- KPMG and Microsoft recently announced a $5 billion five-year agreement for accelerating digital transformations. Satya Nadella and Bill Thomas recently sat down to discuss the alliance
Earlier this month, KPMG and Microsoft announced it was strengthening their global relationship as part of a $5 billion five-year agreement for accelerating digital transformations for KPMG member firms and mutual clients. KPMG is going to be modernizing its workplace using the Microsoft 365 suite of cloud-based collaboration and productivity tools, including Microsoft Teams. And KPMG will also utilize Microsoft Azure and Azure AI as the backbone for a new global cloud-based platform.
Recently Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and KPMG International Global Chairman and CEO Bill Thomas sat down for a chat to talk about the agreement and how they were helping mutual customers become more agile in an increasingly complex business environment.
When Nadella asked Thomas to share his opinion about the agreement, here is what he said:
“There’s many facets to it, but maybe one of the most important is the opportunity that it presents to really help our mutual customers. And if I think about that, our clients, they are transforming in this digital age. They want solutions that are holistic and absolutely tailored to their needs. And historically, you know, you would help them, I would help them, but we wouldn’t help them together. Doing it together actually delivers exactly what they want. They want our content and our knowledge combined with your technology. That combination is real value. And if you think of in, many regulated businesses that we’re helping… The regulation that they are subject to requires stability. It requires consistency, it requires security that we can now provide them on the Azure platform together in a way that we never have before.”
Nadella added: “Yeah, and that’s really what excites us, which is your expertise, your professional services people who have this depth of what it means to think about all of the regulatory complexity. But the bottom line is as digital becomes more pervasive, this then becomes even more important, and bringing these skills together is so critical. One of the other things I’ve also noticed is when I’ve been in product reviews with some of your times, it’s amazing to see the progress being made with technologies like the cloud and in particular AI on something like even audit.”
KPMG and Microsoft have set up a jointly funded incubator in the areas of cloud business transformation, intelligent business applications, and smart workplace solutions. And KPMG in the U.S. and Microsoft are working together to bring Azure to the healthcare and life sciences industries. Plus KPMG in the Netherlands has developed risk management, compliance, and internal audit solutions that utilize discovery tools to enable the digitization of risk and compliance processes across domains such as finance, legal, and IT.
KPMG launched its smart audit platform called KPMG Clara in 2017 and they became the first of the Big Four to take its audit workflow to the cloud.
“With the help of our collective teams, we have launched KPMG Clara, which is our smart audit platform, powered on the back of the Azure platform,” explained Thomas during the sit-down meeting with Nadella. “And in today’s world for us if you think about historical auditing, you know, on-prem solution in 150 countries trying to be used by 220,000 people, compare that today to, you know, an Azure Cloud-based platform, the first of its kind, rolled out around the world, able to sort of change with changing regulation, able to provide the security that our clients expect, and to do that in a way that I think our people really feel that this is cutting edge, you know, by adding data and analytics, by adding the AI to it, in a way today that is transformational. But then you start to think about where we’re headed, and you start to think about the agility that we need collectively, the two of us to be able to respond to changes in the marketplace going forward.”
