Annual Review 2021

A year in review

2021 was the first full year that all us and the businesses we work for, have been living with the effects that COVID-19 has had on our daily lives. It was a year where we have embedded the new hybrid ways of working or for many, learned to interact differently with people physically. Basically, 2021 has been the year where the new ways of working and living have become the norm, with waves of COVID-19 coming and going and us switching from one mode of living to another. It was also a year where companies continued to prioritise digital transformation, with more than 60% of business leaders stating it as their number one priority for their business. The ESG agenda (Environmental, Social & Governance) also made a strong return to the list of priorities organisations and companies need to focus on as governments around the world begin to bring in ever tighter regulation. So what has this meant for MBS in Malta and our people?.

For MBS, both in Malta and the other geographies that we focus on, 2021 has been a year of enormous growth. Growth in terms of our revenues and growth in terms of the people who now work with us. As I said above, this growth is fuelled by our clients’ focus on digital transformation and the continuing shift from legacy on premise systems to those in the cloud. It is also fuelled by Microsoft’s continued development of its Azure cloud platform, enabling solutions that provide end to end, fully integrated ways of working for our clients and equally importantly, for our clients’ customers. In the last 36 months, MBS has shifted from being a business that mainly helped its client solve business problems in the back office, to an organisation providing business outcomes to every type of business problem, be it in the front, middle or back office using the power of the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

ESG will, without a doubt, remain at the top of our clients’ key priorities for the next decade. This is vital to both stay on the right side of the emerging legislation but perhaps more importantly, to ensure they remain relevant to their clients. It’s a fact that our client’s younger customers state that they are willing to pay more for services and goods from companies that have strong ESG ethics. While technology in this space is new and emerging, in anticipation this year has seen the launch of both the Microsoft Sustainability Cloud and KPMG’s integrated ESG solutions leveraging the Microsoft cloud. MBS has been able to bring these two key elements together, enabling us to bring insights to our clients to help them better understand their impact on the environment and society as a whole, and to allow them to prepare and execute their EGS strategy.

Malta in 2021 cemented its place as the Centre of Excellence for all Microsoft Technologies for the global KPMG Firm. We now provide expertise for more than 25 other KPMG member Firms and serve over 175 clients worldwide. We’ve added more than 100 people to our Maltese centre in 2021 and have plans to add more than 150 during 2022. We also accelerated our graduate and young professionals’ programmes to ensure we have the leaders of the future. The last three years has seen us transform the MBS centre in Malta from its original Crimsonwing roots into a centre that sits at the heart of KPMG’s drive into digital transformation. It now sits at the heart of our clients own digital transformation journeys. This coming year, MBS will accelerate its own growth, focus on investing in its talented people, both new professionals and our senior teams, and drive our integration deeper with KPMG traditional advisory skills to continue to deliver excellent outcomes for our clients.