Deloitte and EY each have around 1 lakh employees in India. This is a quarter or more of their global workforce. PwC has about 50,000 employees, KPMG has more than 40,000. For Deloitte and PwC, half or more of their Indian employees are in technology practices. For EY and KPMG, it’s about a third.
Much of this tech hiring has happened over the past few years, when the COVID pandemic prompted a huge increase in global tech spending. Deloitte says they plan to hire another 50,000 technologists over the next three years. In many areas, these traditional accounting firms now compete directly with Indian IT services firms and companies such as Accenture and Capgemini. Some of them say that the scope of their offering is much wider than that of any IT services company in India.
“Clients come to us saying they want to change the organization. They want us to tell them what their business plan should look like, and how it can best be implemented. So, we work with these companies from end to end,” says Satish Gopalaiah, president, consulting, Deloitte South Asia.
The Consulting team helps in building the business plan, the Tech team advises the client on which systems will add value to the business. After all these discussions, the process of designing and maintaining those systems begins.
Mahesh Makhija, technology consulting leader at EY, says that their team of technical experts not only build systems but also help integrate systems. A lot of their work happens in the financial services sector. For example, here EY creates a system where financial institutions can ensure that only people with a certain type of credit rating can access their services and then sell it to buy-now-pay-later sellers. Can integrate with applications like
All these companies employ cloud experts, application developers, data science, automation, AI, DevOps and those specializing in solutions from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow.
serve india
Both EY and PwC have dedicated teams working for clients in India. Makhija says this is one of the other differences between him and traditional IT services firms, which tend to focus on overseas clients.
He says that EY India also takes care of building the technology stack for EY centers in the Philippines, Australia and other places. EY India’s technical practice has 30,000 people, half of whom are technical consultants and the other half in global distribution centers looking after the needs of EY firms around the world. The firm has tripled its tech talent since the Covid pandemic.
PwC has a dedicated team of 17,500 technical experts working only on Indian clients, and another 10,000 working on international deliveries. Arnab Basu, consultant leader at PwC, says the tech practice in India is “growing at a rapid pace with a strong base of digital talent, domain experts and lateral recruitment.” In 2022, PwC India opens three new offices in Bhubaneswar, Jaipur and Noida to focus on hiring local, highly skilled talent.
KPMG started serving Indian clients in 2005. The technology wave saw telecom companies implementing massive programs across the country. “There were multiple requirements for fraud management, CRM (customer relationship management), and many other services,” says Akhilesh Tuteja, global cyber security and TMT (technology, media and telecommunications) leader at KPMG in India.
Banks were not automated at that time, and KPMG took advantage of this to expand in India. The pace of technology accelerated significantly for KPMG in 2018. Data was a big driver. So was cyber security, where the firm saw huge demand for identity management systems, and governance, risk and compliance requirements. “A third big driver was the growing need for customer-facing technology rather than just back-office technology,” says Tuteja.
Today, cyber security is a $1.8 billion practice for KPMG, serving global clients in India. Tuteja runs that business from India. The firm has a Center of Excellence for Digital Trust on data analytics and emerging technologies. “We also have a strong center for machine learning and financial risk,” says Tuteja.
building construction products
Firms also have centers of excellence for product development. EY has these centers in several Indian cities, and technical experts from these centers have also started working on ChatGPT’s solution.
PwC has created a Technology Tinkering Lab which is used to develop new technologies and create solutions together with clients and technology partners. The firm promotes these technologies in industry forums, and publishes thought leadership papers. It conducts customer events to demonstrate ways in which customers can leverage the technologies to build proof-of-concepts. Currently, it is focusing on building solutions for Web 3.0, Metaverse, 5G, Edge Computing, Quantum Computing and Generative AI.