The Dratech Financial Innovation Excellence Award is not a popularity contest. It sits at the intersection of technical depth, governance, and the kind of discipline that keeps financial systems honest. Within the 2024 recognition cycle, that intersection led the judges to Ms Ngozi Joan Isibor, selected from ten nominees and ranked among the top three recognised winners after a rigorous review of her record in audit, financial reporting, and internal controls.
The category exists for a reason. As capital moves across borders and regulators tighten expectations, organisations need more than clean numbers. They need auditors who understand how systems behave, how controls fail, and how financial reports can either clarify reality or obscure it. The Financial Innovation Excellence Award recognises professionals who do more than complete checklists. It highlights those who strengthen financial governance, improve audit quality, and help organisations adapt to increasingly complex standards.
In this context, Ngozi’s work is a clear fit. Her career has been shaped inside demanding environments in Nigeria and the United States, working across private equity, investment management, and multinational entities. Her portfolio is not built on a single sector or geography; it is built on repeated exposure to varied risk profiles, regulatory frameworks, and business models. The result is a profile that aligns directly with what this category is meant to reward: precision in financial reporting, depth in internal controls, and a mindset that treats audit as a living system that can be improved, not just monitored.
Ngozi did not wander into audit by accident. Her foundation in accounting from the University of Benin established the basics: how transactions are recorded, how financial statements are reported, and where governance begins to break down when controls are weak. These grounding shaped her early years, where the day-to-day work involved documentation of procedures, testing internal controls, analysing financial data, and drafting practical recommendations to strengthen client operations. Those early assignments mattered. They exposed her to the core questions every auditor must answer: What could go wrong in this process? Where are the gaps between policy and practice? How do you translate technical findings into clear feedback that a management team can act on?
Her initial role as an Audit Associate at Deloitte in Nigeria placed her inside engagements with multinational entities, measured against International Standards on Auditing (ISA) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). She worked on analytical reviews to spot outliers, assessed risk areas, and supported management by identifying control weaknesses and suggesting responses that improved both risk management and business processes.
From the beginning, the work combined detail orientation with communication. It was not enough to identify a gap. The value came from being able to explain why that gap mattered, what it implied for financial reporting, and how it could be addressed without disrupting the core of the business.
From Local Engagements To Regional Leadership
As her responsibilities grew, the scope of her work expanded beyond individual engagements. Progressing into Audit Senior roles within Deloitte, she began to manage audit projects and lead teams delivering assurance for both listed and unlisted entities in the financial services industry.
Several elements stand out from this phase of her career: First, she was no longer only executing procedures; she was coordinating full audit cycles. That meant planning, defining approaches, managing timelines, and ensuring that engagements stayed aligned with both professional standards and client expectations.
Second, her work started to mirror the regional nature of modern capital. She managed relationships with component audit teams across Africa, coordinated inputs from specialists in areas such as IT and tax, and helped align local audits with group reporting requirements.
Third, internal controls moved from being one task on a checklist to a core area of expertise. She collaborated with management teams to evaluate control design, test implementation, and assess operating effectiveness. Findings were communicated to boards and audit committees, not as abstract control deficiencies, but as concrete governance issues that needed to be addressed to protect financial integrity.
This combination of technical competence, project leadership, and cross-border coordination laid the groundwork for what would follow. It demonstrated that she could hold the full picture in view, even as individual teams focused on their specific pieces of the audit.
Crossing Borders: Audit In The Private Equity Environment
The next chapter of her career took place in the United States, within Deloitte’s private equity audit practice, with exposure to offices in New York and Dallas. There, the complexity of the work shifted again. Engagements were executed under both US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), often for entities with intricate structures, investment portfolios, and international footprints.
In this environment, she contributed to:
- Financial valuation reviews, using methods such as discounted cash flow, trading comparables, and precedent transactions.
- Audit procedures related to mergers and acquisitions, where reliable financial information feeds directly into board decision making and deal structuring.
- The review of SEC filings, including Forms 10-K and 10-Q, with attention to company metrics, industry benchmarks, and disclosure quality.
- Sarbanes- Oxley (SOX) audits, where the severity of control deficiencies had to be assessed and communicated clearly to those charged with governance.
This work is technical, but the implications are clear. In private equity and capital markets, mis-stated valuations or weak disclosure can skew investment decisions, create regulatory exposure, and erode investor confidence. Her ability to work across multiple standards, interpret valuations, and participate in transaction-related work positioned her as more than a routine financial statement auditor. It positioned her as a professional who understands how numbers interact with strategy and regulation.
This is part of what the award committee recognised: demonstrated expertise in audit across multiple regions, and across both traditional assurance and transaction-related assignments. It is one thing to audit a static business model in a familiar regulatory environment. It is something else to work on entities that operate across jurisdictions, under different accounting frameworks, and within investment structures that constantly evolve.
Internal Controls And Financial Governance As A Core Discipline
One of the consistent threads across Ngozi’s career has been her focus on internal controls and financial governance. In both Nigeria and the United States, she has worked with internal audit teams to identify risks, map controls, and design audit approaches that reflect actual exposure rather than theoretical frameworks.
Her assignments have involved evaluating control environments for compliance with SOX in the United States, assessing the severity of control deficiencies, and communicating those findings to senior stakeholders. In parallel, she has engaged with management to improve control design and strengthen reporting processes.
This is where the “Financial Innovation” component of her award starts to become tangible. Innovation in this space rarely looks like a new app or a headline product. It often looks like a more disciplined control environment, a sharper linkage between risk and reporting, and training that makes entire teams more capable.
