The unstoppable progress of digital technology is transforming every business, and as great as the impact has been to date, it is just getting started.
Businesses across all industries and markets are at different stages of their digital journey. Digital transformation is enabled by technology but requires business-wide change, across functions, processes and the way people work. KPMG professionals are, together with our alliances, working shoulder-to-shoulder with these forward-looking businesses to deliver innovative solutions that can meet these challenges and make the journey successful.
We are making significant investments in our own digital transformation, which strengthens our ability to support our clients on their own journeys, with a multi-year US$5 billion investment focused on technology, people and innovation. Across the global organization we are creating a common digital platform so we can better collaborate and offer solutions to clients that help them benefit from rapidly developing technologies.
We have also completed the cloud transformation for our Audit and Tax services, enabling greater efficiency and consistency across almost 150 countries and territories.
We don’t invest in technology for technology’s sake — KPMG professionals use technology to deliver sustainable and effective change for our clients, enabling their organizations, and ours, to become higher-performing, more resilient and secure, and to create more value.
Ultimately, it takes people and technology working together to deliver sustainable and effective change. We continue to invest in our people so that they are technology enabled, agile and connected in ways which will equip them to help our clients navigate the new, digital reality.
Delivering on digital transformation
Digital transformation doesn’t come in a box. It requires the ability to dig in and understand all aspects of the client’s business. With that, an approach can be designed that encompasses the entire business and transforms legacy processes, including HR, IT, finance and sales.
Our goal is to enable organizations to move to the top 10 percent of functional performance to become a more future-focused enterprise, ready to drive growth.
We do that through our market-leading ‘Connected. Powered. Trusted.’ approach. KPMG Connected Enterprise helps clients rebuild their business around their customers to create a borderless organization, where people and technology interact with new levels of productivity and value creation. KPMG Powered Enterprise helps them create a nimble, scalable business to harness the latest technologies, leading business practices and tested solutions for a smarter, faster path to the right operating model. And our Trusted offering helps clients proactively manage risk and regulation, from compliance and operationalization to the transformation cycle.
Another thing that sets KPMG apart when it comes to digital transformation is the global organization’s focus on cyber security. Effective cyber security cannot be an afterthought or an add-on — it has to be integral to all aspects of digital transformation, from front- to back-office. In fact, our approach is to view cyber security as a way for businesses to gain a competitive edge — building in greater resilience and creating greater trust in their brands. We have heavily invested in our own cyber teams and capabilities to protect our organization and safeguard data that clients entrust to KPMG.
Cyber security also continues to be one of our firms’ fastest growing service lines. As a result, ALM Intelligence named KPMG a Leader in Cybersecurity Consulting (2019) ALM Vanguard ranking, awarding us with either a ‘Strong’ or ‘Very Strong’ rating in each of the nine capabilities assessed.
We have deployed numerous new solutions and enablers in the past year, including managed services and digital solutions allowing us to help our clients manage cyber risk. The strength of our alliance with Microsoft saw KPMG launch a new cyber security offering (Microsoft Azure Sentinel) designed to help improve cyber defense capabilities for our clients.
KPMG’s Global Cyber Security team also conducted a global cyber challenge to enable our consultants to help clients deal with a variety of cyber-attacks, including the now all-too-common COVID-19-themed phishing scams and malware.
KPMG Global Cyber Security practitioners working together to create a trusted digital world.
Managing compliance in a digital world
An aspect of digital transformation that can’t be overlooked is the opportunity for effective solutions to manage risk and to comply with rapidly changing regulatory requirements.
From an audit perspective, our KPMG Clara smart audit platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, is one of the leading technological innovations in the industry. It not only brings a next level of insight with advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities, it is a centralized, cloud-based, collaborative platform that is built to drive global consistency. KPMG Clara is designed as an ecosystem that continuously grows with the investments we make into innovating the audit. A recent addition to the KPMG Clara ecosystem was made available just in time for the ongoing financial crisis triggered through COVID-19. The KPMG Clara Complex Asset Impairment tool, that is now available globally, assists engagement teams with certain aspects of the review of management’s assessment of impairment of non-financial assets. It uses external data such as benchmarks and applies advanced statistical analysis over client cash flow statements and forecasts. The value of the tool for firms is expected to increase due to the economic impact of COVID-19, as it is expected that many companies will be required to carry out impairment testing for the current and upcoming financial years.
Compliance programs can also be difficult to maintain and come with significant operational risk, especially in the rapidly evolving environment today. In response, we launched KPMG Regulatory Driven Transformation — solutions designed to optimize risk and automate compliance. These solutions help manage identification of counter party and client risk, financial crime, bribery and corruption risks, as well as helping clients find opportunities that are created by regulatory change.
We continue to invest significantly in further elevating our compliance capabilities in Tax & Legal Services. This includes a multi-million dollar investment in Tax Reimagined, the KPMG platform for delivering a globally consistent approach to transforming clients’ tax operating models, so they can manage complex, cross-border tax obligations more efficiently.
In 2020, KPMG launched the KPMG Digital Gateway, a single-platform solution, powered by Microsoft Azure and built on the cloud, that delivers the full suite of KPMG Tax & Legal technologies. It combines the expertise of KPMG professionals from around the global organization and our alliances with the latest technology tools. The single platform helps to tackle regulatory change, turn data into value, streamline compliance and planning, and enable effective collaboration across tax, legal and finance departments and beyond.
Technology is having a profound impact on legal services as well. Launched in 2019, KPMG Global Legal Services has grown rapidly, especially as clients grapple with financial and regulatory pressures arising from COVID-19. Our organization’s multi-disciplinary expertise, global scale and connectivity across borders enable KPMG professionals to advise on a much broader range of issues than many traditional law firms. We have also launched Global Legal Operations Transformation Services, designed to help clients transform their legal departments and digitize and automate processes in the legal function.
