Big 4’s India presence soars as they focus on tech services

The Big Four – Deloitte, KPMG, EY (Ernst & Young), and PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) – started off as, and are still best known for, their accounting and audit services. Over the years, they have added several more professional services – like management consulting, corporate finance, legal services. But in recent years, perhaps their biggest expansion has been into technology services. And as they have done that, their people-presence and footprint in India has soared.
Deloitte and EY each have about 1 lakh employees in India. That’s a fourth or more of their global employee strength. PwC has about 50,000 employees, KPMG over 40,000. For Deloitte and PwC, half or more of their India employees are in the technology practice. For EY and KPMG, that’s about a third.

Much of this tech hiring happened in the past few years, when the Covid pandemic prompted a massive surge in global tech spending. Deloitte says they plan to hire another 50,000 technologists in the next three years. In several areas, these traditional accounting firms now directly compete with the Indian IT services firms, and the likes of Accenture and Capgemini. Some of them say their scope of offerings is much more than that of any IT services company in India.
“Clients come to us saying they want to transform the organisation. They want us to tell them what their business plan should look like, and how it can be implemented best. So, we work with these companies from end to end,” says Sathish Gopalaiah, president for consulting in Deloitte South Asia.
The consulting team helps build the business plan, the tech team advises the client on what systems will add value to the business. After all these discussions, the process of designing and maintaining those systems begins.
EY’s technology consulting leader Mahesh Makhija says his team of techies not only create but help integrate systems. A lot of their work happens in the financial services sector. Here, EY creates, for instance, a system where the financial institution can make sure only people with a certain kind of credit rating can use their services and then integrate that with the applications of those like buy-now-pay-later vendors.
All these firms employ cloud specialists, application developers, those with expertise in data science, automation, AI, DevOps, and the solutions of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow.

Serving India

EY and PwC both have dedicated teams to work for clients in India. Makhija says this is one of the other differentiators between them and traditional IT services firms, who focus on foreign clients.
EY India, he says, also takes care of building the tech stack of EY centres in Philippines, Australia and other locations. EY India has 30,000 people in its tech practice, of which half are tech consultants and the other half are at the global delivery centres looking after the requirements of EY firms across the globe. The firm has tripled its tech talent since the Covid pandemic.
PwC has a dedicated team of 17,500 techies working only on Indian clients, and another 10,000 on international deliveries. Arnab Basu, advisory leader at PwC, says the tech practice in India “is growing at a sharp pace with a strong base of digital talent, domain specialists and lateral hires.” In 2022, PwC India opened three new offices in Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, and Noida to focus on hiring local, highly skilled talent.
KPMG began serving Indian clients in 2005. The tech wave then saw telcom companies implementing large programmes across the country. “There were many requirements around fraud management, CRM (customer relationship management), and several other services,” says Akhilesh Tuteja, global cyber security and TMT (technology, media & telecom) leader at KPMG in India.
Banks weren’t automated at the time, and KPMG took advantage of this to expand in India. The tech momentum for KPMG accelerated significantly in 2018. Data was a big driver. So was cyber security, where the firm saw huge demand for identity management systems, and governance, risk and compliance requirements. “A third big driver was the growing need for customer-facing technology, rather than just back-office tech,” Tuteja says.
Cyber security is a $1.8 billion practice for KPMG today, catering to even global clients in India. Tuteja runs that business from India. The firm has a centre of excellence for digital trust, on data analytics and emerging technologies. “We also have a strong centre for machine learning and financial risk,” Tuteja says.

Building products

The firms have centres of excellence for product development too. EY has these centres across multiple Indian cities, and techies at these centres have even started working on solutions around ChatGPT.
PwC has created a technology tinkering Lab which is used to incubate new technologies and co-create solutions along with customers, and technology partners. The firm evangelises these technologies in industry forums, and publishes thought leadership papers. It holds customer events to showcase ways in which customers can leverage the technologies to create proof-of-concepts. Currently, it is focusing on building solutions around Web 3.0, metaverse, 5G, edge computing, quantum computing and generative AI.