Her work on SOX and other complex compliance frameworks shows a willingness to operate inside demanding structures, not just around them. It reflects an understanding that regulations are not only obligations; they are also tools that shape how organisations document, monitor, and report their financial reality.
Raising The Bar On Audit Quality
The award committee also highlighted her contribution to audit quality improvement. That contribution is not theoretical. As a member of Deloitte’s Audit Learning Team, she helped develop and implement the audit training programs, which were designed to strengthen audit quality across the firm. She also facilitated firmwide and team-level training, and served as a subject matter expert on internal controls and group audits in line with International Standards on Auditing.
This is a crucial part of the story. Audit quality is not secured solely by standards; it is heavily influenced by how well practitioners understand those standards and apply them under pressure. By investing her time in structured training, she has helped raise the baseline competence of audit teams, particularly in technical areas such as group reporting and internal control evaluation.
From Dratech’s perspective, this kind of contribution is exactly what a Financial Innovation Excellence Award should recognise. It is not only about individual performance on engagements. It is about the multiplier effect that comes from building capability in others, refining methodologies, and shaping the way firms execute audit work at scale.
Her ability to supervise diverse teams, manage multiple engagements, and mentor younger professionals aligns with this theme. The capacity to run complex projects while still investing in staff development is increasingly important in environments where audit firms face talent constraints and rising expectations from regulators and investors.
Professional Growth As Strategic Positioning
Alongside her practical experience, Ngozi continues to invest in her own development. She is pursuing a Master of Business Administration with the University of Fairfax in Virginia and has aced the CPA exams. These details are not merely credentials for a profile. They indicate a deliberate strategy to deepen both the technical and managerial sides of her career. An MBA introduces broader exposure to business strategy, leadership, and operations, which complements the discipline of audit work. The CPA path reinforces her technical credibility in markets where that designation carries significant weight with regulators, boards, and investors.
In combination, these steps show an awareness that the future of financial governance requires professionals who can navigate both the boardroom and the audit room, who can read financial statements and also understand the strategic decisions behind them.
Why Her Work Matters For Modern Financial Oversight
The broader question is simple: what does all this add up to for organisations that rely on sound financial reporting?
First, her international audit experience brings perspective. Having worked across Africa and the United States, covering Public and private entities, and several multinational structures, she is familiar with how different jurisdictions interpret risk and reporting. That familiarity helps her identify inconsistencies, challenge assumptions, and contextualise findings within global best practice.
Second, her depth in internal controls strengthens oversight. Organisations increasingly operate with complex systems, multiple data sources, and distributed teams. Weak controls in such environments can lead to misstatements, fraud exposure, and breakdowns in decision making. By focusing on control design and effectiveness, she helps boards and management teams understand where they are genuinely protected and where the gaps lie.
Third, her involvement in training and capability building has a scaling effect. Every staff member who leaves a training session with a clearer understanding of group audits, internal controls, or valuation issues is more likely to execute higher quality work on future engagements. That, in turn, feeds back into better financial reporting for multiple clients, not just one.
Taken together, these elements align closely with what modern financial oversight requires: accurate reporting, credible controls, and audit processes that are constantly learning and improving. The judges for the Dratech Financial Innovation Excellence Award 2024 recognised that alignment in her profile.
Aligning With The Award’s Criteria
The specific reasons for her selection can be summarised across three pillars:
- Demonstrated expertise in audit across multiple regions
She has delivered audit engagements in Nigeria and the United States, covering private equity, investment management, and multinational entities. This breadth of experience confirms her ability to navigate different regulatory frameworks, accounting standards, and market expectations without losing rigour. - Strong leadership in internal controls and financial reporting
Her work in internal controls evaluation, and regulatory filing reviews shows that she engages directly with the mechanisms that protect financial integrity. These are not peripheral tasks. They sit at the heart of financial governance. - Contribution to audit quality improvement
Through her role in developing audit training programs and facilitating firmwide learning initiatives, she has contributed to the systematic improvement of audit practice at scale. This focus on quality and capability building reflects a forward-looking approach to the profession.
All three pillars are visible in her track record. All three align with the criteria for Financial Innovation Excellence. The award is, in effect, a formal recognition of patterns that have been evident in her work for years.
The Dratech International Conference has positioned itself as a platform that does more than recognise high performers. It also identifies signals about where key sectors are heading. In the case of financial governance, transparency, and audit, the selection of Ms Ngozi Joan Isibor as one of the top three winners in the 2024 Financial Innovation Excellence category sends a clear message.
It suggests that the professionals shaping the future of audit will not be those who treat standards as static rules. They will be those who understand different markets, who invest in controls and training, and who are comfortable operating where regulation, valuation, and strategic transactions meet.
Her trajectory, from early audit work in Nigeria to complex private equity engagements in the United States, supported by continued professional development and a focus on training others, fits that profile. It illustrates what it looks like when financial reporting, robust internal controls, and audit innovation reinforce each other rather than operate in isolation.
For Dratech, her recognition is consistent with the platform’s broader mandate to spotlight individuals whose work quietly shapes systems that many people rely on but rarely see. For the audit profession, it is an example of how cross-border experience and a commitment to quality can translate into concrete recognition.
As the 2024 conference cycle concludes, the award situates her among a small group of professionals whose work is helping organisations navigate financial complexity with greater discipline and clarity. It also sets a reference point for future nominees. Strong technical skills will remain important. However, the bar will increasingly include the ability to lead, to improve systems, and to translate complex regulatory and valuation issues into reliable reporting.
In that sense, Ms Ngozi Joan Isibor’s Dratech Financial Innovation Excellence Award is both a recognition of past performance and a marker of the direction financial governance is moving across Africa and beyond.