KPMG’s Global Legal Services network includes more than 2,700 legal professionals across 81 jurisdictions. Based on that strength and expertise, in 2020 a multi-national oil and gas company named KPMG as a preferred legal advisor.
Strategic alliances create greater value
Successful digital transformation takes more than a single approach or technology. Innovation is occurring at a faster pace than ever before and providing leading-edge solutions is critical to meeting our clients’ needs. That’s why KPMG has created an extensive ecosystem of strategic alliances.
We work with innovators across the technology spectrum, from cloud to IT to intelligent automation. We combine our industry expertise, business know-how and risk, compliance and security knowledge with these technology leaders to deliver solutions tailored to specific client needs.
Today, KPMG has more than 21 global or multi-firm strategic alliances, and we will continue to expand the portfolio as needed to meet the needs of our clients and our people.
As a result, business generated with our alliances has increased significantly year-over-year — demonstrating the power of our alliance-driven solutions.
We continue to strengthen and add to our ecosystem of strategic technology alliances to help deliver the most advanced solutions. For example, we formed a new alliance with Salesforce, with its suite of customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, announced the expansion of our alliance with SAS, jointly committing to opening three Cloud Acceleration Centers, in North America, Europe and ASPAC, and created an IBM Red Hat Center of Excellence in the US.
We value our global alliances and they value us. In the past year, we received 18 recognitions from our alliances, including:
- Appian’s Transformation Award for driving strategic programs that deliver impactful business results
- Microsoft’s Global SI Digital Transformation 2020 Partner of the Year
- SAS Institute named KPMG its Kaleidoscope Partner of the Year
- ServiceNow’s 2020 Global Industry Solutions Partner, 2020 Americas Transformation Partner, 2020 EMEA Accelerated Growth Partner.
Driving innovation
Innovation is in our DNA — and it is having an impact in the marketplace. Over the past year, leading analysts have recognized KPMG for innovation, scalable end-to-end business transformation, and co-innovation with clients spanning data, analytics, artificial intelligence and automation:
A Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Digital Process Automation Service Providers, Q3 2020
A Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Enterprise Insights Service Providers, Q2 2020
Global leader in the HfS Top 10 Report: Enterprise AI Services, ranking first for Technology Innovation
A Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Automation Services 2019 Vendor Assessment*
* Doc #US44934619, September 2019
KPMG continues to invest globally in enabling our clients’ digital acceleration, supported by our global community of Ignition and Insights Centers, which bring our cloud, AI and data and analytics technology capabilities to life for our clients. Meanwhile, KPMG Lighthouse combines industry, business and technical expertise to extract tangible value from data for our clients. Over the past year, it has expanded global deployment of: KPMG Ignite, our newly patented artificial intelligence platform; KPMG Signals Repository, our data and decision science platform; and KPMG Sofy Suite, our ready-to-use analytics platform. Together, these accelerate the delivery of AI, automation and cloud solutions, all of which are essential for business to adapt to and thrive in the new reality. Delivered by a network of talented 2,500 specialists across 32 firms, supported by alliances with top technology providers, these market-leading platforms meet a wide variety of business needs, ranging from intelligent customer interactions to regulatory mapping.
We are also expanding our global network of Ignition Centers, opening our latest Center in London. Ignition Centers are our way of innovating together with clients and KPMG’s global alliances, collaborating both in-person and virtually to develop solutions for clients’ biggest challenges.
Digital transformation isn’t just for business. Lafayette, Louisiana is digitally transforming to become a smart city, with the help of KPMG in the US, and KPMG’s global alliance with Microsoft.
The Lafayette Consolidated Government (LCG) first worked with professionals from KPMG in the US to develop a strategic roadmap for its Innovative City vision to provide better citizen services through technology. The strategy encompasses a broad scope of government services — economic development, education, energy, water, and health and public safety.
In 2017, professionals from KPMG in the US began bringing the LCG vision to life. Working with Microsoft, a digital 311 portal for service requests was launched, as well as an Azure Internet of Things (IoT) Hub to gather critical data from drainage systems, traffic sensors and other applications. The KPMG team even developed a blockchain proof of concept for vehicle/fleet maintenance.
Lafayette has already been recognized for its innovation, including being the 2019 Smart 50 Awards Winner, and the city is just getting started. It plans to continue working with KPMG and Microsoft to deliver greater value to its citizens, recently starting the first of a 10-year project to streamline and optimize each city department for better outcomes and services for its citizens.
Driving innovation with blockchain
The potential for blockchain is just beginning to be realized, and we are investing and developing new applications for the technology:
KPMG has been awarded a patent for an innovative application of blockchain technology that helps clients increase trust in AI data management practices. It applies a trust-based methodology to identifying data to be used in training machine learning and AI models.
KPMG Australia, China and Japan have launched KPMG Origins, a blockchain-based 'track and trace' platform that also uses Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and data and analytics tools to provide transparency and traceability across complex supply chains.
As part of KPMG IMPACT, we launched a blockchain-based climate accounting offering, to enable clients to more accurately measure and assess their carbon footprint.
Legal services may not be offered to SEC registrant audit clients or where otherwise prohibited by law. Certain member firms of the KPMG global organization, including the US firm, KPMG LLP, do not provide legal services or have KPMG Law service entities. In the US, these Legal Operations Transformation Services will be provided through the Advisory and Tax functions. Some or all the services described herein may not be permissible for KPMG audit clients and their affiliates or related entities. Throughout this webpage, “we”, “KPMG”, “us” and “our” refers to the global organization or to one or more of the member firms of KPMG International Limited (“KPMG International”), each of which is a separate legal entity. KPMG International Limited is a private English company limited by guarantee and does not provide services to clients.