KPMG, Google Cloud declares strategic business alliance

KPMG UK & Google Cloud are significantly strengthening their relationship through the launch of the KPMG Google Cloud Business Alliance, which is designed to accelerate digital transformation for KPMG’s UK firm and clients which include some of the world’s most well-known organisations – and comes as part of KPMG’s ongoing investments into technology, people and innovation in 2020.

It will consist of a dedicated core of senior Google Cloud experts drawn from both firms, with KPMG’s team of Google Cloud certified consultants doubling over the course of 2020 to over 100 people in the UK. It will also incorporate the internal IT team who are targeting migration of around 10% of KPMG’s internal workloads to Google Cloud during the course of the year.

Commenting on the partnership, Gavin Booth, KPMG Google Cloud Business Alliance UK Lead said: “We are thrilled to strengthen this strategic partnership which will support clients, in all sectors, with ambitions to accelerate their business transformation through investment in customer experience, advanced analytics, regulatory compliance and IT transformation. The combination of Google’s technology platform and KPMG’s business implementation approach, deep functional experience and scale of certified staff, will propel the delivery of digital solutions to a first-class quality.”

As part of the alliance, a further two new and exclusive industry solutions built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are now in development.

Gavin further explained: “Clients are demanding business outcomes, which means combining technology, business implementation and functional experience in new and commercially innovative ways. Enhancing our joint business with Google Cloud means faster execution and lower risk for clients who know that technology alone can’t deliver the business outcomes they need.”

The first solution, Reimagined Credit – a data led offering using AI for lenders who will apply it to uncover unmet needs in commercial clients, is due to reach minimal viable product status by April of 2020. Reimagined Credit aims to improve customer satisfaction whilst improving returns on capital and reduce credit risk.

The second solution is a sophisticated AI driven conversational chatbot built in response to demand from financial services clients to improve service levels and policy compliance by internal staff. This solution is targeted to provide instant 24/7/365 responses to staff queries and a powerful search facility for the lookup of internal policy content, instead of waiting for a response from a human being. This solution has been designed to enable queries to increase without service denigration or a linear increase in headcount, and for management to derive behavioural analytics about query source and information demands.

Also commenting, Bruno Heese European MD, Ecosystem Development and Channels at Google Cloud, added: “We’re delighted to expand our alliance with KPMG to help customers meet their cloud and digital transformation objectives. KPMG’s expertise in business transformation and management, paired with Google Cloud’s cloud infrastructure and capabilities in areas like AI, ML, and analytics will be a great benefit for UK customers as they continue to migrate workloads to the cloud and take advantage of new cloud-based solutions.”