Professor James C Foo Leong, a Fellow Chartered Accountant, has spent much of his career helping people see finance differently. After starting out at a Big Four firm, he went on to hold a regional finance leadership role in a Fortune 500 company. Today, he is the founder of Visions.One Consulting and Financial Storytelling, and an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore.
At the centre of his work is Financial Storytelling, an approach built on a simple idea: numbers become more meaningful when people understand the story behind them. That idea did not begin as a business concept. It grew out of two experiences that gradually changed the direction of his career.
Seeing the Story Behind the Numbers
Prof Leong’s path into finance began pragmatically. Offered a place to study engineering during National Service, he asked for advice and was pointed towards accounting. An honours degree in accounting could be completed in three years instead of four, letting him start work sooner and ease the burden on his parents.
Working in corporate finance, he noticed a recurring pattern. Leaders spoke confidently about strategy, customers, and operations, yet their confidence faded when the conversation turned to finance. He began to wonder whether the problem lay in the numbers themselves or in the way they were communicated.
So he changed the starting point. Instead of leading with spreadsheets and technical language, he began with the business story: what had happened, what had changed, and what the numbers were revealing. Leaders could suddenly connect the figures to the decisions in front of them.
At the same time, Prof Leong was teaching part-time after work. Even after a full corporate day, he came home from class energised. Helping someone move from confusion to clarity gave him a satisfaction he could not ignore. One experience showed him a problem to solve, while the other showed him where he found meaning. Toastmasters, meanwhile, became a training ground for the speaking and storytelling skills that would later define his work.
A Measured Leap
Eventually, Prof Leong decided to leave the security of corporate life. It was not a blind leap. With two young children at home, the decision carried financial risk, so the family simplified its lifestyle and cut back on overseas holidays, expensive meals, and unnecessary purchases to give the business time to grow.
Visions.One Consulting was built lean. Its real assets were Prof Leong’s experience, teaching ability, credibility, and relationships, along with a determination to create more value than clients expected. Growth came largely through referrals, word of mouth, and trust, and repeat assignments from larger organisations confirmed that the approach was solving a real problem.
Visions.One Consulting is the broader business umbrella, while Financial Storytelling is the specialised brand through which Prof Leong delivers financial training and develops intellectual property around financial clarity and decision-making. “Financial statements are simply stories about a business, told in numbers,” he says. The numbers remain the source of truth, and Financial Storytelling provides the context that helps leaders understand what drives them and what to do next. His goal is to turn financial clarity into a leadership advantage.
From Practitioner to Professor
Six years into his entrepreneurial journey, Prof Leong was invited by the National University of Singapore into academia. What began as an Adjunct Associate Professorship has grown into an academic relationship spanning more than 20 years. He teaches accounting and finance to law students at the NUS Faculty of Law and contributes to executive and continuing education at NUS Business School and NUS SCALE. Across these settings, the classroom and the boardroom have continued to inform each other.
Making Finance Human and Practical
Prof Leong keeps returning to one question: is there a clearer way to help someone understand this? His Financial Storytelling Way combines stories, metaphors, hand-drawn visuals, and experiential learning with proprietary tools such as Accounting in a Box®, a compact visual tool that makes abstract accounting concepts tangible, and the STEPH Model®.
For him, simplicity never means dilution. “If people say they are ‘not numbers people’, I often wonder whether the real problem is not the numbers, but how those numbers were explained,” he says. “Sales are up” may sound like good news, but he encourages learners to dig deeper into margins, receivables, and cash to understand whether the growth is truly profitable.
A Book That Nearly Never Existed
In time, Prof Leong wanted his ideas to reach people he might never meet in a classroom. He spent about four years developing a book, Once Upon a Balance Sheet: How to Make Better Decisions, Drive Growth and Increase Profits.
Then, just as the project neared completion, his original publisher went bankrupt and became uncontactable. He never received the editable production files. All that remained was a flattened PDF that could not even be spell-checked without disrupting the layout. For a time, he struggled to see a way forward and questioned whether the book would ever reach readers.
So he made another entrepreneurial decision and became his own publisher. That meant rebuilding the entire publishing pathway, learning about editing, design, printing, distribution, and ISBNs, page by page and process by process. “The plan may fail, but the purpose does not have to,” he says.
The book eventually reached the market, becoming an Amazon bestseller and holding Amazon’s No. 1 Hot New Release position for almost three months. It went on to win the International Impact Book Awards in the Management Accounting category and was named a finalist in the International Book Awards in the Business: General category.
Bringing the Financial Storyverse® to Life
The creativity behind his next chapter has deep roots. As the youngest of eight children in a three-room HDB flat, Prof Leong had few toys and passed the time doodling and drawing his own comic strips. Growing up with limited resources also taught him early that resources are finite and choices carry consequences, a mindset that later shaped his approach to finance.
Through the book, he created the Financial Storyverse®, a story-led learning world in which characters guide learners towards financial mastery. One of its best-loved characters is Count Jargon®, or CJ, whose mission is to turn jargon into joy. Prof Leong later brought CJ off the page as a plush learning companion, reinforcing his belief that finance can be approachable, engaging, and seriously fun.
All of this intellectual property was conceptualised and developed in Singapore, and Prof Leong hopes to take it to a wider international audience. He sees AI as a powerful way to accelerate research and scale learning, while keeping human creativity and judgement firmly in the driver’s seat.
Beyond the Classroom
Prof Leong has also contributed beyond his commercial work. His efforts include pro bono financial education for the Singapore Charity Council, youth public-speaking programmes through Community Development Council initiatives, and more than 10 years of company support for the North West Food Aid Fund programme.
Looking ahead, he hopes to make finance a shared language of leadership rather than a specialist barrier. “If someone walks away seeing finance differently, asking a better question and making a better decision, then the work has done what it was meant to do.”
When the Plan Fails, the Purpose Remains
Prof Leong sees a strong connection between his journey and the Singapore story of making the most of limited resources through discipline, education, and adaptability. His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is pragmatic: start with a real problem, build something useful, and earn trust one step at a time. Do not wait for complete certainty. Understand the risks, prepare carefully, and take the next practical step.
Resilience, he adds, is just as vital. Plans can fail and circumstances can change, but if the mission still deserves pursuing, find another route and keep moving forward.
Website: https://www.financialstorytelling.com/about
AUTHOR BIO
ALAN KOH
Alan Koh is the Founder and CEO of Impossible Marketing, a group of companies renowned for hyperlocal marketing strategies tailored to businesses in Singapore. His professional journey began in the banking sector, where he quickly rose through the ranks, garnering eight industry awards in just four years.
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