Global professional service firm PwC has announced a $12 bn five-year strategy designed to increase its workforce by more than a third and to focus on ESG in its advisory services.
The global strategy, The new equation, will see the creation of 100,000 new jobs. The expansion will be achieved through mergers and acquisitions, as well as hires from competitors. PwC says the strategy reflects an increased need from companies for oversight of environmental and diversity factors and the growing prominence of ESG in private equity and investment decisions (EA 22-Jun-21).
Bob Moritz, global chairman, said that the ambition was for PwC to be a world leader in professional services, ahead of the curve on issues including technological disruption, climate change, fractured geopolitics, social tension and the continuing effects of COVID-19.
He said a quarter to a third of the new jobs will be in the US, and almost half of those will be from black and Latino communities. The firm is allocating $3bn to invest in its Asia-Pacific region, aiming to double its business there. It is also setting aside $1bn to further automate parts of its auditing process.
As part of a company-wide focus on ESG, PwC is increasing training for partners and staff in areas such as climate risk and supply chains. It is also setting up so-called leadership institutes to help executives, boards of directors and senior managers to create more diverse workforces. Moritz said that ESG will now be embedded in the firm's work and that "every employee of PwC has to be familiar with the issues".
PwC US is reorganising into a simplified structure: Trust Solutions will bring together assurance and tax reporting capabilities; and Consulting Solutions will focus on business-led change, including deals, transformation, cybersecurity, privacy and risk. Both business segments, said Lisa Sawicki, board member PwC US, will be underpinned by continued investments in digital technology.
Based in the US, its ‘Tomorrow takes trust’ initiative will be a three-year, $300m commitment to embed trust-based principles into the core of businesses. The PwC Trust Leadership Institute will offer training to more than 10,000 business leaders. 'The tech effect' will be a new digital resource for leaders to provide practical insights about how to better use technology to drive business outcomes.
Sawicki commented: "The firm will continue to rapidly expand its use of cloud, robotics, AI, VR and other emerging technologies to further digitize our ways of working. On a deeper level this is about affirming the kind of firm that we will be for the long-term, grounded in building trust in society and solving important problems."
Headquartered in London, PwC company network has firms in 155 countries and employs more than 284,000 people in total. Each of the firms is a separate legal entity.
PwC's ambition to bring in ESG expertise, and on such a scale, will certainly add further fuel to the fire of the 'ESG talent war', which has been noted by the UK's Financial Times and featured as a recurring theme at our EA Business Summit sessions earlier this month.