The skills you need for a career in financial services accounting

A career in accounting in a financial services firm is very different from a career at a Big Four firm or other dedicated accounting firm. There’s a lot of overlap – but also a few major differences. What are they? And what are the skills that one needs to be a financial services accounting? 

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A few of the skills you’ll need include range, business knowledge, literal qualifications, problem solving, and emotional intelligence – not to mention being able to grapple with the beast that is AI in accounting.

Range

Muneera Carr, controller and chief accounting officer at Wells Fargo, spoke earlier this year to Heather Cole on the FEI podcast. For her, one of the most important parts of her career and skillset is having a wide range of skills and experiences.

"I will go be an auditor with the Big Four. I will go be a regulator with the SEC. I will go be a preparer of financial statements with one of the large banks. I will go be a CFO," Carr said. "It's the range of doing all these different things, and quite honestly that range gives you breadth that perhaps helps you in the long run."

This is where being in financial services has an advantage over dedicated accounting at a Big Four firm. A bank's finance division contains product control, financial control, financial reporting, business planning and analysis, tax, accounting policy, and even investor relations. Trainees typically rotate between them – you can accumulate range without changing employer.

Knowing the business as well as the rules

The reason that range matters is because, as Carr described, there are two distinct types in a finance function. "You've got the finance people who do financey things, and you've got the accountants who do the accounting things," she explained. "The finance team typically will be forward-looking because they're all about forecasts. The accounting team is all about looking back into the past."

Both sides are important; after all, a bank's books and records are an important part of how it presents itself to the public, and regulators are stringent about the accuracy of corporate disclosure. There is very little room for mistakes – but bigger picture thinking is also key.

"I think accountants could benefit if they understood the business better," Carr said. "They'll make better accounting judgments. And the finance people could benefit if they understand if they're more detail oriented and understand the rigor of the rules. it will make their forecasts sharper and more grounded."

Reading contracts

Here is a difference practice does not prepare you for. In financial services a great deal of accounting work begins with a legal agreement rather than a ledger, and you will meet them far earlier than you expect.

Sinéad McCormack FCCA, now chief financial officer at Medicines Discovery Catapult and former Bank of England financial controller, told ACCA's Journey to CFO podcast that in her first role, at a fund administrator in Dublin, involved acting as a trustee reviewing trading accounts.

As she put it, there "wasn't a journal to be found" – the work was reading and interpreting legal documents. Accountants sit a law module for a reason, and in banking they actually use it. At a “normal” accounting job, contract reading is not junior work.

Problem solving

The core of what makes for a good accountant has always been the same, both before and after the AI revolution: very specific problem solving. Complex pricing and accounting questions usually have several equally defensible ways of dealing with them, and in part, your role is to choose one and be able to defend it.

Amanda Kenafake, CEO of Power Tynan, told CPA Australia's INTHEBLACK podcast that "problem solving has become a skill all in its own," and that good accountants must have it. Her view of where the technical work sits is worth noting: "the finance stuff is the output of the activity."

Emotional intelligence

This is not something that accountants are famous for, but this is a skill that separates the people who get promoted from the people who stay excellent technicians.

Kenafake says that professionals "have got to have really great emotional intelligence to be able to pick up on cues around people, building relationships with people." Her practical test is whether the other person has actually understood you: "the technically correct answer sometimes is not the answer that you need to have for the client," and you may need to "explain it up to five or six different ways until a client can actually go, 'Oh yeah, I get what you're saying now.'"

Deloitte has reached the same conclusion. It is compressing 12 of 14 professional exams into trainees' first year of practice from September 2026, with UK managing partner for audit and assurance Allee Bonnard telling the ICAEW in March 2026 the aim is stronger "communication, teamwork and problem solving."

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is a doubled edged sword. Carr said that she does not see AI as a "threat" but rather as an "enabler", and that "AI will only be as good as the foundation or the architecture that it sits on." That means that a good accountant can get good accounting done faster. But a bad accountant will only get bad accounting done faster.

Kenafake said much the same. "If you were good at your job already… you use AI and you use your skills and your knowledge and everything you know, you can be exceptional," she explained. "If you use AI and you don't use your skills, knowledge and all of that, you can be average, and drop back from that where you were before, which was probably good." In a nutshell: use AI to enhance the skills you already have, don't use it to replace them.

David Carney, executive director of the Careers Industry Council of Australia, put the mechanics of that on the same episode as Kenafake. AI is "definitely an amplifier, it's not a leveller," and unlike a search engine, "AI generally gives you what you ask it to give you. It doesn't come back and question you."

Which is now a large part of the junior job. Robert Half's talent director for accounting operations, David Shogelola, told the ICAEW that early-career staff spend less time on repetitive data entry and more time reviewing outputs, validating what tools produce and spotting anomalies that need human insight.

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