Our Story | Ghana's Most Awarded Professional Education Provider and Technology Leader

How a national best student built the institution that now produces them.

Why MSL Business School Exists

MSL Business School was founded on a single conviction: the standard of preparation that produces national winners is the standard every serious student deserves.

In Ghana, professional qualifications — Chartered Accountancy (ICAG), Chartered Taxation (CITG), and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) — are gateway credentials. They define earning power, career mobility, and access to senior roles in finance, audit, tax, and corporate leadership. Yet for decades, the difference between candidates who passed first time at the highest level and candidates who repeated papers came down to where they sat for tuition, who taught them, and which materials they could access.

MSL Business School was built to dismantle that asymmetry — through technology.

MSL Business School is Ghana's clear technology leader in professional education — the first and only provider with multimodal AI for ICAG, CITG, and CIMA students.

Every aspect of how a serious candidate prepares — structured learning, AI-powered tutoring, instant feedback, peer collaboration, examiner-aligned practice — runs through one integrated platform: the MSL Business School App.

This is the story of how that platform came to be.

The Founder's Foundation

MSL Business School was founded by Michael Siaw Larbi.

The standard the platform was built to replicate begins with his own academic record.

Senior High School: A National Best from PRESEC-Legon

At Presbyterian Boys' Senior High School (PRESEC-Legon) — one of Ghana's most academically competitive secondary schools — Michael was adjudged Overall Best Student for four consecutive years and won multiple prizes in Economics, Geography, Further (Elective) Mathematics, Core Mathematics, and Integrated Science, among others.

He concluded his secondary education with a perfect score in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) — Grade A1 in all eight subjects — and was named National Overall Best Candidate (General Arts) out of 174,385 candidates who sat the examination across more than 800 senior high schools nationwide.

University of Ghana: Valedictorian and Overall Best Graduating Student

At the University of Ghana Business School, Michael graduated as Valedictorian and Overall Best Graduating Student with a final GPA of 3.94 out of 4.0. He received the KPMG Prize for the Overall Best Graduating Student and the GCB Bank Prize for the Overall Best Graduating Student in Banking and Finance, among others.

Professional Qualifications: Chartered Accountant at 21, Chartered Tax Practitioner at 22

While still an undergraduate, Michael completed sixteen professional papers in under two years and qualified as a Chartered Accountant at the age of 21 — joint-youngest Chartered Accountant in Ghana at the time.

En route to qualification, he emerged National Overall Best Candidate at all three levels of the ICAG examination and graduated as National Overall Best Candidate in the CA Final Level. In his ICAG examination journey, he scored 91 and 92 marks in two papers and won six prizes in total.

He went on to qualify as a Chartered Tax Practitioner at 22, completing the professional examinations of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, Ghana (CITG) within one year, with first-time passes in all papers.

He also qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant — earning ACMA and CGMA designations through the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), the global professional body for management accountants.

International Recognition: Global Prizewinner and CIMA Top Scorer

On the University of London Bachelor of Laws (LLB) programme, Michael was awarded Certificates of Excellence for scoring the highest marks worldwide in three LLB modules. A three-time Global Prizewinner.

In the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) Strategic Case Study Examination at Final Level, Michael earned the award for the single best performance across five different examination sittings held in 2018 and 2019 in Ghana.

National Recognition Beyond Examinations

On 30 March 2017, as part of Ghana's 60th Independence Anniversary celebrations, Michael was honoured with the Coca-Cola National Youth Achievers Award in the Education Category for sustained outstanding excellence in education. He was also recognised in the 13 March 2017 edition of the Daily Graphic as one of Ghana's Top 60 Young Leaders.

A Decade in Global Audit, Investment Banking, and Corporate Finance

Before founding MSL Business School, Michael spent nearly a decade inside some of the most demanding professional environments in the world.

He began at Goldman Sachs in London — Spring Analyst in 2016, Summer Analyst in 2017 — at one of the most selective firms in global finance.

