The journey of the roc to the southern sea is marked by waves striking for three thousand li, symbolizing grand ambition and daring action. This spirit has long inspired Wu Di, Deputy General Manager of the Overseas Branch of CNOOC's Financial Shared Services Center. As a senior member of the IPA Group, Wu Di's outstanding practices in financial shared services and digital intelligent management accounting have helped CNOOC's center win the honor of "China Management Accounting Innovation Demonstration Unit."
From participating in the group's first comprehensive ERP implementation to domestic and international financial shared services projects, Wu Di has carved out a unique and leading "CNOOC path" in the uncharted territory of overseas financial control for state-owned enterprises. Complex cross-border environments and severe overseas challenges have only driven her to delve deeper, gradually establishing her as a benchmark for the new generation of professionals specializing in financial digital intelligence in China's corporate globalization.
Leveraging IPA Group's International Perspective for Transnational Finance
Wu Di's connection with the IPA Group was both a personal growth choice and aligned with the strategic needs of corporate transnational finance. After comparing several international accounting organizations, she chose the IPA Group for its deep Australian and UK resources, cross-border exchange experience, and its fit with the management needs of overseas financial shared services business, facilitating smoother and more efficient channels for tax and financial information.
In Wu Di's view, the core value of the IPA Group can be summarized as "systematic input + all-perspective exchange." The association builds a complete knowledge framework for transnational finance professionals, covering international accounting, management accounting, and cross-border compliance, helping to quickly address capability gaps. It also breaks down industry barriers, bringing together finance professionals from energy, manufacturing, finance, and other sectors to exchange insights and accurately grasp industry differences and dynamic trends in transnational operations. Facing the waves of digitalization and green low-carbon transitions, the IPA Group continuously provides cutting-edge courses on AI applications, automation tools, and sustainable disclosure, keeping members at the forefront of technology and standards.
For Wu Di, this certification is not just a qualification but a "lookout tower" and "booster" for transnational finance. It opens a door to the vast world of international finance and represents a new journey for finance professionals onto the global value chain.
CNOOC's Practice in Full Overseas Shared Services for State-Owned Enterprises
CNOOC began planning its financial shared services a decade ago and fully completed construction in 2021. The solid foundation of its domestic shared services stems from years of information technology accumulation and standardized governance experience. Wu Di joined the project team in 2018, participating in the entire process of domestic financial shared services construction, promoting financial standardization, systematic accounting, and process normalization. She led the design and implementation of 11 systems for the financial shared services, achieving full coverage of over 300 domestic units within three years.
Building on this, CNOOC took the lead in the industry by achieving full sharing of overseas accounting, establishing a global shared services pattern characterized by "extreme unification domestically and flexible adaptation overseas," serving nearly 70 overseas legal entities across 22 countries and regions. The CNOOC Financial Shared Services Center, with one headquarters and five branches, has a total staff of nearly 900. Its four distinctive departments are: Operations Management (responsible for quality and performance control), Standardization (responsible for unifying global accounting standards and risk control design), Data Department (responsible for informatization and automation), and Data Application Department (responsible for data analysis and value mining).
The Overseas Branch, established last as the sole center handling overseas accounting business, deeply studied the accounting differences across 22 countries and regions during its construction. It iteratively optimized system solutions in line with group control requirements, achieving unified overseas standards and efficient business adaptation, helping the group gain a first-mover advantage in the field of overseas financial shared services for state-owned enterprises.
Wu Di summarized five key aspects of the Overseas Branch's planning and construction:
1. Advancing with a Global Perspective: Abandoning the "centralized accounting" model of secondary companies, CNOOC promoted the construction of the overseas shared services center from a group globalization perspective. It focused on highly standardized business and highly unified systems, solving problems of complex upstream, midstream, and downstream operations, scattered systems, and differing standards, achieving "one set of standards, one system, one set of books." All rules and standards are managed by the standardization department, driving the realization of business standards, system standards, and business management standards from a financial standards perspective. The rules center is responsible for decomposing financial accounting norms into tens of thousands of system rules, covering every transaction, attachment, and field, enabling full-process intelligent control.
