Business Talk – In conversation with Paul O’Flaherty at EY

Paul O’Flaherty is the EY-Parthenon Africa leader.

Since 2001, he has worked as both CFO and CEO in the listed company environment as well as the public sector and in family-owned businesses. He has worked in South Africa, across Africa, as well as in the Middle East and the US.

O’Flaherty is a qualified chartered accountant and has diversified industry experience including mining, infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, trading, steel manufacturing and financial services,

He carries in-depth experience within corporates in public offerings and debt-raising locally and internationally. He also has regulatory experience in Africa in the energy and financial services industries.

In this episode of Business Talk, he talks to Michael Avery about the rise of long-term value creation and sustainable business practices, and how these must be integrated into the day-to-day strategy of the business.

Businesses are operating within an eco-system of stakeholders that are looking to it to understand their compelling cause or reason for being beyond solely profits.

Unless the focus on broader stakeholder outcomes is embedded across the whole organisation, most of a business’s stakeholders – investors, regulators, consumers and broader society – may not believe that it is indeed focused beyond profit.

According to the EY Long-Term Value survey:

• 80% of business leaders believe stakeholders and not shareholders are important to long term company success;
• 56% agree that capitalism, as it exists today, does more harm than good.

Institutional investors want companies to make clear how they are creating long-term value, so:

• 59% want clarity on environmental issues and climate change;
• 54% want clarity on broad diversity;
• 32% want clarity on how people and culture are being developed and managed.

Trust in business standing at only 58%. A case for change has therefore never been clearer. O’Flaherty takes a deeper look at this, sharing more insight into EY’s response to the pressing strategic challenges business is faced with.

EY-Parthenon is EY’s sector-led strategy consulting business with the expertise of more than 6,500 professionals, globally, who advise C-Suite on transformative corporate, transaction and turnaround strategies that will work in the real world, from idea to implementation, to build long-term value.

The full interview is embedded below. You can find all the Business Talk with Michael Avery interviews here.