Amna Zaidi

FCA CMgr MCMI Founder & Managing Director, Ahqenza

Adviser. Investigator. Educator. Speaker.

Amna Zaidi has spent more than two decades working inside, alongside and around complex organisations.

Her career began in audit and developed through financial services, large-scale transformation, governance, regulation and senior leadership. Today, that experience comes together through Ahqenza, where she works with Boards and senior leaders on matters where judgement, independence and the quality of what happens next matter.

Amna Zaidi in a tan suit, arms folded, smiling

Amna Zaidi FCA CMgr MCMIFounder & Managing Director

What connects the different parts of her work is a question she has encountered repeatedly throughout her career:

What conditions are we creating, and what do those conditions make possible?

Because organisations do more than set strategies and structures.

They teach people what can be said.
What can be challenged.
Whose judgement will be trusted.
What happens when somebody raises the difficult issue.
And, ultimately, who gets the opportunity to succeed.

For Amna, governance, investigations, leadership development and difficult executive conversations are not separate worlds.

They are different ways of seeing the same organisation.

Work with Amna Explore Ahqenza

Amna Zaidi in a light trench coat at a panelled door, in black and white

Amna Zaidi working through figures at a desk, in black and white

A career shaped by evidence, complexity and consequence.

Amna was born and raised in London in a family where education was taken seriously.

She studied Business before qualifying as a Chartered Accountant. Her early career was spent in audit, including roles with BDO Stoy Hayward and Deloitte, before moving deeper into banking, finance and organisational transformation.

Audit taught her to follow evidence rather than assumption.

To ask what sits behind the headline, to distinguish confidence from proof, and to keep asking when the easy answer is not enough. Those lessons would later prove just as relevant in boardrooms, transformation programmes, investigations and leadership conversations.

There is a difference between examining a decision and having to make one.

Amna's career moved from audit into increasingly complex finance, technology, regulatory and transformation roles at Allied Irish Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Bank and NatWest.

Her work included the integration following the Lloyds and HBOS merger, major finance reporting and migration programmes at Deutsche Bank, and enterprise finance and risk transformation at NatWest. At NatWest, she partnered with senior executives on programmes exceeding £100 million, combining strategy, risk, governance, operating-model design and delivery.

She encountered senior responsibility early. In her twenties, she was already reporting into Board-level environments, which shaped an enduring interest in what enables capable people to step forward before they feel completely ready.

These were environments where decisions carried real consequences.

Large investments, regulatory obligations, complex technology, global teams, competing stakeholder interests, and pressure to decide before every uncertainty could be removed.

That experience changed Amna's understanding of leadership.

Technical expertise gets people a long way.

But eventually, senior leadership requires something harder.

Judgement.

How do you decide when the information is incomplete?
How do you challenge a prevailing view when everyone else appears confident?
How do you recognise a problem before it becomes undeniable?
How do you distinguish genuine alignment from silence?
And how do you create an environment in which people can tell you something you may not want to hear?

Those questions would eventually become central to Amna's work.

Because the hardest organisational problems rarely belong to one discipline.

What happens in the difficult moment is rarely created in that moment.

The issues that matter most rarely arrive neatly labelled.

A sensitive allegation may expose something broader about culture or accountability.
An Executive Team may appear to have a communication problem when the deeper issue is whether challenge is genuinely possible.
A Board may have all the information it needs and still benefit from someone independent asking a different question.

Ahqenza was created to bring those perspectives together.

Not as a collection of unrelated services, but as one connected body of expertise for Boards and senior leaders dealing with consequential organisational matters.

The principle behind it is simple:

The presenting issue is not always the whole issue.

And seeing the connections can change the quality of what happens next.

Four Chairs. One Perspective.

The four chairs are the roles Amna holds: adviser, investigator, educator and speaker.

The Adviser
The Investigator
The Educator
The Speaker

Amna Zaidi reviewing papers at a desk — The Investigator

Amna Zaidi presenting to a room of leaders — The Educator

Amna Zaidi on stage at the Oxford Leadership Conference in Dubai — The Speaker

The Adviser

Understanding what governance does when it has to work.

As an adviser, Amna works with Boards, Chairs, Committees and senior leaders on governance, effectiveness, organisational risk and consequential decisions.

She understands the difference between governance that looks robust on paper and governance that supports challenge and sound decisions when pressure rises.

