EY's newly anointed Senior Vice Chair and Deputy Managing Partner of EY Americas, 
Anthony Caterino, has spent nearly 30 years at the firm, bringing a diverse range of experience and sector knowledge to his new position. Caterino's role will include overseeing the entire EY US firm and EY Americas region, representing over $17 billion in combined revenues, and more than 80,000 member firms in 31 countries. We caught up with Caterino recently to talk about his new job, and how EY helped support its people and clients during this time of crisis.
Consulting: What's been keeping you busiest so far in your new role?
Caterino: In my 29 years at EY, each of the roles I've had I've been a little more prepared for a role like this, so it wasn't so daunting taking it on. Our fiscal year started July 1, in many ways I've been actively transitioning for the last three months. This has been a really unique time in our history as a country, as a society, and certainly within EY as we've moved to remote delivery and having all of our people operating from their homes, leveraging our technology, making sure the infrastructure is supporting our business needs and our client needs, and continuing to support our people as they've adjusted to the new normal. Since I took the role in October, that's really been front and center. I've been really focused on our business and how we're performing, making sure we're engaging with our people and talking to them about their well-being, making sure we continue our focus on the market and continue to grow our business through this pandemic and continue to make sure we exit the pandemic stronger than when we entered.
Consulting: Are any of EY's practice areas in particular going to be your main focus?
Caterino: Around 18 months ago we launched a new strategy called NextWave. NextWave is our strategy and ambition around creating long-term value for our clients, our people, our society, and making sure EY is recognized as the most trusted and distinctive professional services firm. Two of the big areas of focus under NextWave are our consulting business and our strategy and transactions business. Those are two areas we're very focused on this year to really invest in consulting, even more specifically, our technology consulting business. System integration, digital, data and analytics, those are some of the high-priority areas in consulting. We really expect those areas to have differential growth because our clients, just like us, have had to adjust to a remote work environment. They've changed their technology infrastructure and how they support their clients. On the strategy and transaction side, which is the other focus area of our NextWave strategy, this is where we're really building out our strategy capability. Our clients, through the pandemic accelerating it, are challenging their entire business model. What used to be a bricks and mortar distribution for retail is now moving online. Now not only do you need the technology and the e-commerce capability, you need to rethink your entire business model and how you're going to make money in this new environment.
Consulting: Was the increased focus in those areas already in the works before the pandemic?
Caterino: It was our strategy already, and we believed that those would be important areas of growth for us. I would say COVID has accelerated and amplified those trends. We didn't know the pandemic was coming, and we didn't know the impact it would have, but as that has unfolded over the last eight months, it's validated our hypothesis that existed pre-COVID, and we've seen it really accelerate. We've seen clients have to pivot their entire business model. Almost every industry has been disrupted, whether it's manufacturing and the impact on supply chain, or hospitality industry and the impact of travel bans, or financial services and medicine moving to more digital. Almost every sector we focus on has been really impacted and has had to move to more digital advanced technology infrastructure to make better use of analytics, but also really challenge how can we generate positive returns in this environment.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest business challenges clients are facing today at this stage in the pandemic?
Caterino: I think it depends on the sector and the business. You don't have to look far to see the impact on small business; restaurants, entertainment venues, things like that are certainly feeling a downturn and they don't have the resources to weather it for an extended period of time. Most of the clients we work with are of a bigger size, so they do have the resources to weather the downturn, but they're still impacted. There's still sectors like hospitality and travel that are significantly impacted, and you see in the news every day talk of stimulus targeted at those sectors. A number of other industries, while impacted, have been able to pivot. And they've done the same thing we've done–they've gone through a remote delivery model, they've been able to utilize technology like we're using today to have virtual meetings and help people collaborate. There's been lots of adjustments by our clients. It hasn't been a one-size-fits-all impact from the pandemic, but I think in many cases clients are finding ways to pivot, adjust, and demonstrate resilience.
Consulting: What do you see as the role consultants have in helping clients weather a crisis like this?
Caterino: Our focus is on how do we help our clients solve their most complex challenges. For the last several months, those most complex challenges have been driven by the pandemic. So our role is to understand the client, to have institutional knowledge of how things operate within the client's organization. We certainly need to have industry and sector perspective and understand the nature of the challenges they're facing and how others in the industry are looking at what are some of the best practices we can bring to bear. We need to understand technology; technology has proven itself to be a critical component of operating in this remote environment, so understanding the infrastructure, the software, the analytics. And you need to have a global perspective. These challenges are not isolated to one location. We're seeing the pandemic affect the globe in different orders of magnitude but everyone's affected. So we can't resolve any of these issues just with a local approach. You need to have a global reach, and global understanding to help clients globally.
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