What BRICS 2026 Really Means for Practising CAs Across the Bloc
Unpacking the Recent BRICS Summit: Key Highlights and Outcomes
9/13/20268 min read
On 12–13 September 2026, leaders and senior ministers from the ten-nation BRICS bloc gathered at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit — the first one India has hosted since taking the group's rotating chair for a fourth time. Negotiators went in facing real divisions, including opposing positions held by Iran and the UAE amid the wider Middle East conflict, and a global trade war several members wanted addressed without naming the United States directly. They still walked out with a 140-point New Delhi Declaration, adopted unanimously on the summit's opening day after talks that reportedly ran past midnight.
Most of the coverage since has understandably focused on the geopolitics: UN Security Council reform, a ceasefire call on Gaza, language condemning the April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack. All of that matters, and none of it is this piece's subject. Tucked inside the same declaration — and in the events running alongside it — is a quieter set of commitments on trade finance, local-currency settlement, MSME credit, financial risk-sharing and cross-border fraud that has far more to do with the daily work of a practising Chartered Accountant than anything in the geopolitical headlines. This is about that second story, and about a structural question BRICS keeps raising without quite naming it: who does the accounting, audit and risk work that turns any of this into something global capital will actually trust?
What New Delhi actually decided
Strip away the diplomatic language, and four things stand out.
Trade is the centre of gravity. The declaration raises serious concerns over rising unilateral tariffs, non-tariff barriers and carbon border adjustment mechanisms, arguing they distort trade and sit awkwardly with WTO rules. It calls for more resilient global value chains, faster trade digitisation, and greater participation by developing economies in the higher-value end of manufacturing rather than just raw-material supply.
MSME finance gets real, specific attention. The declaration names affordable finance as the binding constraint stopping small and mid-sized exporters from entering global value chains, and welcomes shared principles for credit-assessing export-oriented MSMEs alongside a mechanism to unlock working capital through invoice discounting. The Federation of Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises welcomed the focus but was quick to say the real test is whether this becomes a usable mechanism rather than another paragraph in a communiqué.
Payments are moving; a common currency isn't — yet. India has been explicit that there is no proposal for a single BRICS currency. What is moving is local-currency settlement and "BRICS Pay," an effort to link national fast-payment systems so trade can clear without routing through dollar-denominated correspondent banks. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian was the most direct voice on this point, telling reporters that expanding the use of national currencies in trade among members was one of the most important steps the bloc could take — unsurprising, given Tehran's own interest in mechanisms that reduce exposure to Western-controlled financial rails.
Risk and financial crime got their own line items. Two details matter a great deal to this profession specifically. BRICS members showed interest in an Indian proposal for a BRICS Risk Lab at GIFT City's International Financial Services Centre in Gujarat, sitting under a voluntary BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre aimed at shared risk models, pooled best practice and stronger reinsurance capacity. Separately, the declaration records serious concern over organised cross-border payment fraud and calls for coordinated international action to track, dismantle and recover proceeds from these networks.
None of this happened in isolation. Running alongside the Leaders' Summit, the inaugural iBRICS Summit — convened by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute at The Oberoi in New Delhi — brought together more than 500 institutional investors, finance ministers and business leaders representing a combined US$1 trillion in assets, with a Sovereign Capital Compact on the table and real discussion of linking India's UPI with Brazil's Pix. Whatever else BRICS 2026 was, it was not short on capital looking for somewhere bankable to go.
The numbers behind the ambition
It's worth seeing the scale of what these countries now speak for. By the Indian government's own figures, cited through its chairship year, BRICS accounts for close to half the world's population — roughly 3.9 billion people — and, per the IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook, around 41% of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, against a little over a quarter for the G7. India's Commerce Ministry has tracked intra-BRICS merchandise trade rising from $84 billion in 2003 to $1.17 trillion in 2024 — nearly a fourteen-fold increase, and the reason a BRICS Centre for Industrial Competencies, which India joined in February 2026 through its National Productivity Council, now exists to help manufacturers and MSMEs across the bloc build capacity together.
One number is worth sitting with for balance: the US dollar still made up 57.13% of allocated global foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026 — slightly higher than the previous quarter, per IMF data. De-dollarisation, in other words, is a direction of travel BRICS is committing institutions and capital toward, not a fact on the ground yet. That gap between ambition and current reality is precisely where professional services — the people who certify, price and report on cross-border risk — become relevant.
What each seat at the table brought
India, as chair, drove the practical agenda above — MSME finance, the GIFT City Risk Lab, payment interoperability — while also securing declaration language backing its case for UN Security Council reform.
China, close to half of BRICS's combined GDP on its own, used its state media to frame the summit as a way of amplifying the collective voice of the Global South and building a more inclusive, multipolar economic order. At home, though, its Ministry of Finance has spent since 2012 — with guidance reinforced as recently as 2023 — steering state-owned enterprises away from Big Four international audit networks and toward domestic or Hong Kong-based firms, citing data security. Roughly a quarter of China's 98 central state-owned enterprises still used a Big Four auditor as of 2021; that share has been deliberately shrinking ever since.
Russia's Vladimir Putin used his platform at the BRICS Business Forum to describe the bloc as open to cooperation with everyone rather than aligned against any one country. Russia is also the closest thing BRICS has to a live experiment in the question this piece keeps returning to: after all four global audit networks exited the country following 2022 sanctions, their Russian practices didn't disappear — PwC's arm became Technologies of Trust, Deloitte's became Business Solutions and Technologies, EY's became the Audit Technologies and Solutions Centre — and continued auditing the Russian economy with no global network name attached.
