The Accountant Quits. Umar Mallam Hassam Does Not

When the accountant-turned-podcaster/social entrepreneur left his Amsterdam-based position in August 2020, the Great Resignation wasn’t in our collective vocabulary yet – call him an early adopter – but Umar saw the writing on the wall. He had outgrown the sluggish corporate norms of traditional finance and was seeking expansion. He wasn’t alone. When Umar founded The Accountant Quits, he found a massive audience for his content, first on LinkedIn and then through his podcast. Speaking to fintech founders and financial architects – including Coinshift’s founder, Tarun Gupta – about the future of the industry, he began to zero in on the impact and potentials of blockchain. He never looked back. His mission was clear: financial infrastructure is moving onchain, and accountants must be prepared. With the Accountant Quits, Umar does precisely that, sharing knowledge through podcasts, articles, and his more recently founded Crypto Accounting Academy, a seven-week, quarterly course now recruiting its fifth cohort.

The CPA crisis continues. There is a shortage of accountants in the world, and a sustained decline in university enrollment in the field suggests that if needs are going to be met, the industry is going to need a radical change. The Accountant Quits host may have quit accounting, but he hasn’t turned his back on it – quite the contrary. Umar has grown his content platform into a fully fledged educational resource, offering modules to help a new generation of professionals master technologies that, deployed en masse, would soothe some of accounting’s biggest pain points – and even make the practice exciting again. The goal: to reconcile the realities of doing business with accounting standards that can be slow to change, while empowering financial architects with the ledger magic of blockchain. The Accountant Quits, in other words, is really about keeping accountants inspired.

CS: Did you go right into finance after school? 

UMH: I started out studying science, actually. I moved from Mauritius Island to go to university in Malaysia, and when I got there I saw other people in my environment pursuing a career in accounting and finance. They were wearing suits. I thought they looked cool, ambitious. I was like, “I could do that.” So I did. After school and started working in external audits for a big multinational company called BDO. I worked in Malta, in auditing; in Amsterdam, in accounting. But at some point, I started becoming dissatisfied with the corporate culture. Working in an accounting or finance role isn’t just about the technical stuff. There’s a ton of soft skills you need to have. There's a way to behave within a company that could make or break your next promotion. That didn't sit well with me. Suddenly I was no longer entertaining the idea of being in top level roles at these companies. I started exploring and branching out, and became really interested in marketing. I attended a workshop where they were speaking about archetypes and storytelling and I became fascinated with branding. So, I came up with a challenge for myself: to write a daily LinkedIn post about a specific brand and how its story made it successful. I did that every day, for 100 consecutive days. 

CS: No wonder The Accountant Quits is such a strong brand. 

UHM: I was still doing accounting at that point! But I had discovered how important it is to tie in emotion when you want to sell to an audience – and started to believe that I could do something else. In August 2020, I quit and founded my own brand storytelling agency. I gave myself a gap year for reading and writing. I knew that even after studying other brands’ narratives, it would take time to be able to tell my own brand’s story. At the same time, I noticed a lot of accountants in my circle were also dissatisfied with their work. I thought if I could share my story of navigating a career change, I might be able to motivate other accountants wanting to do the same. That’s how I came up with “The Accountant Quits.” I started the podcast in July, 2021, almost a year after I left my job. 

CS: Did you immediately zoom in on blockchain?

UMH: Not right away. One big topic at the time was how new technologies were affecting work models. I wrote about AI and how it would impact accounting, or eventually make accountants redundant. I wrote about the future of work. And I wrote about blockchain. But that’s where it came together. I knew I had to boil my work down to one focus, because people would remember me for something – but not for everything. 

As I got to know blockchain, I saw it as an accounting technology. I read white papers about the benefits of shared information networks – even before Bitcoin – and saw that blockchain solves one of the main pain points of accounting: reconciliation. In theory, blockchain means you never have to reconcile, because you have a public ledger that does that automatically. That’s how TAQ became a podcast on blockchain for accounting. 

CS: Was any one thought leader or white paper a particular catalyst when you were getting into crypto? 

