Thought leadership stories

Learn more about The School of Accounting and Finance's newest Advisory Council Chair, Lana Paton.

SAF PhD student Jillian Adams is recognized for her achievements as the 2024 Faculty of Arts valedictorian.

SAF Professor is being recognized for his contributions to accounting research.

Three SAF professors will receive the Distinguished Professor Emeriti award in 2024.

Chen is the very deserving 2024 School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) valedictorian of 2024. She is completing her degree on the Dean’s Honours List and is graduating with a Bachelor of Accounting and Financial Management (AFM, with both a Professional Accountant Specialization and Financial Leadership Specialization. She is currently pursuing her Master of Accounting degree, with a convocation in 2025.

A group of SAF students swept the competition in Poland and take home the trophy in the 2024 CFA Institute's Research Challenge global finals.

One of the top women in finance in Canada, Jeannine LiChong is a dedicated mentor and community builder.

From SAF to Dragon's Den and beyond, Ian Weng is revolutionizing the frozen food market in Canada.

The Inaugural Hub for Sustainability Integration Conference took place on March 21st at the Delta Hotel in Toronto. The day was filled with informative presentations and panel discussions from some of the country’s most knowledgeable sustainability integration and climate advocates. 

The Contemporary Issues in Sustainability Reporting Symposium, co-organized by Professors Liz Demers and Mingyue Zhang on behalf of the CPA Ontario Centre for Sustainability and Performance Management (CSPM), brought together thought leaders from academia and business to explore and discuss contemporary issues in sustainability reporting.

What is sustainability? Is it a trend, a buzz word or a real solution to many of the climate, economic and social issues we’re facing today? 

With our inaugural Hub for Sustainability Integration Conference coming up next month, we sat down with expert Jennifer Roedding to help paint a clearer picture of how leaders can integrate sustainability into their businesses and see larger profits in the long run.

Dr. Tisha King, professor at Waterloo’s School of Accounting and Finance, collaborated on a research project to find and pay homage to Canada’s first Black accounting professionals in honour of Black History Month.

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) recently caught up with Grace Zhou (MAcc ‘18) to chat about her career post-graduation and to gain insight into the exciting opportunities that SAF co-op terms can provide to enrich students’ professional experiences. 

The School of Accounting and Finance's Student Venture Fund (SVF) had the honour of hosting University of Waterloo President Vivek Goel last week.

Professor Cody Buchenauer (CPA, CA, MAcc ’14) is a School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) alum with a remarkable career journey. From a student navigating through co-op terms to an industry professional holding a role as senior manager at EY, Buchenauer is now a full-time faculty member as well as a member of SAF’s co-op and experiential learning team. Bridging academia and industry to guide current students’ career paths as a passionate educator, his journey is a testament to the impact of the co-op experience offered at SAF.

New research shows that team-based recognition can be effective in settings where performance is highly interdependent, and teamwork is essential to the company’s success.

With the fall term fast approaching, the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is excited to welcome the incoming Class of 2028. There is a lot of preparation involved as students get ready for their first year of university. To help with this transition, a team of faculty members at SAF have created a series of modules to get students familiar with the technology requirements for SAF, as well as basic accounting and finance concepts.

by Jessie Ge, PhD Candidate

In the digital age, a new Twitter strategy can have implications for a healthy bottom line. How companies handle customer complaints on social media plays a critical role in their customer-focused performance management systems. However, there has been a notable lack of descriptive information related to assessing managerial performance based on the handling of online complaints.

Based on the emerging technology, this paper proposes a new method to measure the expected duration of competitive advantage for average adopters. This method is based on public data, such as google searches, press releases, book titles, and companies’ disclosures with respect to the technology. The method is very easy to implement.

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is pleased to share that Jillian Adams has been awarded the Warren Ober Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student. This award is given to a University of Waterloo graduate student in the Faculty of Arts who has made significant contributions to teaching.

When Blake Phillips began his doctorate in finance in 2009, he was asked to declare a focus. With previous degrees in biology and forestry and an interest in conservation, he zeroed in on sustainable finance.   

Congratulations to School of Accounting and Finance professor Ranjini Jha, recipient of the 2023 Arts Award for Excellence in Service!

Established in 2012 by then-dean Doug Peers, the Arts Awards for Excellence in Service, Teaching and Research recognize exceptional contributions made by faculty, staff, and students in the Faculty of Arts. This is the 11th anniversary of the Arts Awards and more than 30 members of the Arts community were nominated by their chairs, supervisors, and colleagues.

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) caught up with Andres Perez-Vilarino (MAcc ’19) to discuss his career post-graduation, and to learn how he has leveraged his education and passions to help inform his role.

More than 30 nominations submitted for the 2023 Arts Awards for Excellence in Service, Teaching, and Research posed an especially tough challenge for members of the Arts Honours and Awards (AHA) committee this spring. So many outstanding members of the Arts community inspired their chairs, supervisors, and colleagues to put names forward as nominees to recognize their contributions and achievements. Today, Dean Sheila Ager and the AHA committee are happy to share the results.

