The business partner

Andrew Taslim’s mother ran a bak kut teh restaurant in his family’s hometown Jambi, a small city in Sumatra, Indonesia. Beloved across South-East Asia, bak kut teh is a rich, delicately cooked broth of pork and medicinal herbs with a complex flavour.

Although Taslim does not make the link between his career and his mother’s recipes, his professional journey has been a fine blend consisting of extensive experience and steady progress through multiple sectors. By taking on complementary roles, he has fine-tuned his professional growth to get to where he is today.

Business partner

‘I really like internal audit,’ begins the head of internal audit for Blibli, an omnichannel commerce and lifestyle platform. That light-bulb moment came at the end of a year-long contract appointment with Microsoft in Singapore in 2013, before which he had spent two years with RSM Singapore in audit and five years with KPMG Singapore (first in audit, then in an advisory role with the forensic accounting practice).

‘Microsoft wanted to extend my contract for another year, but in more of a financial accounting capacity, which didn’t relate to my previous roles in audit and internal control,’ he explains. ‘Not taking the extension led ultimately to my first big career break: I joined Mondelēz as an internal control manager covering Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.’

He spent a year with the US food and beverage multinational before moving back to Indonesia with MPM Group in the automotive sector, spending nearly five years there before leaving as head of corporate internal audit. At Blibli, which has a unified omnichannel ecosystem called Blibli Tiket – the synergy between Blibli, tiket.com, Ranch Market and Dekoruma – he is in his happy place.

‘Internal audit is about being a business partner, not a policeman,’ he says. ‘I’m a people person. We need to be approachable, good communicators, and then working in the e-commerce space you also need to be agile and flexible.’

Big dreams

Sent to New Zealand to finish high school, the teenage Taslim dreamed of being a pilot (he still watches Top Gun regularly) or medical doctor. However, his eyesight did not meet flying requirements and medicine was too costly a path. He also understood his parents needed to provide for his three siblings as well.

‘So I thought, how hard can accounting and finance be? But I struggled in the beginning. I did an accounting module at school in Indonesia and was never able to balance the balance sheet. I was always a couple of million rupiah off,’ he recalls with a wry smile. ‘It wasn’t until studying in New Zealand that it began to fall into place. I better understood accounting terminology and methodology learning in English.’

The route to ACCA for the current deputy chair of ACCA Indonesia Member Panel’s came via CAT. He quickly saw the benefits of the accounting technician certification. ‘It’s such a practical qualification; it gives you exposure to accounting standards in real-life scenarios, and asks you what could go wrong and how you would implement them correctly. You don’t get this at university.’

Multisector exposure

Taslim has worked across several industries, from the multisector exposure of large professional services firms RSM and KPMG to oil and gas with Chevron, IT with Microsoft, FMCG with Mondelēz, automotives with MPM, and now with Blibli. Currently, Taslim is a key member of the Blibli team, contributing to the BlibliTiket Omnichannel Ecosystem. He also oversees auditing responsibilities for several subsidiaries within BlibliTiket.

Indonesia’s omnichannel commerce (e-commerce, physical stores, distribution and delivery) sector is bustling and competitive. Regional players vie with strong domestic platforms for a share of the complex market. Indonesia has a huge and diverse population, speaking hundreds of languages and spread across thousands of islands.

‘Each platform has an advantage with certain products, so to be profitable they should focus more on these instead of trying to cover all categories and being a jack of all trades, master of none,’ he says.

Risk management

A subsidiary of Djarum Group, a well-known conglomerate in Indonesia, Blibli Tiket was the country’s third unicorn to go public on the local stock exchange. A risk management framework is a requirement for IDX-listed companies, so top of Taslim’s to-do list is an enterprise risk management project.

He describes internal audit as the third line of defence behind the business owner at the front and operations in second. From a conflict of interest standpoint, these lines need to remain clearly separated, especially in the e-commerce sector, where new regulations and standards are a part of life.

While he has experience in undertaking risk management projects in mature organisations, he has advised to engage Deloitte as a consultant to help maintain a clear separation between internal audit and enterprise risk management in the three lines of defence.

‘It’s an interesting, hectic and heavy project,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of bureaucracy we need to manage, while maintaining segregation of duties and managing conflicts of interest.’

Beyond the project, a key ongoing challenge is convincing the CFO of internal audit’s recommendations. One instance is to look for cost savings in software development given that e-commerce platforms are essentially tech companies.

‘We want to ensure that the cost/benefit of any new application or solution is balanced, which is more straightforward in a regular commercial business – if you need an IT solution, you simply buy one. In e-commerce we tend to build our own, which can be more costly if not controlled and managed properly.’

And when internal audit’s recommendations are taken seriously by management? ‘Oh, it’s a fabulous feeling,’ he says.