A new trend towards professional crossover is seeing accountancy firms bring together the areas of financial technology, creative thinking and digital disruption
One of the main reasons I started this blog was because I was fed up of the old fashioned stigma relating to accountants. If you ask a passer-by to describe an accountant you're pretty much guaranteed to get the 'old', 'boring' and 'dull' response. I've not long been in the public practice industry but in my short period I have I've met some bizarre and crazy people. The types of people that completely prove the stereotype wrong.
I believe a major factor in the very popular opinion comes from the use of dated principles and decade old workplace cultures. Most accountancy practices in today's society will naturally adopt a shirt and tie/suit dress code and sit behind a boring desk crunching numbers on a spreadsheet with some horrific decoration and cringe-worthy quotes flying around. Another major factor is that naturally most partners or owners in practice tend to be older themselves and thus aren't as clued up on modern cultures and modern tech.
I draw the comparison between your grandparents trying to work an iPhone. They know how to speak, they know how to listen, they know how to dial a number, however the tech is so different that your grandparents can’t figure out how to make a call. So what do they do? they pick up the house phone and do what is natural to them because it's what they are used to and comfortable in doing.
This leads nicely on to my next topic. Financial technology is one of the fastest growing industries yet accountancy practices are so far behind that they cannot make any use of this technology. Practice owners should make it a priority to consult with tech experts to make sure they are taking advantage of all of the modern ways to deal with accounts. I draw reference to Xero and QuickBooks. Two massively up and coming cloud accounting software that are quickly becoming the norm for clients to do their bookkeeping. Unless you learn how to use this kind of software, you're not going to last as long as you would hope in the industry.
The Accounting/Tech Sector cross
I believe the answer to the previously mentioned problem lies within adopting more modern workplace cultures and attracting a different type of personality into the industry from a younger age. The reason why many young teens get into tech is because it’s exciting, and it’s cool. You can go to work and eat breakfast from a mezzanine overlooking a glass office with iMac’s littering the floor or head to the staff room on lunch and play a game of pool or FIFA on the Xbox. Accountancy needs to change to attract the bright minds. One example of a company doing this at the moment is PwC’s Hong Kong premises.
The premises operates a ‘leave-your-tie-at-the-door’ policy. Here, suits are not only discouraged but actually forbidden for staff. Meet the new, weird and wonderful space where accounting meets marketing meets digital disruption: a whole new world of professional crossover in the PwC Experience Centre.
Hot on the heels of the major networks’ expansion into legal services, they’re dipping their toes into the creative/digital pool. PwC’s 2014 acquisition of US management consulting firm Booz & Co (since renamed Strategy&) got the ball rolling, followed in the Asia-Pacific region by the strategic acquisition of Fluid, a Hong Kong design and creative company, in late 2015.
Following the trend
Companies today are navigating unprecedented disruptive threats and organisations need the right strategy and the ability to execute it, Dennis Nally, chairman of PwC International, said at the time of the Booz merger. In response, it created the Experience Centre, a virtual and physical talent ecosystem designed to nurture the seed of a client’s next big idea and take it to market faster. Since the roll-out began around two years ago, PwC Experience Centres have opened in strategic locations around the world, including Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai in China, and Sydney in Australia, with Singapore due to open later this year.
PwC is not alone among the professional services networks branching into the disruptive space. KPMG debuted its Insights Labs – globally-accessible virtual R&D centres designed to develop data-driven business solutions for clients – in mid-2014, followed in 2015 by its first Ignition Centre, an integrated technology incubator where clients come to scale up ideas in collaboration with the firm’s specialists.
Meanwhile, Deloitte has Deloitte Digital, a global consulting practice launched in 2012 to define and deliver digital solutions for clients by combining cutting-edge creative with business and technology experience. Its string of subsequent acquisitions is headlined by the March 2016 buyout of US-based creative agency Heat. In May 2015, Deloitte Digital was launched in Singapore, serving South-East Asia, a region where it says digital capabilities and know-how ‘are ripe and ready to be harnessed’.
Not to be left out, EY has its Global Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, an online platform launched in 2012 providing guidance to entrepreneurs and innovators as well as enabling fast-growing companies to connect to each other by sharing their different perspectives.
Outside the Big Four, Grant Thornton acquired Australian digital consultancy Consult Point Group in 2015. GT’s Australian chief executive Greg Keith explained that this was part of a five-year plan to form ‘the cornerstone of Grant Thornton’s shift from an accounting firm to an advisory firm’, in line with its regional strategy. The acquisition boosted Grant Thornton’s digital team by 25, including two partners and two associate directors.
‘We’ve engaged with our clients to ascertain what it is they see as prohibiting their growth going forward, and digital disruption is one of the top three,’ Keith said. ‘Mid-size business really sees technology as an opportunity to improve efficiency to connect globally and be disruptive, and to enable their strategy. We’ve set up a technology team to provide that service, and hope to expand that further.’
Guy Parsonage, PwC Hong Kong Experience Centre partner, says that the profession’s move into non-traditional services is client-driven. ‘They’re asking: how can a single service provider help me from strategy to execution?’ he says. ‘Our clients see us as a trusted adviser, and they’d like us to be able to do this.’
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