In Ghana, he joined PwC, where over nearly five years he progressed from Associate to Assistant Manager across both Audit and Assurance and Tax Consulting engagements. The client roster spanned some of the largest companies operating in Ghana and across Africa — including MTN, Nestlé, Newmont, Visa, Coca-Cola, Google, Vitol, Halliburton, Cargill, MultiChoice, Vivo Energy, Ocean Network Express, PZ Cussons, Yinson, Prudential, the Ghana Statistical Service, and Ghana Gas Company.

He then joined mPharma — one of Africa's most prominent healthtech companies — as Country Head of Finance. Within four months, he was promoted to Global Head of Investor Relations, a role he held until June 2024.

By any conventional measure, this was a career on its trajectory.

In June 2024, Michael walked away from it.

Not because the corporate path had failed him. Because the work he had begun in January 2023 — building MSL Business School — had become impossible to do part-time.

By that point, the conviction was already proving itself. In March 2024, Abigail Cudjoe — an MSL student — had been named National Overall Best Graduating Student in the ICAG examination. Other MSL students were qualifying ahead of schedule. The system was working.

It needed his full attention.

The full personal record, including awarding bodies and supporting context, is documented at michaelsiawlarbi.com/awards.

The Founding Insight: Excellence Can Be Taught

When people read an academic record like the one above, the most common reaction is to call it exceptional. A gift. The product of ability that cannot be transferred to anyone else.

Michael has heard that interpretation his entire adult life. He partly accepts it — and entirely rejects what people usually mean by it.

There is, of course, something innate. The speed at which patterns surface for a particular student. The comfort under examination pressure. The depth of focus across long study cycles. None of this is equally distributed. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

But the leap from that observation to "therefore the rest cannot be taught" is the wrong leap. And it is the one that has held back generations of capable students in Ghana.

What Michael watched, up close, was the part nobody talks about. He watched what actually produced his own results — and what produced the results of every student around him who succeeded at the highest level. The shared factor was not innate brilliance. It was a method.

Clear examination targets. Disciplined revision cycles. Practice timed against the same constraints as the real exam. Feedback that arrived fast enough to change the next attempt. Materials organised around how examiners actually mark — not how textbooks are written. The relentless, almost obsessive, removal of any friction between what a student needed to do and what a student could actually do on the day.

The students who reached national-best level had this method, in one form or another, around them. The students who fell short — many of them brilliantly capable — did not. The difference between those two groups was almost never talent.

It was access to a system.

That observation, sustained over years of personal study and direct teaching, became the founding conviction of MSL Business School:

Whatever portion of excellence is gift, the rest is method. And the rest can be taught.

The conviction carried a hard implication. If excellence is a method, then the institution responsible for teaching it has to be designed around the method itself — not around the convenience of a classroom timetable, not around the limits of how many tutors can be in a room, not around what a student happens to be able to afford in printed materials.

Every traditional tuition centre in Ghana, however well-intentioned, hit the same ceiling. Class hours were limited. Personal feedback was bottlenecked by tutor headcount. Practice depended on whatever past questions a student could lay hands on. Revision schedules were left to the student to figure out alone. Friction was everywhere — and friction is what kills capable students long before they ever get near an examination hall.

The only way to break the ceiling was to stop thinking like a tuition centre.

The system had to be a platform. Always available. Always practising. Always giving feedback. Always remembering what a student had struggled with and adapting to where they needed to go next. The kind of system that could put the same calibre of preparation in front of a student in Accra, in Kumasi, in Tamale, in Takoradi — at the same hour, at the same standard, at the same depth.

That system could not be built out of classrooms. It had to be built out of code.

This is why, from the first day, MSL Business School was never conceived as a tuition centre with a website. It was conceived as a technology company — purpose-built to deliver, at scale, the standard of preparation that produces national winners.

The Results: A Documented Record of National Excellence

The technology-first approach has produced a record without parallel in Ghana's professional education sector.

MSL Business School students have secured more than 40 national academic awards across the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana (ICAG) and the Chartered Institute of Taxation, Ghana (CITG) examinations.

