Competency Framework
The CBA Competency Framework
CBA certifies at three levels. Each is defined by the evidence collected before a credential is awarded — what was examined, what was applied, and what was confirmed — and the level is stated on the certificate and in the public register.
- Levels
- 3
- Disciplines
- 13
- Fields
- 4
- Validity
- 3years, then renewal
The three levels
A level is not a rank of seniority. It states what CBA collected before it awarded the credential.
Each level includes everything the level below it requires.
Level 1
Certificate
Defined in the framework; no discipline is currently certified at this level.
- Assessed by
- A written examination against the published blueprint of the discipline.
- Evidences
- Knowledge of the discipline as defined by its domains and learning objectives, at the date of the examination.
- Applied skill and professional experience are not assessed at this level.
Level 2
Practitioner
9 disciplines are certified at this level.
- Assessed by
- The examination, and assessed applied work: workbooks completed on realistic material and marked against a defined tolerance.
- Evidences
- That the holder can carry out the core tasks of the discipline, not only describe them.
- Professional experience and seniority are not assessed at this level.
Requirements at this level
- Pass the examination at the cut score set by a documented standard-setting panel
- Pass 4 assessed workbooks
Level 3
Professional
4 disciplines are certified at this level.
- Assessed by
- The examination, assessed applied work, and professional experience in the discipline confirmed by a named referee, with a signed undertaking to the Code of Professional Conduct.
- Evidences
- That the holder is a practising professional who has demonstrated knowledge, application and experience.
- Performance in a particular role or organisation is not assessed at any level.
Requirements at this level
- Pass the examination at the cut score set by a documented standard-setting panel
- Pass 6 assessed workbooks
- 3 years’ professional experience in the discipline, or 2 with a relevant degree
- Experience confirmed by a named referee
- Signed undertaking to the Code of Professional Conduct
How the framework holds
The level is a consequence of the evidence
A discipline is certified at a level only where the requirements of that level are set for it.
A credential is issued at a level only when every piece of evidence that level requires has been collected for that candidate.
The level and the scheme version are recorded on the credential at issue and shown in the public register. They do not change afterwards.
A credential is valid for three years and is renewed against evidenced professional development.
Competences by discipline
What a holder of each credential has demonstrated at award. Each statement is assessed through the discipline’s domains and, at Practitioner level and above, through its assessed workbooks.
Finance
CBA-FMAFinancial Modelling & Analysis with AIProfessional
- Design spreadsheet models with a clear separation of inputs, calculations and outputs, consistent conventions and built-in integrity checks
- Construct a fully linked three-statement model in which the balance sheet balances because the logic is right, not because a plug forces it
- Build driver-based forecasts and test them with sensitivity analysis, scenario structures and sanity checks against history and external benchmarks
- Value a business using discounted cash flow and market multiples, and defend the assumptions behind discount rates, terminal value and comparables
- Direct an AI assistant to draft, extend and document model components, then verify the output through structured checks before relying on it
- Use AI as an audit and stress-testing partner on existing models while recognising hallucination, context loss and confidentiality risks
- Communicate model results, limitations and key sensitivities to decision-makers in clear, honest terms
- Domains and objectives
CBA-FPAFP&A ProfessionalPractitioner
- Design and run an annual budget cycle, from target setting and submission templates through consolidation, challenge and board approval.
- Build and maintain rolling forecasts that update systematically for actuals, run-rates and known future events.
- Construct driver-based planning models in spreadsheets that link operational drivers to revenue, cost, cash and headcount outcomes.
- Decompose variances into price, volume, mix, rate, efficiency and one-off effects, and separate controllable from uncontrollable causes.
- Produce management reporting packs and KPI frameworks that focus leadership attention on decisions rather than data.
- Operate as a finance business partner: framing trade-offs, supporting investment cases and communicating financial insight to non-finance stakeholders.
- Apply disciplined, verifiable workflows when using spreadsheets and AI assistants for analysis, commentary and forecast review.
- Domains and objectives
Accounting
CBA-CAMAccounting ManagerPractitioner
- Plan, run and progressively compress a month-end and year-end close using a documented close calendar, task ownership and quality gates.
- Design and evaluate internal controls, including segregation of duties in small teams, and respond appropriately when a control fails.
- Allocate work, build review hierarchies and manage capacity, performance and development across an accounting team, including remote and outsourced staff.
- Construct management reporting packs and variance commentary that give leadership decision-ready information on time.
- Run a structured selection and implementation process for accounting systems, integrations and automation, including sensible use of AI assistance.
