Head of Accounting Services

About the Opportunity

An established international professional and corporate services firm is hiring a Head of Accounting Services to lead its accounting business across ASEAN, spanning Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This is a genuine regional leadership seat: ownership of the accounting service line and its commercial performance across the three markets, a mandate to set accounting strategy and quality standards, and a platform built to scale. You would report into senior regional management and be based in Kuala Lumpur, with some flexibility on base location for the right person..

This is not a caretaker role. The firm has been growing across the region and wants a commercially-minded, client-facing leader who can front CFO and finance-director conversations, back up business development, and lift the teams from routine bookkeeping toward larger, more complex engagements — while keeping local teams close to their clients and regulators. Depth of seniority matters less than commercial ability and client-facing credibility — this is a platform where a capable leader can step up into a broader remit, so we are open to a range of backgrounds rather than one narrow profile.

The Role

You would own the Accounting Services line across the three markets, end to end:

• Carry commercial accountability for the service line — revenue, margin, utilisation, work-in-progress, pricing and resourcing across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.
• Lead and develop the senior managers who run local delivery, setting clear regional priorities, business plans and performance expectations.
• Own the most senior and complex client relationships, act as the regional escalation point, and move clients from transactional accounting toward higher-value reporting and advisory work.
• Set a consistent regional operating model: common methodologies, quality standards, review processes and service-delivery expectations, while respecting jurisdiction-specific requirements.
• Drive the technology and transformation agenda — cloud accounting platforms, automation and standardised workflows.
• Contribute to business development and cross-border client opportunities as the platform grows.

Think regional architect and hands-on technical authority in one seat: close enough to the accounting to be credible with your teams and clients, senior enough to run the numbers and the strategy.

What Makes You a Fit

First and foremost, you are commercially minded and client-facing. You are comfortable in front of CFOs, finance directors and boards — pitching the outsourcing of a finance function, defending a service scope, and translating a client conversation into what your teams can deliver. You are business-minded rather than a pure technician, and you enjoy backing up sales to help win new work. Just as important is how you work with people: you build easy, credible relationships with senior clients and with peers across a regional leadership team.

On the technical side, a solid accounting grounding is expected rather than exceptional — a Big Four or mid-tier-firm background, comfort with IFRS and local reporting, and the ability to guide your teams on complex matters when it counts. Depth of seniority is not the point — what counts is that you have led or supported larger, more complex engagements and are ready to carry commercial responsibility, so you do not need a long title or a big portfolio behind you. You have ideally led or helped lead delivery across more than one office or market, or you are ready to take on that regional oversight, with a strong home-market (Malaysia ideally) statutory base and a working understanding of the Singapore and Indonesia environments.

Ideally you have carried some service-line commercial responsibility — a revenue-to-gross-profit view, or the pricing, utilisation and margin behind the work — and you are comfortable inheriting and growing client relationships with a genuine nose for business development.

You hold a degree in Accounting or Finance, you are based in Malaysia with the right to work there (a Malaysian citizen, or already holding a Malaysian work visa), and your business English is strong.

Helpful, though not essential: a professional qualification such as ACCA, CPA, ICAEW, CIMA or MICPA and MIA membership; a background in corporate services, fund services or professional-services outsourcing (though we are keen to look more broadly); experience standardising or bringing teams onto a common operating model; exposure to accounting technology and transformation; and basic Mandarin.

 

What is On Offer

• A genuine regional remit across three markets — Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia — rather than a narrow single-country brief, owning the accounting service line and its commercial performance from revenue to gross profit.
• The opportunity to build, standardise and scale a regional accounting platform and to shape its quality and technology agenda.
• A seat in the core ASEAN management team with genuine visibility across the regional business, and real potential for the remit to broaden as the platform scales.