Wenqian Hu’s paper Trust Versus Rewards: Revisiting Managerial Discretion in Incomplete Contracts was awarded the Lazaridis Institute Prize for the best paper on accounting issues relevant to technology firms. The paper finds that an algorithm-generated bonus allocation scheme improves employee productivity, compared with human managers’ bonus allocation.

Recipients of the 2022 Outstanding Performance Award have been named and include three School of Accounting and Finance faculty members: David Ha, Deborah Kraft and Daniel Rogozynski.

In fast-paced and often rapidly changing work environments, employers continue to seek new and improved ways to recognize employees in the workplace. However, new research from the University of Waterloo suggests that public peer recognition may backfire by enabling comparisons among employees, and these comparisons may make some employees feel unfairly treated.

Krista Fiolleau, associate professor in the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) has recently published a chapter titled “The professional responsibility of accountants as re-defined by the inclusion of the NOCLAR standard in the Code of Ethics” within the Research Handbook on Accounting Ethics alongside co-authors Pier-Luc Nappert from Université Laval and Linda Thorne from the Schulich School of Business.  NOCLAR, an acronym meaning non-compliance with laws and regulations is discussed extensively throughout the chapter.

From becoming the first member of her family to graduate from university, Ranjini Jha now educates other students as a professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.

Currently, Ho works as an associate in private equity at Brookfield Asset Management and he attributes the start of building his investor mindset to his experience at the University of Waterloo with the Student Investment Fund (SIF). SIF gave him and other SAF students the unique opportunity to invest with real money and get hands-on-training in equity valuation and portfolio management with guidance from industry experts and faculty mentors. This taught him about value investing that he then applied to his co-op role as private equity analystat the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and when competing in the CFA Institute Research Challenge.

Mingyue Zhang is an assistant professor of accounting at the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo.

She earned her PhD in Accounting from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management) and Master of Professional Accounting from Singapore Management University. She is also an affiliate of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.(ACCA)

by Alyana Versolatto

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is pleased to share that professor Efrim Boritz was inducted this year into the Canadian Accounting Hall of Fame for his extraordinary contributions to the accounting profession. During Boritz’s illustrious 40-year career at the University of Waterloo, he has been a prolific writer and researcher with 24 books and monographs to his credit and over 40 articles in refereed journals. His research involves investigating areas of professional practice in external auditing and internal auditing which rely on the exercise of professional judgment.

Cyber-attacks and data breaches are of great concern for data-sensitive organizations. These organizations are adept at safeguarding data but fail in safeguarding against cyber-attacks. Phishing is a semantic attack that deceives email users into clicking on the embedded link or attachment in an email. The goal could be to induce the email users to subsequently give away sensitive information, enable malware that can steal passwords, or install a backdoor into the user’s system and encrypt the users’ data. Phishing imposes a great risk on these organizations for two reasons. First, even a non-vital position in which employees likely perceive little cyber risk, if being attacked, could cause significant economic loss and litigations. Second, phishing emails could simultaneously reach most employees within an organization. Thus, strengthening the frontier of safeguarding against phishing is of vital importance.

On a bright sunny day at the TD Centre in Toronto, professor Adam Vitalis interviewed four SAF alums about their careers in the internal audit field. Internal audit is a critical component of effective corporate governance and risk management and plays an important role in helping organizations achieve their objectives while safeguarding their assets and reputation.

As workplace practices continue to shift, organizations are finding inventive ways to keep their employees motivated and committed to reaching their goals.

The University of Waterloo community came together to cheer on eight finalist teams as they pitched to a panel of judges and a chock-full room of attendees at the Velocity $5K finals on March 30th in the Black and Gold Room at the University’s Student Life Centre.

The recent collapse of banks in the United States and this week's intervention by the Swiss government to facilitate the takeover of banking giant Credit Suisse might have some worried about a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

Dr. James R. Thompson, associate professor in the School of Accounting and Finance and co-director of the University of Waterloo's Computing and Financial Management program, sheds light on what's causing the instability in the banking system and how it might affect Canadian financial institutions.

Many fear a repeat of 2008 given the recent collapse of banks in the United States and the intervention that happened this week by the Swiss government to facilitate the takeover of banking giant Credit Suisse.

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is #EmbraceEquity, calling people to imagine a world that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where differences are valued and celebrated. Today and every day, the School of Accounting and Finance is proud to celebrate the contributions and achievements of women in our community.

Muhammad Azim is an Assistant Professor at the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo.

He acquired his Bachelor of Commerce from Queen's University, Masters in Finance from Queen's University, and a PhD in Accounting from the University of Toronto. He has previously worked at Deloitte's Assurance and Advisory Services, and during that time he also obtained his CPA and CA degrees.

Tisha King is a professional accountant and earned her Ph.D. from Wilfrid Laurier University. Professor King specializes in behavioral research that largely focuses on ethical judgments and decision-making within the context of taxpayers and tax professionals. Her recent studies investigate how advances in technology, penalties, and fairness influence tax compliance. In her free time, Professor King enjoys running, biking, and hiking with her family.