KPMG reaches sustainable growth thanks to talented teams and significant investments

We’re keeping ahead of our strategy that we launched two years ago around our three main pillars: Client Centricity, Innovation and Powered by our People. Our growth is the result of our continuous investment in our people and our client capabilities which helped us better sustain our clients and the wider society facing complex challenges. Our ambition is clearly to be a market leader on selected services such as Managed Services for private and liquid assets but also for banking and corporate/public sectors. During continued economic and geopolitical uncertainty, robust numbers and consistent growth were achieved thanks to a combination of high-level investments in technology, connected knowledge, both local and global, and an improved working environment to better nurture our talent.

In 2022, we invested more than 10 million EUR in technology and people to not only develop business capabilities but also to review and automatize our internal processes so that our people focus on value-added activities that boost quality. Thanks to a combination of efforts including investment in tools, technology and a change in mindset to do things differently in a smart way, we’ve managed to reduce non-core tasks by 20%, and this is only the start of the journey.

Investing in our people will remain critical in a competitive marketplace for talent. Employees increasingly seek value and purpose at work, therefore a key focus of our strategy is to offer a work environment that inspires our teams to collaborate and live the #TeamBlue KPMG experience. We aim to do so by ensuring our people have the right tools to develop their skills; enabling them to achieve a positive impact on everything they do. We’re driven by offering an inclusive and caring environment and providing our people with flexible career paths by, for example: strengthening our Milestones Program to accompany our newly promoted talents in their career journey, launching our well-being strategy by offering workshops and first aid courses in mental health, enabling our staff to take additional days off through KPMG Unplugging Days and widening the availability of our e-learning trainings. These recent investments have paid off as we see our people growing with the firm. According to our annual Global People Survey, more than 80% of our people consider KPMG a great place to build their career, and a clear majority would recommend the firm as a very good place to work. While we’re proud of this achievement we acknowledge that we cannot rest on our laurels and will keep improving our conditions and processes further.

Being the clear choice for our people is where we offer one of the most flexible work models with a large headquarters in Kirchberg and hybrid working models. We’ve recently opened two new flex offices in Luxembourg, in Belval and Windhof, for our cross-border workers and will open an additional one at the German border. KPMG significantly increased its share of sustainable mobility, a choice advocated as part of our environmental objectives and widely adopted by our employees, whose orders for electric vehicles reached 60 percent this year.

Over the years, technology and the ever-changing external environment such as increased regulation, competition and heightened innovation have fundamentally reshaped the challenges and expectations of our clients. Which is why we have evolved our business models as the demand for technology-enabled transformation has increased drastically. It’s important to us that our people thrive alongside these new technologies as it helps to make the right decisions and pushes more data-driven decision-making. We’ve therefore embarked on a journey to develop the relevant competences across the firm. By now, 60% of our leaders have completed a Digital MBA and the rest will follow soon.

We recognize that in order to remain the Clear Choice for clients, we need to stay curious and explore the core and non-core activities of our clients, understand how to better respond to change, experiment and try new things to find solutions that create value and make it happen. This can be done by daring ourselves to change, creating space to rethink operational efficiencies and designing future initiatives with a technology angle. Setting within our firm an innovative and flexible culture, or a growth mindset, that encourages agility, collaboration and change will provide our clients with a competitive edge. This requires the creation of a work environment in which roles can evolve and people can collaborate across role boundaries. Tactics here include instilling a strong ‘learning to learn’ mindset that maintains a focus on tomorrow as well as today, which will be critical to success.

Our focus areas for 2023 are on developing our service offerings that will help our clients concentrate on their core businesses. Our clients are asking us to onboard more and more of their non-core activities from tax reclaim, fund reporting, Know Your Customer processes (KYC) to accounting and more. Additionally, we know the power ESG has to transform our clients’ business and we are developing capacities/capabilities to assist them on how to enhance trust, mitigate risk and unlock new value as they build a sustainable future.

Another game changer for the auditors is the transformation of the audit experience for both our clients and our teams. We’re investing in KPMG Clara — our cloud-based audit methodology and workflows platform which helps us deliver smarter, data-driven outcomes and deeper insights by blending some of the best of technology with the best of our people.

Last but not least, as a client-centric firm, we aim to offer an even better, unique and consistent client experience by improving the quality of our service based on client feedback.

In a global world, Luxembourg can play a significant role to pioneer and test new things. Two of our Partners have recently embarked on an international journey on two major topics that are of importance to us while still being involved in the local management. The appointment of Chrystelle Veeckmans and Yves Courtois as KPMG EMA Head of Asset Management and KPMG EMA Head of Managed Services respectively, further strengthens our position as a central hub in EMA and will allow us to expand our solution offering internationally. Along with these outstanding professional achievers, we are continuously looking into developing the leaders of tomorrow and adding specialists and experienced profiles to grow our team. We have hired more than 20 leaders to bring a pragmatic and forward-looking perspective and to boost the firm’s creative and innovative drive to deliver impact for the firm’s clients.

In addition, we’ve developed a series of strategic alliances and outsourcing solutions leveraging on existing capabilities within the KPMG network to extend our client offering and make efficiency gains while maintaining and raising the standards of quality. We can achieve much more together when we collaborate.

KPMG is committed to having a strong people culture where every individual brings their unique talent, experience, and personality to the firm and are recognized for the impact they make. Our people are our most precious asset.