The hiring spree will support KPMG Products, a new division launched by the Big Four firm, to provide a portfolio of powerful new digital tools and applications, designed by KPMG sector experts and built by the firm’s technologists to help clients address some of the most challenging issues facing their businesses and speed up the delivery of their digital transformation strategies.
The creation of KPMG Products is part of the firm’s broader £300m investment plan, which will see KPMG invest in new technology and develop solutions for its clients.
Over a third (34%) of UK CEOs ranked digital transformation as their top operational priority over the next three years in the KPMG 2021 UK CEO Outlook survey. KPMG’s new specialist team will build a portfolio of products designed to help clients streamline their processes, and better understand and analyse their data as they relook at their operations against a challenging operating landscape and invest in digital transformation.
As part of this investment the firm will grow the headcount of its 3,000 strong team of technologists, by 3,500 employees over the next three years, including a group of ‘product specialists’, made up of designers, engineers and data scientists.
Jon Holt, chief executive of KPMG UK, said: ‘Businesses are making wholesale changes to both their operations and their strategy as they seek to shore up their resilience against a challenging economic and geopolitical backdrop. Our technologists will help them to interrogate and understand the data flowing out of their businesses and make informed decisions to drive future growth.’
Lisa Heneghan, global chief digital officer at KPMG UK, said: ‘The consulting industry is evolving, and this considerable investment signals a significant change in how we operate and serve the organisations we work with.
‘To realise this change, we have already started to significantly grow our pool of digital talent to develop these revolutionary technologies. Founded on our consulting heritage, these products are being designed using the firm’s expertise to support our clients in the most innovative ways where they need it most.’
The products will be rolled out to KPMG clients in the coming months and the first to go to market include:
• Dash – a pre-configured analytics platform that provides instant, sector-specific insights focused on solving retailers’ most challenging problems: performance, portfolio management, pricing and range;
• ESG IQ – a big data analytics solution that helps banks, insurers and asset managers to gain a deeper understanding of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of existing and prospective assets based on their own ESG risk appetite; and
• Strategic Workforce Planning Solution – enabling NHS trusts to model their workforce capacity.
