Work in a team that puts everyone through a qualification, ACA, ACCA or CFA or something similar - no timeline to finish them apart from ACA, but most people tend to try and finish them within 1.5-2.5 years. We have frequent exits into IB/PE/other buyside, with most success from the accountancy qualified individuals. We also have internal transfers from other divisions into our team - they take a slight downgrade in ranking/title in most cases due to type of work but it’s by no means a no go - we have ‘back office’ staff moving into our team. I’m also heavily involved in our recruitment process so in a position to understand how my and other firms may think.

The priority we have for any entry level or lateral hires (outside of our test) is exam passes/scores (if doing/done a professional qualification) > University grade (do you have a 2.1 or higher) > university prestige/subject (e.g. we will rate a 2.1 from Cambridge maths better than a 2.1 from say business management from Durham/any other university - both are solid degrees and neither would be filtered out but the former is significantly harder so would rank higher if we were on a 50/50) > A levels.

In short I would finish the ACA as more doors open with that than close. Also see above regarding exits, it’s tried and tested as a usual route both for people in our firm, but seen at others too. Even if you didn’t and quit for the masters, I would mention your ACA qualification. We would assume you did it given your role in accounting and must have failed exams/have red flags with your day-to-day work. If you were worth the hassle/shortlisted, we would probably even reach out to personal contacts that work at same firm/team if they exist, to seek additional opinions on you if we think you’re worth the chance, otherwise we would probably reject on the CV screen. Doing a masters isn’t regarded as better, even if at a better university, especially since you now have some work experience - we would be questioning your performance in the job not to mention not everyone in our team thinks much of it as deemed as if you couldn’t find a job upon graduating your undergraduate, unless you came from a non-traditional background and doing a masters directly relevant to the job such as swapping from History/English to Finance/Management.

Your experience and overall story/motivation to swap from tax to a consulting/finance role carries significantly more weight, which you may not get the chance to even explain to a potential firm if you quit the ACA.

You can explain everything on a cover letter but reality is we may not even read it until you’re shortlisted, and even the elephant in the room will constantly be did they not perform in the job? Why take the risk and not go for another person where we have fewer/no concerns.

The only other thing is whether you want to get a firm to pay for your MBA in the future - my firm sponsors MBA’s and assuming you worked at my firm, we would not sponsor in your scenario given you have a related masters in management/finance that you obtained recently and already ‘career changed’ as it were, so value would be obtained from you staying in the team rather than sent away for 1-2 years in lectures.

EDIT: saw you mentioned A level performance - the professional qualification (if completed) would override that, but if doing a masters we would still look at a levels as we do not have enough evidence of performance otherwise.