- Measure the health of an accounting function with metrics such as close duration, error rates, reconciliation ageing and rework, and lead improvement cycles.
- Domains and objectives
CBA-IFRSIFRS SpecialistProfessional
- Apply the conceptual framework's definitions, recognition criteria and measurement bases to classify transactions and select accounting policies
- Recognise revenue from customer contracts using the five-step model, including variable consideration, allocation and over-time versus point-in-time decisions
- Account for leases as lessee and lessor, building right-of-use asset and lease liability schedules in a spreadsheet from contract terms
- Classify and measure common financial assets and liabilities, apply the effective interest method and explain the expected credit loss approach
- Prepare basic consolidated figures for a parent and subsidiary, including goodwill, non-controlling interests and intragroup eliminations
- Present financial statements and select disclosures that satisfy the core requirements users and regulators scrutinise most
- Exercise and document the judgements and estimates that IFRS reporting demands, distinguishing policy choices from estimation uncertainty
- Domains and objectives
Management
CBA-AIMAI-Driven Management ProfessionalPractitioner
- Explain in plain terms how current AI systems produce output, and distinguish tasks where they are reliable from tasks where they predictably fail
- Evaluate candidate AI use cases against value, feasibility, data availability and risk, and scope a bounded pilot with measurable success criteria
- Lead a team through AI adoption, including expectation setting, skill building, resistance handling and communication with senior stakeholders
- Redesign team workflows so that AI-assisted output passes through appropriate human review, with clear ownership of quality and errors
- Apply manager-level governance to AI use, including data protection judgement, acceptable-use rules, disclosure decisions and escalation of high-risk situations
- Interpret simple adoption and benefit metrics in a spreadsheet and decide whether to expand, adjust or stop an AI initiative
- Domains and objectives
CBA-COMOperations ManagerPractitioner
- Map, analyse and redesign operational processes using flowcharts, swimlane diagrams and value stream thinking, and justify design choices against cost, speed, quality and flexibility trade-offs.
- Calculate and interpret core operations metrics including takt time, cycle time, throughput, utilisation, efficiency and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and apply Little's Law to relate work in progress, throughput and lead time.
- Plan capacity against forecast demand, select appropriate strategies for smoothing, chasing or managing demand, and size buffers, queues and staffing levels for realistic service targets.
- Manage quality using prevention-based thinking, cost of quality analysis, root cause tools and basic statistical process control, and distinguish common cause from special cause variation before acting.
- Apply lean fundamentals, including the classic wastes, 5S, standard work, pull systems and kaizen, to deliver measurable improvement without damaging service or team morale.
- Design KPI structures that connect strategic goals to frontline measures, avoid common measurement distortions, and present performance data honestly using spreadsheets and simple visualisations.
- Lead operational teams and small change projects, including workload planning, performance conversations, stakeholder engagement, risk management and embedding new ways of working.
- Domains and objectives
CBA-CPMProcurement & Supply ManagerPractitioner
- Analyse organisational spend and supply markets to segment categories and select an appropriate sourcing strategy for each.
- Plan and run a structured tender, from specification and evaluation criteria through to a defensible award decision.
- Draft, interpret and manage the commercial core of supply contracts, including service levels, KPIs, remedies and exit provisions.
- Prepare for and conduct principled commercial negotiations using positions, interests, concessions and total cost analysis.
- Apply core inventory and logistics techniques, including reorder point, economic order quantity, ABC classification and Incoterms 2020 basics.
- Identify and respond to ethical breaches, conflicts of interest and sustainability risks across the procurement cycle.
- Build working procurement tools in Excel or Google Sheets, including spend cubes, weighted scoring matrices, TCO models and supplier scorecards.
- Domains and objectives
CBA-CRPCompliance & Risk ProfessionalProfessional
- Design and populate a compliance risk assessment, scoring likelihood and impact and prioritising risks against a stated risk appetite
- Draft the core elements of a compliance programme: governance structure, policy framework, controls and training aligned to identified risks
- Explain the purpose and typical mechanics of anti-money-laundering and data-protection regimes at a conceptual, jurisdiction-neutral level
- Plan and execute monitoring and testing activity, interpret the results and distinguish control weaknesses from isolated errors
- Triage reports of suspected misconduct and apply sound practice in the opening stages of an internal investigation
- Build management reporting on compliance performance using accessible tools such as Excel or Google Sheets
- Assess the health of an organisation's compliance culture and select realistic interventions to strengthen it
- Domains and objectives
CBA-DMPDigital Marketing ProfessionalPractitioner
- Plan campaigns from a business goal, setting outcome measures, a channel mix and a seasonal budget grounded in lifetime value, acquisition cost and contribution.
