KPMG Talks Innovation with Analysts

Hill: When you think about the challenges and complexities facing our clients, those dynamics make it difficult to navigate growth and prosperity without an emphasis on innovation. We believe part of what we bring to our clients is not just an ability to look at their business as it is but to help them think about their business at it needs to be. A more explicit, formalized engine of growth is important for all of our clients. We bring that capability and others around transformation that help our clients become more innovative, helping bring innovative ideas to their business. We believe we have to be able to deliver those and transform their business in a way aligned to their footprint.

Consulting: What are some of the big market trends KPMG is eyeing?

Hill: We look at factors in the four "buckets" of political, economic, social and technological. A lot of our clients are dealing with regulatory issues, so we're seeing tons of trends there. Socially, Millennials and their buying preferences and changes in dynamics there are really important to a lot of our clients. Not just in consumer markets, but automotive. Kids aren't buying cars anymore so they won't need insurance. They'd rather go to the dentist's office than a bank. I look at the technological bucket as by far the most dynamic. A lot of these technologies are going to change the U.S. economy as well.

Consulting: What are clients demanding?

Hill: They're demanding a partner they can trust. Finding an innovative partner who has made the right long-term investments in people and solutions and can bring those to them in a way that adds value to their own transformation. With all this complexity what they're looking for is simplicity. I think KPMG provides a really good balance of strategy through execution to help them do that. We bring a lot of value to strategy that I think the traditional notions of strategy haven't brought. If you don't have the notion of strategy tightly integrated with execution you miss a lot of experiential insight to help pull it off.

Consulting: At analyst day KPMG unveiled two new capabilities, Spectrum and Source. Tell me about them.

Hill: Source is a platform where we put our methods, our insights, project delivery tools and project capabilities together to help our teams execute globally. We put a lot of our methods here, housed in a wiki format, which allow for industry and client-specific customization, which we haven't had in prior versions of methodological platforms. We have a library within Source of sector-specific leading practices, benchmarks, KPIs and maturity models that bring together perspectives from around the firm and other tools our teams can use to help deliver their engagements. We can exchange real-time learnings and best practices in a way we haven't seen before globally, and it's something that can and will evolve over time.

We've launched Spectrum as an evolution of our business model. We're developing machine intelligence to bring a level of value clients would never have achieved prior. With today's technology and interconnectivity we can have an asset that can be deployed for a fee, and instead of a snapshot have a real-time amalgamation of that answer. So instead of a checkpoint with a nice report, you now have a dashboard where you can highlight potential issues and alert you to a problem before it happens. KPMG Spectrum is all about matching intelligence engines with intelligent people and bringing an unprecedented level of value to clients.