Leveraging technology to address tomorrow’s business challenges today

Current advances in technology present newer avenues for growth, both for us and for our clients. It is interesting to note that in the next 5 years, global application technology market is expected to be worth US$86 bn and the Indian application technology market is also expected to grow at 12% CAGR and touch US$4 bn.

Rapidly changing customer preferences, emergence of new technologies and increasing regulatory control are the new challenges for our clients. Our Annual Global CEO Survey for 2018 highlights that 79% of CEOs interviewed found their current business challenges are around speed of technological change in their industries and the impact and opportunities it provides to them.

While this evolution and disruptions from emerging technologies offer opportunities to our clients, it also poses challenges on capability, capacity and investment fronts. The barriers for entry have come down in many industries and competition is coming from unexpected quarters.

The cautious approach and short-term pressures faced by our clients prove to be a roadblock for building a long-term strategy for innovation. Many hold back due to a lack of clarity on how the future will unfold.

To address this issue, PwC is focusing on creating technology-enabled solutions and digital platforms for addressing the business problems which our clients struggle with. Digitisation of our services has always been a focus area for us and the formal launch of these solutions is a simple manifestation of this global priority. New Ventures in the US was established to enable PwC to invest in new business models that leverage our knowledge and build solutions for the evolving marketplace. The launch of New Technology Solutions is an extension of the global mandate in India.

Our technology-enabled solutions are aimed at mitigating the risks associated with investment in technology, providing definitive solutions to the pressing organisational issues and giving our clients the flexibility to choose the way they want to associate with us, including the modes of payment.

This global mandate hinges on the following broad themes to provide enhanced value to our clients:

1. Innovation to scale: Bringing in innovation to scale to provide readily available and easy to implement solutions to the most pressing problems of our clients
2. Alliances: Working with partners like Google and Microsoft, and associating with start-ups to create product development ecosystems that ensure quality delivery to clients
3. Business models: Tweaking our delivery model to focus on outcomes
4. People: Investing in our people and their development as well as hiring the right talent to provide value added services to our clients
5. Digital ecosystem: Building a digital ecosystem of solutions that enable clients to ‘plug and play’ to solve their problems

We are filling the innovation gap for our clients by pursuing the right problems and applying the right combination of knowledge and expertise to solve them.

Our objective is simple: to prepare ourselves to provide the necessary support to our clients to ensure that they remain competitive and future ready.