The need for digital transformation in Professional Services.
The need for digital transformation is rapidly catching up with Professional Services firms of all sizes. Regulators are pushing businesses and their finance departments towards digitization. Given what’s possible with technology today, regulatory expectations are increasing for compliance with complex global standards and higher degrees of transparency and analysis.
Accordingly, the pressure is increasing for Accounting firms. Higher quality audits and tax services are the baseline. Auditors, tax preparers and advisors need to be able to flag issues well ahead of filing and provide deep analysis and timely insights for executives on where their company stands. Agility and scale are critical to keep up with demands.
Orion brings two decades of unparalleled experience building automation and intelligent platforms for Accounting firms. We have 750 engineers dedicated to our Professional Services practice across the US, Europe and Asia. We know audit and tax. We know data & analytics. We know technology. With our combination of deep domain experience and technological know-how, we can help you achieve agility at scale, much faster than you think.
Greater accuracy. More insight. Faster answers.
That’s the kind of professional services the market increasingly demands. Powerful forces of change, such as digitization, automation and cloudification are driving this shift. As are customers and employees who expect anytime-anywhere access to information, and a simple, intuitive user experience. A massive industry is on the verge of massive change, possibly disruption. In 2019, the Big Four accounting firms earned revenues of more than $150 billion – more than the combined economic output of two-thirds of the world’s countries. But even greater value is at stake because professional services are critical to the overall health of the global economy, whether it’s audits that build trust in capital markets or tax and advisory services that help enterprises realize commercial goals while mitigating risk.
Evolution of core business functions.
Audit function
With lower-end services becoming commoditized, expect clients to access them over self-service platforms. Up-skill your workforce, to not only augment their digital but also human acumen. With a push of a button, auditors will be able to visualize high volumes of data and spot anomalies in transactions. AI and ML will extract and find patterns in billions of data points, freeing up auditors to exercise judgment in high-risk and strategic areas.
Tax function
For tax departments inundated with regulatory changes and complexity, automation has been a boon. Robotics are already automating rules-based processes and data visualization tools are helping tax professionals analyze information faster. In the future, tax professionals will spend less time on compliance and financial reporting, and more on strategy, planning and managing risk. We envision a tax function in which multiple solutions are orchestrated by people, including emerging ones such as optical character recognition (OCR) for unstructured data, resulting in more forecasting and decision support for business.
Risk and Assurance function
Companies will demand that BI and analytics provide instant visibility into risks and insights to help turn those threats into opportunity. Access to real-time data and application of AI and ML to complex issues will shift many services from problem solving toward prevention.
The opportunity to lead in reimagining how technology can provide better business outcomes.
As advisors, Professional Services firms are trusted to guide their clients with their business strategy. You have the opportunity to lead by example and implement the best technology has to offer to operate your own business more efficiently and with agility at scale, and provide better business outcomes for clients.
Evolving client expectations
In the not too-distant future, it is foreseeable that clients will be asking if it be possible to audit 100% of the financial transactions of a company. They’ll ask if their tax function can pivot from backward looking reporting to predictive “what if” scenario planning.
Evolving employee expectations
To attract the best and brightest talent, and keep them engaged, employees will expect the user experience across internal systems to be effective and efficient, so they can do their best work.
We can partner with you to anticipate evolving client and employee expectations, find the right answers, conceptualize and build the right solutions, and deliver the business transformation you need. Orion brings two decades of experience transforming Audit and Tax functions, rooted in Digital Strategy, Experience Design, and Engineering.
