Wei Chen
CFO, Yarra City Council
About Speaker
Wei Chen is the Chief Financial Officer at Yarra City Council and also an Executive member of FinPro. She prefers to be called Chen, just to confuse HR and IT, but accidently confused a lot more people than intended.
She started her accounting career at Department of Finance in the Australian Government. Although she really enjoyed working on the high profile federal budget, she found the budget discussions in the council chamber much more entertaining.
Chen left Wyndham City Council after spending 12 years of boring suburban life and moved to Richmond to be close to the city action when she thought COVID had ended. She was sadly mistaken and promptly got locked down in a small unit. With nothing else better to do, she guided the councillors at Yarra City Council through the journey of understanding financial sustainability and led council’s most important revenue generating project, the separation of waste charges, through Yarra’s interesting political landscape.
Even though she is now much more interested in strategies and stakeholder engagement, she still uses Excel to organise her entertainment calendar.