UMH: There was one white paper, written by Ian Grigg: “Triple Entry Accounting.” It was such a novel concept. Accountants are used to double entry, right? Triple entry sounded really exciting. Eventually, I interviewed the author for the podcast, which was a big moment for me. 

CS: You speak to so many people on the podcast – including our founder, Tarun. Many are coming from traditional finance and web2, moving their practices and skills onchain. In your view, what is motivating that shift? And to go back to marketing archetypes, is there a particular “type” of accountant that is attracted to web3? 

UMH: I’d say that everyone today who's into blockchain is very curious by nature, and very receptive to new ideas and ways of doing things. There's something in their personality that has made them look at this new technology not just at the surface level, but deeply, into its functioning and applications. These are people who have actually looked under the hood to understand the technology – and once they do, they immediately see how it’s different and better than what we had before. And these are people who are willing to teach themselves, even if there aren’t that many resources available. People coming to TAQ want to stay on the frontier and get an edge in terms of their career. 

Because you don't learn blockchain at school, everyone I have spoken to working in web3 has a unique story about how they got there. A lot of people do get into it by first investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum, before really understanding the technology. Then they fall down the rabbit hole. The more time you spend on it, the more you understand it, and the more you want to work with it. 

CS: What about patterns from the hiring perspective?

UMH: Again, very few people have tangible professional crypto accounting experience, so businesses are hiring people who maybe have an interest in crypto on the side. But again, it’s mostly about being curious and believing in the possibility of positive evolution through technology. In terms of pattern recognition, if you can see how the internet transformed how we share and move information, then you know how blockchain is going to change how we share and move value. It will become mainstream – it’s just a matter of time. 

CS: There’s a term that we have banned at Coinshift but that is still used a lot in human resource contexts: “back of office” employees. Our philosophy is that onchain, the people traditionally described that way are truly front and center, pioneers and architects of new financial infrastructure. And in traditional finance, there’s a CPA “crisis.” People aren’t taking the exam anymore. 

UMH: I think these days accounting is even less sexy than it used to be. Honestly, if I could go back even I would probably tell my younger self to learn coding instead. We’ve seen the stats: 300,000 accountants have left the profession in the last five years. There are international accounting standards before, right? But there are no accounting standards for digital assets, anywhere. Digital assets still have to be reflected in financial statements. So which accounting standards do you use? You have no choice but to take the existing ones and reinterpret them. Blockchain is everywhere, but accounting bodies move at a slower pace than the technology, and they’re always going to lag behind. 

CS: Institutions are too slow for the market. 

UMH: The institutions are just too slow. In general, accountants know what they have to do, but even the handful of guidelines around crypto are a bit subjective. It's moving in the right direction, slowly, but these things take time. Meanwhile, there’s a new development in web3 every week. You can't have regulations or new standards at the same pace.

Why aren’t people studying accounting anymore? Accounting is referred to as the “language of business.” You need to understand the numbers behind running a business. So, it's not just accounting that's being impacted by technology. It’s the entire economy. I cannot imagine what younger generations born into social media, for example, will want to do with their lives as a result of technology being omnipresent. But I know that, in addition to tech, another thing institutions cannot keep pace with is the evolution of how people are thinking about work. 

CS: TAQ isn’t just a content platform, it’s also an educational one. How did you expand into offering courses? Is the idea to bridge the gap you describe above, improving conditions while the standards catch up to the tech?

UMH: Honestly, providing courses had been in the back of my mind since I started TAQ three years ago. People starting asking me to provide one pretty much immediately, but I didn't know enough about crypto accounting at the time – no one really did! So I told myself, take time to learn, then you can help others do the same. The podcast played a big part in that, as a way for me to learn about the technology and understand what we would have to teach. It was through conversations with other people, as well as all the research that goes into it, that I understood what type of curriculum we would need to propose. I can’t do it alone, though – crypto accounting is too vast. So we have teachers coming in, each bringing their unique specialist knowledge in the field. Tarun has been our acting wallet and custody expert. 

