Shabnam Karim - Bloomsbury Institute London

Having qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Deloitte in South Africa in 2005, Shabnam moved to Deloitte’s London division and took on the role of Assistant Manager. During her time with Deloitte, Shabnam held a wide-ranging client portfolio including listed multinational corporations auditing their group consolidations, annual reports and press releases to smaller and medium-sized entities.

Shabnam left Deloitte and continued her career in other audit firms in the City of London. After having her first child she was offered a role with ACCA in their professional conduct department. She was the first Accountant to take on this role in an otherwise solicitor-dominated division, however, her contributions to the team led to more Accountants being recruited for this position.

In 2011 she joined Fitch Learning as Group Financial Accountant, managing a finance team of 4 and consolidating operations in the UK, US and Singapore.

Following a conscious career break to care for her young family, Shabnam re-entered employment in 2018 and joined Bloomsbury Institute as Data Controller in the February of that year. She then took on the role of Financial Controller in May 2018, and Chief Financial Officer in 2021, a post she still holds while also being Chief Operations Officer.

Interests

Shabnam is passionate about education and believes that this starts right in the early years of a child’s life. She supports her local community, as Chair of the Finance Committee at a children’s nursery. During maternity leave, Shabnam volunteered for and pioneered a literacy programme run by the National Literacy Trust at the nursery – the successful roll-out led to borough-wide funding being put in place for the programme to be run.

Nelson Mandela once said: Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. Shabnam is proud to be part of Bloomsbury Institute and especially of the widening participation initiatives that the institute is passionate about.