Elly Yates-Roberts |
Professional services company PwC has deployed a new Decision Analytics Platform to manage its provision of financial advice relating to mergers and acquisitions. The Microsoft Azure-based toolset has already been used for 150 deals in eight countries since its launch earlier this year.
Charlie Pickett, director of PwC, says that the company delivers a number of products on the platform. “Financial Diligence is a product that we deliver on the platform, Deal Analytics is a product that we deliver on the platform, but there’s also a whole lot of other teams globally, both in Australia and elsewhere, that have products that they can build on our platform.”
Investment company Quadrant used the PwC platform when it purchased meal delivery company My Muscle Chef. During the process, the platform was used to consolidate historic financial information and demographic data, which PwC then used to work on the transaction. “Analytics, financial diligence, tax, a broad set of people, and we could all work with the same data on the same platform in a collaborative way,” said Pickett.
“The killer use case and benefit is having the same, single source of truth, the consistent platform experience, and the ability to give clients access to it as well. For that example, we gave Quadrant access to the data and the platform that sits underneath it, so they could actually pull out their own analysis. Given the time pressures we were under, this was invaluable.”
Pickett says that Azure has already changed the M&A game. “Our time to market is a lot quicker. We can turn around work quicker and we can deal with those bigger datasets, which has been, I think, transformational for our business.”
He also believes that Microsoft’s range of applications made it an attractive basis on which to build the Decision Analytics Platform. “There is an ecosystem of tools and technologies that talk to each other really nicely. We can develop the core application with the features we want to centralise, but other teams can also develop modules and integrations that sit alongside it, all in the same controlled Microsoft environment.”