Introducing PwC Operate: our new service delivery business

Setting the scene

In the current dynamic political, economic and regulatory landscape, our clients have a growing need for help in delivering large-scale operations - everything from complying with obligations around Financial Crime and KYC (Know Your Customer), to processing claims, to delivering regulatory change programmes. Our new PwC Operate business was formed in July 2017 to enable us to support our clients, providing the expertise to deliver growth in increasingly regulated markets.

Operate is a cross line of service business, offering all of our operational and managed service propositions in one place. It’s aimed, in particular, at clients with regulatory, risk and compliance requirements.

What we did

Since its official launch in 2017, PwC Operate has delivered rapid incremental revenue growth, working with the LoS to successfully win and deliver large scale execution-led programmes.  PwC Operate has helped transform how the firm delivers outcome-focused work and has been instrumental in broadening our service offering, consolidating the integration and delivery of our ‘Operate and Run’ capability under the single PwC Operate brand.

In its first year, the model has been proven with PwC Operate growing from an initial 540 staff in July 2017 to circa 1,000 staff by June 2018, while focusing on further developing and scaling delivery capability across clients’ complex risk, regulatory and compliance activities.

To date, Operate has supported the delivery of a range of client programmes across a variety of regulated market sectors, including:

• Financial Crime (including large scale KYC remediation programmes for global banks);
• Redress and remediation programmes (including customer compensation claims calculations for complex mis-selling scenarios);
• Commercial banking contract pre-papering at scale to support regulatory changes;
• Compliance testing programmes to test client information security policies and procedures, and;
• Providing resources to clients on a staff augmentation basis to support the delivery of regulatory change programmes.

Several of these engagements have involved more than 100 staff for periods of over 12 months and have generated over £40 million net revenues for the firm.  While the majority of these engagements have been in Financial Services, PwC Operate has also worked for clients in Oil & Gas, Utilities, Retail, Pharma and Local Government.

Bringing it to life

Typical assignments include:

Global bank. Consulting-led Investment Sales Review (Redress).

PwC Operate supported the review and remediation of 70,000 advised investment product sales for a global banking institution.  PwC supported initial discussions with the FCA and helped define the scope of a Past Business Review and associated delivery plan.  This plan was approved by the Regulator and PwC Operate then mobilised a team of 90 PwC Operate staff to carry out the programme of work.

Global financial institution. Deals-led KYC review (Remediation).

Our client had a KYC backlog of corporate customer cases that were overdue for periodic review and had committed to the FCA to address this backlog within an agreed timescale.  PwC Operate mobilised a team of over 100 Operate KYC resources based in our Belfast Delivery Centre. This team worked closely with the client operations management to work through the backlog in a structured way to meet the required deadlines.