The power of networking

One of the great things about working for PwC is the pride I feel when I see our logo in every city I visit. I’ve benefited hugely from being part of that global network. I think it’s also a huge advantage for our clients. It’s not just about the network itself. It’s about the way we network and the value we extract from our network. This is something I’ve experienced first-hand in many different ways in the course of my career.

I joined PwC in South Africa straight out of uni. I had a CPA but was doing a lot of financial audit. My passion was always digital audit: systems rather than numbers. My main industries were banking and hospitality.

Networking, Zurich style
In 2007, I came to Europe. I fell in love with Zurich and Switzerland. One of the things I liked most was the informal networking that went on, especially over lunch, not just with fellow team members, but also with people from other parts of PwC and new clients. Not only did this make me feel very welcome as an expat; it also enabled me to connect with people in other lines of service and feel part of a single organisation rather than an isolated silo. I also realised that it was a great informal channel for sharing knowledge, information and resources ‒ certainly not to be underestimated.

Above all, working relationships became friendships. I subsequently ended up in the UK on secondment to an insurance company. This was an opportunity to reflect, and I realised that what I liked most was working for PwC. I went back to South Africa for many years to start a family and grow a career in financial services at PwC, but I never really closed the chapter on Switzerland. So when fifteen or so years later the chance arose to come back to the same team, I jumped at the opportunity to continue these relationships where we’d left off.

Focusing the power of the network
From what I’ve heard in the marketplace, this networking and ability to break down silos to focus exclusively on the client’s problem is one of the things that differentiate PwC from the competition. I saw it myself in one of the big success stories I’ve been privileged to be part of. We were pitching for a multi million dollar account involving the digital transformation of the prospective client’s audit. While our fellow bidders turned up to present with purely local teams, we at PwC came with a hybrid, international team bringing a multitude of angles to the challenge. Our proposal team was coached intensively on how to lead powerful conversations  and we spent 48 hours preparing the oral presentation. We won the pitch, and since then have applied the same focus and coordination to significantly grow the account.

Going forward it’s going to be even more important for providers of assurance to work across disciplines. Digital assurance has been around since even before I started my career in auditing 20 years ago, but driven by the rapidly increasing importance of things like the cloud and cybersecurity it’s really gathered pace in the last seven years or so. Our clients need assurance over all these disjointed systems and almost abstract environments. We’re endeavouring to fill that gap.

Enticing tech talent
That, of course, means deploying people with expertise in a whole array of different disciplines. Admittedly it can be difficult and expensive for a firm like ours to acquire these skills, and we face the challenge of providing these services at cost. Offshoring will be a key theme in this respect: harnessing services delivered from lower-cost territories to be able to meet the requirements affordably at the requisite scale. It can also be challenging to convince people with expertise in emerging technologies such as RPA (robotic process automation) and AI (artificial intelligence) to come and apply their expertise in audit ‒ a field that at first glance might not seem so enticing as other areas where this know-how is in demand. But here too, PwC has a trump card: the network and the fact that our assurance and advisory services are under one roof. This means that one possible path for talented young tech experts is to join in an Advisory role and then take on a hybrid role in Assurance. Another advantage of a global firm is that even if you’re in AI consulting, for example, you don’t always have to be in AI consulting. There’s huge opportunity at PwC for people to follow their interests and develop along a path of their choosing.

#That’sAssurance for me?

For me, assurance means an independent, professional service giving a client and its customers comfort and building trust. Somehow this idea is mirrored by the way my career has evolvedbuilding trust and newtworks with my global PwC family has helped me pursue my interests and passions, and work in the places I love to be. It’s all been possible thanks to PwC.