PwC India to invest Rs 1 bn in digital services, hire 1,000 people in 3 yrs

Professional services firm PwC India on Monday announced an investment of Rs 1 billion towards the development of digital solutions and is expected to hire a thousand digital technology experts over the next three years, in order to strengthen their capabilities to deliver tech solutions that will help clients address real-world business challenges. This will be in addition to ongoing investments towards innovation, digital research and development, and talent for building new tech-enabled solutions across the globe.
 

The firm also demonstrated forty new tech solutions spanning multiple functional areas such as digital, finance, risk, compliance and tax. The tech-enabled solutions have been developed to solve client challenges related to emerging technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence and mobile. With this launch, the firm aims to offer plug-and-play tech solutions, complementing PwC India's services to create new value for clients.  

"We ourselves operate in a 'cloud-first' environment and we are now leveraging our experience to create relevant solutions for our clients. The focus is on building a digital ecosystem of solutions adoptable for plug-and-play to solve client problems using emerging technologies. We are also changing our delivery model to ensure that we deliver outcomes to our clients quicker," said Sivarama Krishnan, partner, PwC India.  

Krishnan added that a large part of prospective hiring will be focused on individuals who will help make these solutions better and customise them to client domains. The firm has already hired a little over hundred digital solution professionals to build the initial leg of products. The solutions consist of a large number of self-learning modules that will learn and improve themselves based on client data and can then utilise the anonymised data to further streamline the solutions for better services.  

"Most of these solutions are targeted towards sectors outside of financial services, like manufacturing and retail, among others, as they face a dearth of dedicated digital solutions," he added. PwC has already implemented these solutions for clients such as Microsoft, IDFC bank and select smart city initiatives in Pune and Bhopal. 

While many of these solutions are already in use across PwC's client base in India and abroad, the company is looking at targeting beyond their enterprise base with a focus on offering these solutions to small and medium businesses across the country on a subscription as well as pay per use model depending on the solution.

Some of the solutions include products for fraud analysis, leadership learning and development, salesperson mentorship models (for insurance sector) and purchase cycle monitoring, among others. 

PwC India is investing in both people and technology to build strong, tech-enabled solutions teams that will provide value-added services to clients. This will also enable the firm to take up technology-based projects from other network firms in the future.  

The firm is focused on moving beyond the scope of existing service offerings, to unlock new value for clients by exploiting the potential presented by emerging technologies. By working with start-ups and product development ecosystems through alliances, PwC India will be able to address the most pressing challenges clients face by bringing in innovation to scale, said Krishnan.