Tax: Transforming tax, legal, and people and organisation services

Transcript

Stuart: My clients when they interact with me are really after an understanding of the tax services that we can bring to them to solve the most complex issues. And from a tax perspective, that includes core tax services, legal services and people services. By definition, they're massively complex issues. So actually what our clients, what my clients expect of me is to bring real insight but fed by data.

Kerstine: Technology is absolutely critical in shaping what we do for clients. Our clients are expecting us to do things differently and get ready for the changes in the external reporting environment. And the only way that we can do that is by utilising technology.

Stuart: Many of the issues that our clients are facing today require that duality of technology and human-led.

Kerstine: The human-led piece comes with the initial idea that you are looking to automate or change a process and utilise technology. But it doesn't stop there.

Stuart: At the very very core of this is actually collaboration. What it's allowing us to do is work with clients in a completely different way.

Kerstine: It really is around engaging the stakeholders, the end users of the technology all along the way, and making sure that when that technology is released to the client that it is embedded and it can really make a difference.

Stuart: There's been an awful lot of change in the transfer pricing environment in the last few years. What we've been able to do through technology is effectively work with clients to scenario plan live. So what it’s allowed us to do is make different assumptions and work with clients to say, if this assumption works in this way, what would that mean from a transfer pricing perspective. If we change that assumption and work with you live on a screen and visualise it, this is the impact. That has allowed organisations to make decisions in a far smarter, quicker way than they'd ever been able to do before.

If I might use another example from my legal practice. The use of technology is enabling clients
to streamline processes in a way that they would have never imagined before. That is coupled with our lawyers who are able to then place that layer of expertise across the top to allow that deep expertise to feed the process and that is something that I think is differentiating us and actually allowing our clients to receive benefit in a way that they might not have anticipated before.

Kerstine: We're doing a huge amount to invest in our people and our broader understanding of what technology can do for them.

Stuart: But we're also really heavily investing in the core of our technical capability across all areas of tax. So what we're doing is we're coupling the two together, and that's a really powerful combination. So the upskilling of the deep technical and the upskilling of the deep technological is massively powerful.