I looked at big universities to see if they were teaching blockchain, and honestly it was laughable. They would maybe have an hour-long workshop about technology in general – and maybe, just maybe, they’ll touch on blockchain there. Even then, anything taught at university level remains very theoretical. Just like most of what you can read on the internet is very theoretical. But I wanted accountants to understand the practical side. How do you use blockchain and crypto in a business? It’s not a speculative technology anymore. That’s what makes it interesting. 

CS: Business schools tend to lump blockchain in with web2, digital banking. Although, making that connection – in practice, as you say – is also a big topic right now. Are accountants talking about achieving web2 parity? 

UMH: From an accounting perspective, it’s very important to be educated in web2 when coming to web3. We’re still ultimately doing the same thing – the technology is just better. When I speak to crypto accounting firms, they would never hire someone who doesn't have a strong web2 accounting background, so it's very important that people keep pursuing the traditional qualifications at these universities. So far, we've had 40 students, and most are working in web3 already and coming to us to deepen their knowledge. 

I’m going to web2 conferences and showing them the technology, telling them to educate themselves so they can come work in web3. There’s a lot of interest but not a lot of enrollment from that side – yet. 

CS: Why do you think that is?

UMH: What we do is very specialized, very niche. I think the missing element is the sense that there will be somewhere to apply the knowledge after – a job with an onchain company, for example. I want the coursework to lead to that outcome more directly, to double down on providing accountants with opportunities to work in Web3. One way we are doing this is through scholarship programs. Right now, the course’s price point isn’t accessible for most new university graduates. But because it's hard for crypto accounting firms to find and hire the right talent with the right knowledge, there’s an incentive there to help us. I want to be able to say that people who come do the course go to the front of the line for company hires. The essential aim of The Accountant Quits is to provide practical knowledge that has direct applications in work places. 

CS: How can onchain financial systems such as Coinshift support this goal of knowledge sharing and accessibility? 

UMH: There’s a book by Al Ries and Jack Trout called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and one of the laws they have in there is called the “law of focus.” They use it to describe “owning” a word in one’s category, like how Lotus held its own despite competition in spreadsheets by owning the corporate focus of “groupware” for networked PCs. Well, I like the idea of TAQ being a platform that helps onchain companies focus on the product they’re building by allowing them to leave some of the education to us. Of course, we need their support – just like Coinshift has already partnered with TAQ. 

CS: As you say, we have the advantage of speed and agility when it comes to building the products that are going to best transform customer habits, but we know that there is knowledge out there that we can use, when it is shared collaboratively, to build on each others’ achievements with our unique expertise. That’s the beauty of open source. 

UMH: It has to be collective. If you have someone coming from fighting for policy that helps big players in web2, say, they might be well placed to help do the same in web3. So we need people from the entire tech industry to contribute and share knowledge.

CS: Do you have any predictions for the near future? In general, are you optimistic?

UMH: Everyone is speaking about stable coins, and I think that’s going to be the catalyst for the technology while we’re waiting for new regulation to come in, bringing companies on chain. But the user experience has to get more simple if we’re going to get mainstream people and businesses into self custody. People don’t want to move their funds around with tools they find hard to use, or risk losing their private keys. Things have improved a lot in recent months, but people want to be able to forget that it’s blockchain on the backend and just use it like they use the internet. I know everyone’s making this speech right now, but that’s really what we need. If Stripe, MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal are talking about blockchain – and they are – it’s going to happen faster than we think. 

CS: So you are an optimist.  

UMH: When people see these global powerhouses starting to use the technology, they will start to pay attention and give it credibility. And those people are going to need us early adopters: accountants that understand the technology and know how to deal with digital assets. Going back to the power of brands, these big names have big, decades-old legacies that give them that credibility. They would disappear if they didn’t adapt to new technology, but they also have those brand legacies to preserve. Newer companies will have the competitive advantage when it comes to speed because they don’t have that baggage. An onchain bank with Safe under the hood, 24/7 access, fast and affordable services, and simple UX? Of course that can compete with traditional banks.