South Africa carries close to the opposite lesson. KPMG's entanglement in the Gupta-family "state capture" affair — including a widely criticised report that helped justify the removal of a finance minister — cost the firm its CEO and seven other senior leaders, its relationships with the tax authority and the Public Investment Corporation, and a string of JSE-listed clients, against a state-capture bill some estimates put as high as R1.5 trillion for the economy overall. It remains one of the starkest illustrations anywhere of the concentration risk that builds up when one global network is embedded across a country's largest institutions.
Brazil sent Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira in place of President Lula, who stayed home for local elections, but its weight in agriculture and critical minerals — and its own instant-payments rail, Pix, now on the table for possible interoperability with India's UPI — kept it central to the finance conversation.
Egypt, the UAE, Indonesia and Ethiopia — full members since 2024–25 — rounded out the room. The UAE sent Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince rather than its president, reflecting Gulf capital and energy weight; Indonesia brought Southeast Asia's first seat at the table (the declaration paused to mourn four Indonesian peacekeepers killed serving with the UN in Lebanon); and Ethiopia added one of Africa's largest populations and, in 2025, the fastest GDP growth rate in the bloc at 6.6%. Each, in its own way, raises the same underlying question this piece is about: who does the accounting, audit, tax and risk work that turns a declaration into activity investors can actually trust.
The gap the declaration doesn't name
Here is the part no communiqué will say directly. Behind every cross-border invoice discounted, every MSME credit assessment, every risk model feeding the proposed GIFT City lab, and every rupee, real, renminbi or dirham settled without a dollar in between, sits a set of books that someone has to prepare, audit and certify to a standard global capital will trust. Globally, that work is heavily concentrated: the Big Four accounting networks — Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG — together generated roughly $220 billion in revenue in FY2025 across a combined workforce of about 1.5 million people, and in the United States alone they audit more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies.
India's own numbers show how this concentration plays out inside a BRICS economy specifically. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India counted roughly 4.23 lakh active members as of April 2025 — but only about 1.6 lakh of them, well under half, are in full- or part-time practice; the rest work in industry, government or elsewhere outside public practice. Those practising members are spread across nearly 99,000 registered firms, which on its own explains a great deal about why the profession has struggled to build anything close to Big Four scale: that works out to barely more than one and a half practising members per firm, on average. Meanwhile, a small set of firms with international-network affiliations — structured, because foreign firms are barred from directly holding Indian audit licences, through Indian partnerships such as SR Batliboi (EY), BSR & Co. (KPMG), Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and Price Waterhouse (PwC) — still handle around 65% of Nifty 500 audits between them and cover close to 45% of NSE market capitalisation.
This isn't a hidden scandal; it's a structural fact the profession itself has been arguing about in public, this year. ICAI's own Global Networking Guidelines — which would have required internationally affiliated firms to disclose the commercial and fee-sharing terms of those affiliations — reportedly ran into direct pushback from the Big Four, and, according to press reports, from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs itself. Separately, the National Financial Reporting Authority has spent much of 2025 and 2026 in litigation with Big Four firms, including Deloitte Haskins & Sells, over its authority to investigate audit quality, with the Delhi High Court upholding NFRA's core powers in February 2025 even as disputes over specific enforcement notices continue. Whichever way any individual case lands, the underlying question isn't going away: a profession that signs off on the accounts of a country's largest listed companies is, in India as elsewhere in BRICS, still organised substantially around a small number of foreign-network affiliates rather than independently scaled domestic firms.
Why this is India's opportunity too
India's own economic story this year gives the argument extra weight. GDP grew 7.8% in the April–June quarter of FY27, on top of a 7.4% full-year estimate for FY26; forex reserves have climbed past $740 billion; UPI now clears more than 650 million transactions a day; and the Economic Survey 2025-26 talks about a "Disciplined Swadeshi" approach — building strategic capability while staying embedded in global value chains, not retreating from them. Manufacturing's share of GDP, at around 13.5%, is still below where it stood a decade ago — a useful reminder that self-reliance here is a project in progress, not a box already ticked.
That honesty matters, because the professional-services layer of India's self-reliance story has had far less attention than semiconductors or defence production, even though it sits directly underneath every trade, MSME-finance and risk-sharing commitment BRICS just signed up to. A Risk Lab anchored at GIFT City, an invoice-discounting mechanism for export MSMEs, joint audits on foreign-invested Indian companies, ESG and green-finance assurance for the bloc's climate commitments — all of it is work domestic CA firms and PCAs are entitled, qualified and, increasingly, required by regulation to do. What most of them lack today is the shared scale, technology and cross-border network to do it at the volume BRICS-wide trade now demands. That is precisely the gap a shared, technology-enabled practitioner network — independent partners joined under one banner, sharing fees, tools and standards under ICAI's own code of ethics, the way large international networks are internally structured — exists to close.
An invitation:
No single firm, in India or anywhere else in BRICS, closes this gap alone, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But if you're a practising Chartered Accountant, auditor or advisory professional anywhere across Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or the newer BRICS membership, and any part of this — MSME trade finance, cross-border risk modelling, joint audits, fraud and forensic work, ESG assurance — sounds like the work you're already doing or want to be doing at scale, we would like to hear from you.
CAGlobal exists to connect exactly this fraternity. If BRICS nations are serious about building their own capital-markets infrastructure, they will need a professional-services backbone to match it — and that gets built practice by practice, conversation by conversation, not by waiting for the next declaration.
Reach out through CAGlobal.in, or share your view in the comments below. We would genuinely like to know how this looks from where you sit.
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