With businesses across sectors facing new challenges moving through the pandemic, the need to shore up operations has taken center stage. This takes many forms, from modernizing their front, middle, and back-office, seeking out new cost optimization opportunities, and adjusting their overall strategies to better weather the pandemic and the resulting financial crisis. To help clients navigate these and other challenges, KPMG has named Carl Carande as the firm's new Global Head of Advisory. We caught up with Carande to talk about his new role, how clients are coping with the sudden influx of change, and his plans for KPMG's Advisory practice.
Consulting: What will be your primary areas of focus in your new role?
Carande: I've been the vice chair of advisory in the Americas now for the last five years, and during that time I've also been on Mark Goodburn's global advisory executive team. We have a clear global advisory strategy, so my focus is going to be on continuing to accelerate the execution considering the new reality we find ourselves in. In doing that, we're not only accelerating our strategy, but also making sure we can continue to simplify our overall organization, make sure we get our own back-office components aligned, and making sure everything we do globally is actually focused on our clients.
Any energy I can free up I want to make sure the broader advisory team is client-focused. Our clients' agendas are around digitization, modernization of their front, middle, and back-office, looking for opportunities for cost optimization, being prepared to have strategies that may need to be modified based on the new realities coming out of this global pandemic and financial crisis. They're also focused on ensuring they have providers they can really rely on if they have processes where they just don't have the competencies or technology power. It all really aligns with what we've been investing in.
I'm excited about the execution of our strategy, focusing on the things our clients find most relevant, and making sure we can do it globally in a seamless manner. There's also some optimization that I can bring to the table having both roles and making sure we're not doing things twice, we're doing it once, and that everything we're doing is with our clients in mind.
Consulting: Are clients in more of a bracing mindset instead of a growth mindset right now?
Carande: There's definitely belt-tightening, locking down the hatches going on in a lot of traditional businesses. You can see pressure in bringing costs down in budgets going into next fiscal and calendar year. Clients need to invest to modernize their front, middle, back-office, and make sure they accelerate their digital journey as they interact with their clients and suppliers. They need to look at ways to have sustainable cost optimization, some of which comes with that technology investment.
Others come from looking across their existing business, looking at risks they were on top of but also others that are emerging, like cyber and supply chain risks, and then being strategically opportunistic with M&A acquisition separations as they look to potentially take advantage of some weaker players in their sectors. When you go through the economic shock we've been in with this financial recovery, which based on sector is all occurring with different trajectories, there's still a lot of optimism with our clients, there's a need to be strategic, a need to take advantage of the opportunities so they can come out of this shock more relevant and stronger.
Consulting: How would you characterize the overall state of the advisory consulting landscape?
Carande: It's been dynamic, there's no doubt about it. A lot of things we were working on to accelerate anyway have been further accelerated. When you start to take a look at KPMG taking tens of thousands of consultants that are typically traveling 60-80% of the time, and within a 7-10 day period bring them where they're primarily working from home, being able to do that and not miss a beat with our client commitments has been one of the items I'm most proud of. If you had told me we were going to do it that quickly and that dramatically I would have been concerned about our ability to deliver against our client commitments, but we've been doing an exceptional job of that.
When you look at the state of the consulting business, you have the market dynamics, different pressures and the emergence of lots of restructuring opportunities in certain sectors. Other sectors are booming, so there's certainly a lot of dynamic elements in play in terms of what our clients need. Our ability to deliver has really accelerated to become more in remote delivery, something we were very confident we could do, but clients were sometimes hesitant about. Coming into this new reality we're going to have significant client demands, and our ability to serve our clients is going to be broadened because we can now serve them in a much more remote way where it makes sense. Over time being able to use all three legs of our stool; working remotely, from home if necessary, leveraging our expansive office network where appropriate, and being on-site with our clients when it's critical.
Consulting: Have clients come around on being served more remotely more often?
Carande: We knew if we could prove to our clients we can deliver remotely while continuing to meet and exceed their expectations, going forward they can be less reliant on demanding consultants travel to their location, and that there are synergies and benefits to be gained. If we can deliver our professional services with less travel and expense, that's real cost savings to our clients. We can continue to have the ability to deliver against client commitments, and I think we can enhance the experience of our professional services team not having to travel as much, but ultimately still leverage the opportunity to make sure we're traveling and meeting with our clients when necessary.
I think there are a lot of design sessions and other things we'd like to bring back in more of a live format, there's clearly a need to have some client delivery on-site. Sometimes there's some restrictions with data or other sensitive components, but I do think the aperture has broadened and our clients have certainly become more comfortable that you can rely on firms like KPMG to deliver in a much more digital, mobile way than they had before.
Consulting: What are some of the new demands or challenges clients are facing in this climate?
Carande: To me it's really three-fold. First is whether or not their front, middle, and back-offices were ready for an immediate digital world. Whether it's C2C, C2B, B2B, they needed to be more integrated, and more digital to be able to maintain and grow their business. Most of our clients were on a journey, but that was a multi-year, elongated journey. We're seeing that move towards modernization, that ability to interact digitally. Those plans have accelerated, those investments have accelerated, and we believe that's going to continue for some time. The second area was around security.
Some of our clients have moved thousands of their employees that were working in-office, in very controlled environments with technology and built up infrastructure. Now that they have all those thousands of nodes working from home in different environments, with different WiFi structures and different levels of security, they want to make sure they can coordinate a work-from-home and a work-from-anywhere environment that still maintains the level of security protocols and confidentiality they need to operate with their businesses and clients.
The third is around talent: the ability to motivate, train, maintain culture, professionally develop resources, and make sure you can have a level of integration and collaboration you need in those environments. Instead of having that in a team room, a conference room, a physical center, there's a need to have that done in a completely remote way. I'm really confident we have the scale and agility to step up and meet client demands that are growing significantly. Different sectors have had different challenges, but KPMG has been well-positioned to help our clients first through the initial shock of the crisis, then the stability, then now the recovery of many of our sectors.
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