Our strategy has been to take a strong sector-based approach to working with clients. We have made real progress with this in 2011 by refining a deep sector-based approach to serve our largest global clients.
We organise our capabilities around 15 sectors spanning Financial Services, the Public Sector, Corporates and Private Equity. This sector model helps us deliver the most relevant Content, Coverage and Capability. It is the platform that enables us to work better with our clients and build closer relationships. Bringing together lead partners, client service teams and representatives from different functions and countries across KPMG Europe LLP, means we can direct our effort to supporting the priority clients with whom we really want to do business.
What follows is a positive exchange of ideas and best practice that can be adapted to different needs in different places, enabling us to learn together quickly and replicate what works efficiently. It also offers real time insight into where the skills and knowledge are within KPMG Europe LLP so that we can quickly put in place the right people with the best skills for the right engagement.
Just some of the ways we are helping clients to succeed
A multi-disciplinary team drawn from across KPMG Europe LLP has spent two years helping Telefonica Europe completely redesign its HR function across the UK, Germany, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, creating a single European People Services Centre with much higher service levels and much tighter cost control.
Teams in the UK and Russia helped Plastic Logic, a company at the forefront of research and development of organic/plastic electronics, raise $230 million equity financing from Rusnano, which represents one of the largest investments by Rusnano in the nanotech sector to date.
We advised two Goldman Sachs infrastructure funds on their €800 million purchase of an 80% stake in Endesa gas transmission network in Spain.
We acted as lead financial adviser to Ford in forming a joint venture with Sollers OJSC of Russia
We believe that by working shoulder to shoulder with clients we can build a really deep understanding of their businesses and the sectors within which they work and this, in turn, allows us to offer them innovative solutions to help them turn challenges into growth opportunities.
To make this approach more relevant to KPMG’s key global clients we have identified those companies we think we have the greatest opportunity to serve and add value to.
These companies are the largest operators in our region, global businesses either headquartered in Europe or those based in, say, the US or China that have significant inbound interests in the European market.
By identifying these clients we have now been able to start organising our own resources more efficiently and effectively around serving their needs.
We have brought together a community of specialists, under a lead partner, responsible for the performance of each of these accounts. Their job is to understand the clients’ needs, the markets in which they operate and the dynamics of the challenges they face now and are likely to face in the future. This then enables them to develop solutions that directly meet the clients’ needs and which are designed to deliver tangible value to our clients.
Different sectors have different needs, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. For instance, regulation is a key concern for clients in Banking and Insurance and our new approach is helping us put the right resources into finding ways to manage these growing risks.
Within the Public Sector — which is experiencing strong growth in some areas, notably Healthcare, and massive contraction elsewhere — we are helping clients to manage these sharply contradictory trends.
In the Corporate sector the preoccupation is less with regulation and more with performance, cost and revenue optimisation and managing operational risk. In response, our propositions here are focused on achieving incremental results and the avoidance of catastrophes such as data loss.