skills and improve your understanding of how you are perceived by others, which will help you better create relationships, particularly across differences.

In this course you will apply analytics techniques for the purpose of improving performance in a firm’s operations, measurement and control, and incentive structure.

Through cases, discussions, and guest speakers, this course will dive deep into the very latest issues and developments in financial reporting, governance, and ethics. The ever-changing financial regulatory landscape will be covered in detail as well.

This a collaboration between an external organisation and programme participants. Students form small groups within their cohort and act as a team of consultants for an organisation of their choice.

The project may cover any business challenge or opportunity faced by their client. Participants can work with any company, not-for-profit organisation or public sector organisation of their choice. Over an extended period, the team delivers agreed outcomes and receive client feedback.