2. Front-loading Data Governance: The shared services center is a data center and value center. CNOOC embedded data governance concepts from the start, relying on software systems for global solidification, horizontally integrating financial systems of overseas units, and vertically connecting various levels of overseas units to ensure data standardization and unity from the source. It adheres to principles of extreme simplicity and ease of use, supporting multi-language switching, guided filling, and flexible displays suitable for international characteristics. It maintains a security baseline, coordinating finance, compliance, network security, and overseas data protection, independently building a lightweight international platform adapted to overseas business, multicultural environments, and group planning, ensuring overseas business data security and user experience.
3. Quality and Efficiency as Core Operations: Implementing the ISO9001 quality management system to achieve full-process standardization and traceability, balancing service efficiency and compliance baselines. To ensure business stability, the initial focus was not on reducing staff to pursue profits but on goals of high-quality accounting, strong financial supervision, and excellent data services. It implemented accounting responsibilities, insisting on strictness and practicality, making overseas capital "visible, adjustable, and manageable" to support the group's overseas strategy implementation. During the pilot phase, it accurately identified main risks in overseas business, adhering to review norms and requirements for key information like bank account verification and quantity-price comparisons, starting from the accounting level to investigate business risks.
4. Adherence and Flexible Adaptation: The biggest challenges for overseas shared services are time differences, standards, taxation, and funds. CNOOC adheres to financial, compliance, and legal baselines without rigidity, fully respecting differences in national accounting standards, tax regulations, and cultures. Under the group's unified chart of accounts and reporting framework, it allows reasonable local adaptation, achieving "one global set of books, with local flexibility," while maintaining some flexibility in process steps, interface displays, and convenient system module connections.
5. Building an Overseas Talent Structure: Beyond systems and mechanisms, talent is another major challenge in building overseas shared services centers. CNOOC employs a differentiated selection and systematic training model: prioritizing recruitment of professionals in minor languages (e.g., Spanish, Arabic) based on country needs, paired with financial backbones to form teams; using English as the global working language with minor languages supporting deep local communication; building a three-dimensional training system of "financial expertise + digital capability + international perspective," ensuring all staff master system operations, RPA applications, and basic data analysis skills; and persisting with a "young talent + technical backbone" combination, using technical thinking to break financial inertia, overcome cognitive bottlenecks, and maintain team innovation vitality.
Wu Di believes that adhering to baselines, taking initiative, enduring hardship, making learning a habit, and embracing cross-disciplinary work as the norm are essential to standing firm in the waves of globalization and digitalization.
Lofty Ambitions Fueling Success
With the spirit of the roc soaring ninety thousand li and waves striking three thousand, Wu Di has maintained this personal motto and inner conviction in her career choices. Having long focused on financial informatization, global ERP implementation, related-party transactions, and tax control, she deeply realized at the group's financial shared services center that overseas finance held new space for greater value growth. Consequently, she transitioned from an informatization designer and domestic shared services builder to a hands-on manager of overseas shared services, delving into accounting differences across countries and the substance of overseas business to address gaps in frontline global control execution, achieving dual proficiency in "top-level design + ground-level execution."
Wu Di firmly believes finance professionals should not be confined to accounts and statements but should become guardians of corporate globalization, promoters of digitalization, and participants in value creation. In a transnational state-owned enterprise like Cnooc Limited (ASX: CNOOC), finance must operate from the heights of national energy security and global strategy, fulfilling duties and creating value. After assuming the role of Deputy General Manager of the Overseas Branch, she has gradually transformed from a technical expert and builder into a composite financial manager in her daily management, quality and efficiency improvement, financial supervision, and risk prevention and control work.
Standing at this new starting point of overseas shared services, Wu Di and the Overseas Branch have clear and firm goals: to build a new ecosystem for overseas finance to global first-class standards. From domestic to global, from accounts to digital intelligence, from compliance to value, Wu Di continues her journey on the innovative path of overseas financial control with the posture of a practitioner and a navigator. She has proven through practice that Chinese finance professionals are fully capable and wise enough to navigate global financial systems, making China's voice heard and contributing China's solutions on the international stage. The new generation of finance professionals will continue to ride the winds and waves, expanding territories far and wide, while the IPA will strive to strengthen the bridge between China and the world, helping more domestic finance professionals broaden their international perspectives and step onto the global stage.
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