HAVING broken the glass ceiling and being part of KPMG’s growth for 30 years, Bina Mehta knows the professional services industry inside out.
As the chair of KPMG UK - the first woman to hold the role in the company’s 150-year history - she ensures its board fulfils its responsibilities to set the tone from the top, oversee strategy and hold leadership to account.
Since the early years of her career, Mehta has had an amazing association with the global firm, working in the UK, India, the US and Canada. The inspirational business leader spent more than 20 years focused on corporate mergers and acquisitions and restructuring.
Mehta, who now lives in southwest London, has led KPMG’s focus on the trade and investment agenda, supporting clients to access finance and grow their international presence.
Born to parents who arrived in Britain in the 1960s, she studied at Bayes Business School, obtaining the University of London’s BSc degree. Being qualified in 1993, she took up a summer job in a local accountancy firm. After she joined KPMG, she was sent to India with two others to set up its operations in the country of her origin. She later returned to the UK where she focussed on corporate finance. In 1999, she moved to Boston to scale the company’s American operation.
Following her return to the UK in 2002, she became part of the restructuring team, acting for private equity houses, lenders and corporate clients. Mehta later went to Canada in 2008 where worked with entrepreneurs.
Back in the UK again by 2011, she led the firm’s global transactions and restructuring team and went on to work her way to her current position.
Mehta draws her inspiration from strong family values and considers her mother as her role “She is an inspiration and role model and makes me proud of my Indian connection. My mother’s qualities are her kindness; determination and resilience that she showed when she was a young newly-married person who arrived in a foreign country,” Mehta told Times of India.
Mehta is a passionate believer that greater diversity improves business performance.
“Today, the firm has the most diverse board in its history with 60 per cent being women and 30 per cent being from an ethnic minority background,” she said at the time of her appointment in KPMG.
"Diversity brings fresh thinking and different perspectives to decision-making, which in turn delivers better outcomes for our clients," she told BBC News.
Awards and accolades have chased the successful executive who is fluent in Gujarati and who is married with two children.
In 2022, she was recognised with an MBE in the New Year’s Honours list for services to trade and investment in Britain and for supporting women entrepreneurs.
Mehta was recognised as Champion of the Year at the UK Social Mobility Awards last year. At the GG2 Leadership & Diversity Awards in 2022, she also won the Hammer Award, given to an individual who has broken through the glass ceiling.
She is vocal about the power of collective action to drive positive change across government, business, and community.
She advocates sustainable growth and equality, recognising the role of an inclusive organisational culture to achieve the goal. Under her leadership, KPMG has become the first organisation to publish socio-economic background pay gaps and targets.
She has also been involved in the Change the Race Ratio initiative of Lord Karan Bilimoria. The programme is now backed by over 100 business signatories from across the UK and seeks to accelerate racial and ethnic diversity at executive board level.
She represents the industry on the Strategic Trade Advisory Group and sits on the Professional Services Trade Advisory Group.
Mehta, who takes pride in her working-class background, has been a driving force in setting a target in KPMG to recruit more working-class staff, which aims for 29% of its partners and directors to come from working-class backgrounds by 2030.
Mehta is a council member of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and part of the Professional Business Services Council. She heads the KPMG Foundation, which is an independent charity dedicated to improving the lives of some of the UK's most vulnerable children.
When KPMG came across legacy issues, Mehta showed her resolute commitment to dealing with them.
“I love our firm and we should all be looking to leave it in a much better, stronger place than we came into it,” she told The Times, adding, “after 30 years here, I feel it’s our responsibility to do that.”
Female representation as well as diversity and inclusion is close to her heart.
“It has made me determined to champion the benefits diversity brings to the workplace and highlight the vital role mentors play,” she told AccountancyAge.
“I was one of a handful of professional women in my team and the only member from a minority ethnic background. I climbed the ranks alongside my peers but as I progressed further there were fewer role models I could personally identify with and the journey felt notably different. That prompted me to question why I had become the anomaly.
“Businesses today are more aware of and accountable for the structural and cultural barriers that women and people of all minorities face,” Mehta said.
