Annual report 2018: Kevin Burrows, Head of Clients and Markets: video transcript

Solving important problems and delivering exceptional value to our clients, across all industries, from start-ups to multinationals, local to global, is at the heart of what we do at PwC.

CEOs, their executive teams and investors tell us that the sheer pace of change, cyber threats and geopolitical uncertainty are at the front of their minds. And we’ve been supporting clients with these challenges throughout the year.

Our disruption and strategy teams are at the forefront of this, helping clients explore the forces that could impact their organisations and bringing this to life quickly through virtual reality, proof of concepts and our data lab experience.

Our expertise in the digital arena is recognised as market leading. This year we won the Digital and Technology Project of the Year at the prestigious MCA Awards for our work with Direct Line, to help them to disrupt the commercial insurance market. We’re also doing groundbreaking customer analytics work with the New West End Company, a partnership of 600 retail, restaurant, hotel and property owners in London. And PwC Operate, our execution and managed services business, is now fully established and providing unrivalled technology innovation, quality and efficiency for all of our clients.

We continue to strive to build trust in society, whether that’s undertaking high quality audits or assisting companies and individuals with their tax affairs. It’s great to see these services benefiting from the tech revolution; this year we’ve done our first drone-assisted audit and we're also now serving 12,000 clients through the Suite, our digital platform for expert tax insight and resources.

But embracing new technologies can come with some risks, and we continue to see many high profile cyber-attacks. It’s no wonder that this is a top concern, and our cyber team are leading the way in both responding to attacks and future-proofing clients’ businesses.

Increasingly we are also being called on to support our clients with their Brexit planning, particularly where they’re relying heavily on the EU for their workforce, trade or supply chain. I’m also really proud that PwC supports the UK Government’s GREAT Campaign, which is all about promoting the best of Britain abroad. It was fantastic to sponsor the recent Festival of Innovation in Hong Kong and help UK businesses showcase their innovations and leading-edge design, building wonderful connections with Asia.

This year has been full of so many other highlights, from helping clients with GDPR and gender pay challenges and also making sure that government services, school dinners and hospitals continue to run as part of our work with Carillion.

All of this is really exciting, and embodies our drive towards “Intelligent Digital”, which combines business understanding with technology innovation and human insight to build trust in society and solve important client problems.