The Focus on Corporate Finance 2025
Registering for The Focus on Corporate Finance at CPD Fest 2025 couldn’t be more straightforward. We have three packages for you to choose from – 8 hours, 16 hours and 24 hours of CPD – allowing you to customise the event to your own specific needs. Once purchased, pick ‘n’ mix the topics of most interest and relevance to you from any of the sessions running across the week of CPD Fest 2025.
CPD Fest Packages:
The 12 Gifts Of CPD Fest
Over the coming weeks we are going to give you advance access to hugely valuable extracts from the note packs The CPD Fest & The Essential Advisors’ Mix.
With The 12 Gifts of CPD Fest you will get guides, financial statements, checklists, tools, tax papers, letters of engagement and reports all the way up to and including the kitchen sink!
Registration for The 12 Gifts Of CPD Fest is free, quick and straight forward and you can do so here:
Event Details:
Session 1: Financial Markets - Is This Bull Market Sustainable or Is It a Bubble Just Waiting To Burst?
Time: 09:00 – 10:40
Speaker: Cormac Lucey – Finance Lecturer & Economics Columnist
Financial markets have seldom been so expensively valued. But, below the surface, there is a division between hyper-elevated stocks that are exposed to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) theme and the rest of the market. Are we in a bubble? And, if we are, when might it burst?
What will be covered
- The bubble in AI stocks
- The spillover of the bubble to the broad equity market
- Trying to guesstimate when the bubble will top
- Investment implications
At the end of the session participants will have been brought up to date on global financial markets, on whether AI stocks are in a bubble and what to look for as signs that that bubble might be bursting.
The session is targeted at corporate board directors, at chief financial officers and at those who advise them on corporate financial management.
Course level: Advanced
Session 2: The Most Important Lessons You Can Learn From Corporate Finance
Time: 11:00 – 12:40
Speaker: Cormac Lucey – Finance Lecturer & Economics Columnist
Corporate finance can often be surrounded with a mystique. But its basics are simple. And they’re wholly concerned with maximising firm value. What are the most important lessons we can learn from corporate finance to help up maximise firm value?
What will be covered
- What is shareholder value?
- How do we measure shareholder value?
- How do we boost shareholder value?
- The central role of ROIC
- Financial management
- Corporate investing
- Management of capital structure
- Mergers, acquisitions and disposals
At the end of the session participants will fully understand the concepts underpinning shareholder value and the key techniques by which it can be increased.
The session is targeted at corporate board directors, at chief financial officers and at those who advise them on corporate financial management.
Course level: Advanced
Session 3: Built to Sell: Helping Clients Maximise their Enterprise Value and Create Profitable, Saleable Businesses
Time: 13:40 – 15:20
Speaker: Des O’Neill – Connext Partners
Accountants and advisors are uniquely placed to help clients unlock hidden value and build truly sale-ready businesses. In this practical 100-minute session, Des O’Neill introduces the Built to Sell framework and the Value Optimiser Audit, showing how to transform trading businesses into profitable, scalable, and saleable assets. You’ll discover the key drivers of enterprise value, how to build self-managing teams, and how to position your firm as the trusted advisor in value creation and exit planning — helping clients grow, thrive, and achieve maximum return on exit.
In an era of increased competition, margin pressure, and succession challenges, accountants and advisors are uniquely positioned to help clients create enterprise value and build businesses that are truly Built to Sell. This session shows how to transform trading businesses into profitable, scalable, and saleable assets — unlocking lasting value for clients and deeper advisory opportunities for your firm.
Des O’Neill will cover the following topics during this webinar:
- The 6-Step Built to Sell framework adapted for client-facing advisory work.
- How to identify and amplify the key drivers of enterprise value in trading businesses.
- Introducing the Value Optimiser Audit – a practical diagnostic tool to assess sale readiness.
- Developing scalable products, pricing, and profit models that attract premium valuations.
- Building self-managing teams and systems that reduce dependency on owners.
- Positioning yourself as a trusted advisor in value creation and business transformation.
- Creating a roadmap that helps clients prepare strategically for exit while growing profitably.
By attending this session, you will:
- Understand the levers that create and protect enterprise value in trading businesses.
- Learn how to guide clients to develop sale-ready, self-managing business models.
- Discover how to use the Value Optimiser Audit to benchmark, advise, and add measurable value.
- Strengthen your advisory positioning by helping clients achieve scalable and sustainable growth.
Session 4: Global Fragmentation and Ireland: Threats and Opportunities
Time: 15:40 – 17:20
Speaker: Constantin Gurdgiev – Associate Professor of Finance
As the global economy accelerates its shift from the 1970s-2000s paradigm of globalization, Ireland finds itself at the economic policies crossroads, with its feet firmly stuck in the old world of outsourcing, corporate offshoring, and cross-border tax competition. The new, although still emerging geopolitical and geoeconomic world order, framed by the Great Powers Competition (US vs China+, G7+ vs BRICS), presents major threats and offers many opportunities for small open economies, like Ireland. However, to capture these, Dublin will need to dramatically reorient its domestic and international economic development policies, including the overarching architecture of its taxation policies and longer-term fiscal spending priorities. The accounting profession in Ireland has a major role to play in: leading the restructuring the policy priorities, helping design new tax and economic policy architecture, and providing corporate and small business clients with timely advice on future tax strategies.
