Deloitte & Touche conducts digital business in the corporate services market.

In the public impression, Deloitte, like the other three major accounting firms, mainly provides professional services such as finance, taxation and consulting. As a veteran multinational company, Deloitte’s global revenue in 2018 was $43 billion, which was basically the same as Tencent’s revenue last year.

However, little is known to foreigners, Deloitte has also laid a deep foundation in the technical fields of AI, blockchain, cloud computing, big data and RPA (which is internally called the ABCDR service system).

After such “cross-border operations”, Interview with Zhu Lei, the managing partner of Deloitte’s Innovation, Digital and R&D Center (“IDDC”), he discussed the basic situation and organizational structure of Deloitte in the field of enterprise innovation and digital transformation. Product line and market expansion issues were introduced.

Basic Situation and Organizational Structure of IDDC

The Deloitte IDDC (Innovation Digital & Development Center) was established in November 2018 as an independent legal entity with the registered name of Deloitte Diligence Digital Technology Co., Ltd. and is a wholly-owned holding company of Deloitte China. At present, the company has five leading partners, each from the five business lines of Deloitte, adopting a partnership system and temporarily not considering independent external financing.

In terms of organizational structure, IDDC uses a mechanism that works in front, middle, and back.

  • The front desk (about 50 employees): Mainly composed of industry experts, responsible for collecting product and solution requirements from the business department, prototyping, similar to the product manager of an Internet company.

  • 中台(about 100 employees): It consists of data team, new media operation team, project management team and strategic alliance expansion team, responsible for data management, new media promotion, development project management, and Deloitte Alliances and international exchanges of global member firms, external partners.

  • Backstage (about 500 employees): Mainly composed of product design, development, operation and maintenance and quality management teams.

For the above organization management, several partners of Diligence have a division of labor. Among them, Mr. Zhu Lei is mainly responsible for marketing and strategic alliances. The existing partners include Shangtang Technology and Keda Xunfei.

Deloit’s innovative products are based on professional servicesUpgrade of knowledge

The development of technology has affected the service of professional service organizations. For example, when inspecting related parties of an enterprise, it is necessary to go to the regulatory authorities such as the Industrial and Commercial Bureau to find information. As the government’s information is published on the Internet, tools such as enterprise search and sky-eye inspection can be directly traced by related parties. It can be said that technology has replaced some basic professional services.

But for large enterprises, there are still a lot of cumbersome professional services that rely on “heap heads” and “work hours”. IDDC applies product technology to business scenarios to improve service efficiency and reduce the number of people and workload.

Case a case: A large pharmaceutical company, in response to the requirements of the Food and Drug Administration, needs to report authentic and compliant to the company’s marketing activities. Since this kind of activity has hundreds of thousands of games every year in the country, in addition to the staff of more than 100 compliance departments within the company, Deloitte is usually required to provide hundreds of external support to complete the report.

But actually, this kind of inspection is completely processable, such as: automatic counting of the number of people in the event, verifying the venue, and whether the auditor expert is the person (under the premise of signing the speaker agreement), etc. . Deloitte and Shangtang Technology have cooperated in computer vision to identify and complete the above compliance audit procedures in real time.

In addition, Deloitte has launched the “Fourth Report” for its financial analysis and mergers and acquisitions business, providing tools for digital transformation, value management and VC/PE investment decisions for traditional large enterprises.

The fourth report is a driving force that reflects the company’s value growth in addition to the three financial statements, and is quantitatively analyzed through models and indicators. The data for building reports comes from three sources: user, product, and channel data, all of which are authorized and legal.

Unlike the industry benchmarking analysis and even the “heads” decision, the fourth report can provide more relevant and accurate support when traditional enterprises carry out digital business. “When large companies conduct online business, they must report to the board of directors, and they will not be able to try and try quickly like a startup. Activities such as subsidies and red envelopes are difficult to start because of financial budgets. I did it at the beginning of the year.” Zhu Lei told 36 氪.

And through the calculation of the fourth report, it can help improve management’s confidence, thus speeding up the transformation of large enterprises in digital transformation.

First locate very large customers, marketing channels expand from partner network to online

IDDC’s target customers are very clear: to be a very large B-end customer. covering finance, biomedicine, TMT, real estate, energy, government smart city projects and other industries.

This positioning is determined by the customer’s needs. The very large B-end will often have more investment in digitization and compliance. But Zhu Lei said that IDDC’s products will gradually sink customers. Moreover, for small and medium-sized customers in need, the pricing of products is more acceptable than traditional professional services. Large customers are also increasingly inclined to purchase such more “light” services.

In the market expansion of innovative products, in addition to the partner’s personal network to obtain customers, it will also be placed in the high-frequency scene of business people such as airports. In addition, Deloitte is increasingly focusing on online self-media operations and working with public parties in some vertical areas.

Competitive landscape and business challenges

Other large accounting firms are also actively deploying digitization, but the level of investment and resources is different. Deloitte’s investment in innovation last year was about $4 billion, accounting for about 10% of total revenue. Small and medium-sized accounting firms generally do not have such financial and human resources.

The Internet giant has a layout in financial technology. Ali and Tencent are also investing in investment banking business, but there is no obvious action in auditing, consulting and other services. It is believed that Internet companies are pursuing scale effects, so they are more inclined to invest in general technology and divide the market share as an upstream.

Direct competition with Deloitte is for startups that are streamlined, product updates, and relatively inexpensive. However, in terms of brands and channels, there will be a slight deficiency.

Talent is a major challenge for Deloitte to innovate. Good science and engineering job seekers tend to lean toward cutting-edge technology companies. There is a stereotype of a firm like Deloitte. The advantage of Deloitte is that the employer brand is strong enough and has a global vision platform, and there is a clear implementation system for employee benefits.

As a partnership company, the source of funds is not as diverse as that of a commercial enterprise. The investment in products is mainly from the profits of the partners. Therefore, innovative products must prove their profitability within a certain period of time. According to Deloitte’s innovative products in the market, the company allows new products to have a 1-2 year investment period, but after that, the product must be self-financing. But for Deloitte, a company that is extremely strict with risk management and financial returns, this may be the best way to start a new business.


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