The headline achievement: MSL produced the National Overall Best Graduating Chartered Accountant for all three ICAG examination sittings held in 2024 — March, July, and November — making MSL the first tuition provider in Ghana to achieve a clean sweep of all ICAG Overall Best Graduating Student awards in a single examination year.

The named winners of that clean sweep:

  • Abigail Cudjoe — National Overall Best Graduating Student, March 2024 ICAG Examination

  • Godson Nkunu — National Overall Best Graduating Student, July 2024 ICAG Examination

  • Jesse Blessing Nyarkoh — National Overall Best Graduating Student, November 2024 ICAG Examination

Beyond the clean sweep, MSL students have secured the National Overall Best Graduating Student distinction in CITG examinations across multiple years, including Princess Akuwa Agbesi (August 2023), Paula Ayorkor Tengey (August 2024), and Rose Bawuah (August 2025), alongside dozens of subject-level national distinctions across Management Accounting, Financial Reporting, Corporate Reporting, Advanced Taxation, Advanced Audit & Assurance, Strategic Case Study, Financial Management, Public Sector Accounting & Finance, Oil Gas & Other Minerals Taxation, Strategic Tax Planning, Tax Practice Administration & Ethics, Tax Audit & Investigations, and Advanced Taxation Practice.

What distinguishes this record is not the count. It is the consistency.

Different students. Different examination sessions. Different papers. Different years.

The outcome has remained the same: national-level performance.

When excellence repeats across cycles, it is no longer chance. It is a system.

Beyond the Awards: Thousands of First-Time Passes

The 40+ national awards represent the visible tip of a much larger pattern.

For every named national winner, there are thousands of MSL students who have passed their professional examinations at first attempt — qualifying as Chartered Accountants and Chartered Tax Practitioners on the timetables they had originally planned, without the financial cost, time loss, and confidence damage of resits.

National awards represent the ceiling of what the system can produce.

First-time passes represent what it delivers as standard.

For most students, the second number is the one that matters.

The complete, named record of every national award winner from MSL Business School is documented at mslbusinessschool.com/awards.

The Platform: How Excellence Scales

The MSL Business School App is the engine behind the record.

It is the first and only multimodal AI learning platform built for ICAG, CITG, and CIMA students in Ghana — and the most comprehensive technology-driven preparation system in West African professional education.

Within one integrated environment, MSL students access:

  • Multimodal MSL AI — a custom AI tutor trained on the ICAG, CITG, and CIMA syllabi, capable of accepting text, voice, and image input. Students can photograph an exam question, ask the AI to solve it step by step, and receive an examiner-aligned explanation in seconds.

  • AI-generated quizzes, flashcards, and lesson summaries — personalised to each student's progress and weakness areas.

  • Conversation memory — the AI remembers what a student has already asked, what they have struggled with, and what they have mastered.

  • Learning streaks, XP, and leaderboards — gamified discipline that turns daily revision into habit.

  • SmartConnect peer collaboration — structured chat for students preparing for the same papers.

  • Full course video library and live class recordings — every session, available on demand.

  • Past questions, downloadable notes, and structured revision frameworks — the same materials used by the named national award winners listed above.

The MSL Business School App is free to download on the App Store and Google Play. Full content access is unlocked when a student enrols on an MSL course.

Visit mslbusinessschool.com/app for the full platform overview.

Where We Are Going

MSL Business School was built as infrastructure — engineered to serve a generation of professional accountants, tax practitioners, and finance leaders.

The platform will continue to expand: more qualifications, deeper technology, broader reach. Every iteration of the MSL Business School App raises the standard of what students can expect from technology in professional education.

The mission remains unchanged: to make the calibre of preparation that produces national award winners the default for every serious candidate the platform reaches.

The story, in other words, is still being written.

The Standard Has a Name

Every great institution begins with a standard someone refused to compromise on.

For MSL Business School, that standard belongs to its founder.

For its students, that standard now belongs to them.

The names listed in MSL's award records are the proof.

The MSL Business School App is the system that makes that proof repeatable.

This is what excellence looks like when it is taught — by design, at scale, and through technology.

Explore further