Her regulatory work on the ICAEW Audit Registration Committee, contributing to oversight of audit quality, professional standards and regulatory assurance, reinforces that perspective.

For Amna, governance is ultimately less about architecture than behaviour.

What happens when somebody uses the governance structure to challenge something important? That is when its quality becomes visible.

The Investigator

Following evidence without deciding in advance where it should lead.

Independent investigations bring Amna back to some of the first professional disciplines she learned.

Follow the evidence.
Separate fact from assertion.
Test inconsistencies.
Do not begin with the answer.

But investigations involving people require something more: they involve memory, trust, power, fear, reputation and sometimes considerable personal consequence.

Amna's investigation work combines the discipline of an auditor with experience of leadership, governance and organisational dynamics. Through Resolve, Ahqenza’s independent investigations practice, she works on workplace and executive investigations where impartiality, credibility and defensible findings matter.

By the time an organisation commissions an investigation, people may already have learned a great deal about what it costs to tell the truth.

The Educator

Developing the people who will handle the next difficult moment.

Amna is less interested in teaching leadership as theory than in helping people prepare for situations in which theory alone would not be enough. Her executive education work spans leadership, governance, strategic decision-making, finance, transformation, negotiation and influence.

She teaches through Cranfield School of Management and University College London, including executive and MBA-level programmes.

For Amna, the real measure of leadership development is not whether somebody leaves a programme inspired.

It is whether their judgement holds when the answer is not straightforward.

The Speaker

Giving difficult questions a language.

Speaking allows Amna to take the same organisational questions into a different kind of room.

Her speaking has included the Oxford Leadership Conference in Dubai, alongside engagements in the UK and internationally on leadership, transformation, negotiation, culture and the realities of leading through uncertainty.

Her keynote work increasingly centres on who gets to succeed, the price of truth and how judgement holds under pressure.

Explore Keynotes & Speaking

Speaking is not separate from the rest of the practice.

The Adviser sees the decision.
The Investigator sees what happens when something breaks down.
The Educator works with those who will face the next difficult decision.
The Speaker gives those ideas a language that can travel more widely.

Four Chairs. One Perspective.

Staying close to standards, accountability and the public interest.

Amna is a Fellow Chartered Accountant and Chartered Manager, serves on the ICAEW Audit Registration Committee and is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

These appointments matter to Amna because they keep her work connected to something larger than commercial outcomes.

Professional standards, responsible judgement, public confidence, and the obligation to act with integrity when decisions carry consequences for others.

Unwinnable No More: the human route into the same ideas.

Amna's book, Unwinnable No More: Challenge the Rules. Rewrite the Win., was published in 2025. It explores many of the same questions that inform her advisory, education and speaking work, but from the perspective of the individual navigating an organisation from within.

Ahqenza asks:

What conditions is the organisation creating?

The book asks:

What does it feel like to navigate those conditions from inside them?

At its centre is an idea that also connects directly to Ahqenza:

Talent and effort matter. But nobody succeeds in a vacuum.

Organisations shape the conditions in which potential is recognised, developed and given room to succeed.

Watch the book trailer

Cover of Unwinnable No More by Amna Zaidi

Read the book

Unwinnable No More: Challenge the Rules. Rewrite the Win.

Buy on Amazon

Amna Zaidi holding flowers beside a guest presenting a copy of Unwinnable No More

Taking the conversation beyond Ahqenza.

Amna's ideas and career have been featured across business, leadership and professional publications, exploring leadership, transformation, inclusion and who gets to succeed.

Credentials & Appointments

Fellow Chartered Accountant, FCA
Chartered Manager, CMgr MCMI
Member, ICAEW Audit Registration Committee
Liveryman, Worshipful Company of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales
Associate Lecturer, Cranfield School of Management
Executive and MBA Programme Contributor, University College London
Member, International Association of Facilitators
Author, Unwinnable No More
Listening Volunteer, Samaritans

What difficult moments reveal.

Amna has spent her career around consequential decisions: auditing them, making them, examining what happens when things go wrong and helping others prepare for the decisions still to come.

Difficult moments rarely create the organisation. They reveal it.

They reveal whether challenge is genuine, whether bad news can travel upwards, whose judgement is trusted and who is given room to succeed.

Work with Amna

If a version of these questions is live in your organisation, you do not need to arrive with a fully defined brief.

Discuss your situation Explore Ahqenza's services