- Brief and approve content across languages, including AI-assisted work, so that meaning survives adaptation, copy decks are complete and consistent, and claims, rights and disclosures are cleared before release.
- Build search activity across languages, organic and paid, that matches intent, cuts wasted spend and holds visibility where results pages answer the query directly.
- Run paid and organic social, creator and messaging activity that gives automated campaigns sound inputs, selects creators on audience evidence, handles public comments and turns conversations into orders.
- Design consent-based email, SMS and messaging lifecycle programmes, keep suppression lists current, and raise conversion through funnel diagnosis and lead thresholds matched to sales capacity.
- Measure and test marketing results under consent limits, separating what rule-based and algorithmic attribution report from what spending caused, and choose among attribution, experiments and marketing mix models.
- Apply consent, suppression, disclosure and claim-substantiation rules, as stated for the market concerned, across campaigns, content, audience lists and measurement.
- Domains and objectives
Technology
CBA-AIGAI Governance ProfessionalProfessional
- Classify AI systems and use cases by risk level using criteria drawn from the EU AI Act and comparable regulatory regimes, and assign provider and deployer responsibilities correctly
- Apply the core structures of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001 to design an organisational AI governance programme at a conceptual level
- Produce and evaluate AI governance documentation, including AI inventories, use-case risk registers, model cards, data sheets and transparency notices
- Interpret the purpose, methods and limits of bias, fairness and robustness testing, and select appropriate metrics and review checkpoints for a given deployment
- Design AI incident handling, escalation and post-incident review routines, and allocate governance roles across boards, committees and operational teams
- Evaluate third-party and procured AI systems using contractual, documentation and assurance evidence available to a deploying organisation
- Domains and objectives
CBA-AIPArtificial Intelligence ProfessionalPractitioner
- Explain how the main families of machine learning and deep learning models learn from data and select an appropriate approach for a given business problem.
- Specify, assess and prepare the data an AI project needs, including labelling, splitting, feature treatment and data quality controls.
- Interpret model evaluation outputs such as confusion matrices, precision, recall, error measures and validation results, and detect overfitting and leakage.
- Plan the lifecycle of an AI solution from problem framing and success criteria through deployment, monitoring, drift detection and retraining.
- Apply modern AI application patterns, including generative AI, prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation and human-in-the-loop workflows, using concepts that transfer across tools.
- Evaluate AI systems for fairness, transparency, privacy and security risks, and relate them to major governance frameworks such as the EU AI Act and relevant international standards.
- Domains and objectives
CBA-DAPData Analytics ProfessionalPractitioner
- Apply descriptive and inferential statistics correctly to business data, including distributions, variability, confidence intervals and common significance tests.
- Prepare raw data for analysis by profiling, cleaning, reshaping and joining datasets, and document the transformations so results are reproducible.
- Analyse datasets using spreadsheet functions, pivot summaries and conceptual SQL, selecting the right aggregation, filter and join logic for the question asked.
- Design charts and dashboards that match chart type to analytical purpose, avoid distortion, and support decision making for a defined audience.
- Communicate analytical findings as clear narratives and recommendations, stating assumptions, limitations and uncertainty honestly.
- Explain and evaluate introductory predictive methods, including regression, classification basics, time-series forecasting and how model quality is measured.
- Judge when and how to use AI assistance in an analytical workflow, and verify AI-produced formulas, queries and summaries before relying on them.
- Domains and objectives
CBA-GAIGenerative AI PractitionerPractitioner
- Explain, in practical terms, how large language models and diffusion models generate output and why this produces characteristic strengths and failure modes
- Design, test and refine prompts using structure, examples, constraints and iteration to obtain reliable, well-formatted results
- Choose and apply grounding strategies, including document upload, web-connected search and retrieval-augmented pipelines, to reduce hallucination and improve traceability
- Work across text, image, audio and vision inputs, selecting appropriate multimodal tools and recognising quality defects in generated media
- Evaluate AI outputs systematically using verification workflows, rubrics and simple metrics rather than trusting fluency
- Apply data hygiene, confidentiality and disclosure practices that keep generative AI use lawful and professionally defensible
- Integrate generative AI into everyday tasks such as drafting, research, meeting summaries and spreadsheet-based analysis using broadly accessible tools
- Domains and objectives