Constantin Gurdgiev will cover the following topics during this webinar:
- The key principles guiding tax policy and tax-aligned economic incentives: the entrepreneurial tax policy supporting formation of new high value-added enterprises, and the extractive tax policy sustaining the current status quo ante of using domestic tax system for achieving redistributive justice.
- Application of these principles to Irish economic development case.
- Positioning of these principles in international (cross border trading and investment) context;
- How the aspects of Irish domestic economic development prioritization can help mitigate challenges presented by the Great Powers Competition to Irish MNCs-tilted economic development model; and
- What opportunities specific policy dimensions of the new tax policy architecture can present to Irish investors, entrepreneurs, businesses and their advisers.
By attending this session you will be exposed to some of the core principles behind macroeconomic thinking about fiscal policies; contextualized to these principles to concrete policy ideas; and lay foundations for future engagements with policymakers and business clients in addressing the key challenges faced by the Irish economy into the next decade.
This session will be primarily targeted to: business advisers, tax advisers, investors and business owners.
Course Level: Intermediate
CPD Course Speakers
Cormac Lucey – Finance Lecturer & Economics Columnist
Cormac Lucey teaches finance, at post-graduate level, at the IMI, UCD, TCD and Chartered Accountants Ireland.
He is also a commentator on economic and current affairs both on broadcast media and through his weekly columns with The Sunday Times (Irish edition) and The Times (Ireland).
And he is chairman of the Hibernia Forum, an independent think-tank which promotes the free market, individual liberty and responsible and prudent government.
He served as a special adviser to Michael McDowell when he was Tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) between 2002 and 2007. Cormac previously worked both in industry and in corporate finance in both Ireland in Germany.
Des O'Neill - Connext Partners
Having worked for a number of years in practice, and with one of the profession’s regulatory and support institutes, Des co-founded OmniPro to develop tools, techniques, products and services that make accountancy more profitable and rewarding.
Des is passionate about bringing innovation to the accountancy profession and enabling accountants to achieve what they want from their careers and business. His core belief is that when empowered to achieve their best, accountants can deliver transformative results for clients.
He holds qualifications from the ACCA Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, CPA Institute of Certified Public Accountants and ACIS Association of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators.
Constantin Gurdgiev - Associate Professor of Finance
Constantin Gurdgiev is the Associate Professor of Finance with Monfort College of Business, University of Northern Colorado (USA), Visiting Assistant Professor at the Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, and principal at the Macroview.eu – a service specializing in geopolitical and geoeconomics risks and uncertainty advisory. Professor Gurdgiev serves as a Co-founder and Chairperson of the Board at the Irish Mortgage Holders Organization https://www.mortgageholders.ie/, and a Co-founder, Board Member and Member of the Risk and Audit Committee at iCare Housing https://icarehousing.ie/. In his spare time, Constantin is an avid fly fisherman, mountaineer and forager across the great outdoors of the Western United States, Dolomites and Alps.
Conor Grimes - Connext Partners
Conor is a Fellow of Chartered Accountants Ireland and has several years of experience working in corporate finance roles with international professional service firms. Separately, he has also worked in Head of Finance roles in industry and as such is uniquely placed in understanding client’s needs and advising them through a transaction process.
Outside of Connext Partners, Conor is a Non-Executive Director and chair of the finance committee of Tuath, one of Ireland’s largest Approved Housing Bodies.
Dara Kelly - Grant Thornton
Dara joined Grant Thornton in 2005 as part of the advisory team. He has extensive experience in advisory services, and was admitted to the Partnership in 2016.
From 2013 to 2016, Dara was based in New York where he led the Grant Thornton . The role involved assisting US corporations execute development strategies into European markets. During his three years in New York, Dara also worked closely with the US transaction services team on significant buy side transactions for large private equity clients and investment banks.
On his return to Ireland, Dara took up the lead of the Irish firm’s China/Hong Kong Business Group.
Prior to 2013, Dara worked in the Irish advisory team where he gained valuable experience working on a number of complex corporate finance assignments including MBO’s, bank financing/re-financing, valuations and fund raisings.
His main area of expertise is in corporate finance, transaction services and corporate restructuring and he has extensive experience in providing strategic advice to leading Irish corporates and financial institutions.
Dara’s skill set also incorporates experience from the provision of International Business Reviews, strategic option papers and exit strategies to both accelerated and controlled mergers and acquisitions, obtaining maximum value for his clients.
The Focus on Corporate Finance 2025 is brought to you in association with:
