Q&A with James Lee, Managing Director and Head of Financial Services, Analytics and Cloud Transformation at PwC

Media 7 | August 16, 2021

James Lee, Managing Director and Head of Financial Services, Analytics and Cloud Transformation at PwC, is a well-recognized management consulting leader and senior technology executive specializing in advising global financial services organizations on “cloud-first, data-driven” digital transformation with data and analytics, AI, and intelligent automation. He has over 20 years of strategy consulting and technology operation experience in North America, Asia, and Europe that spanned across various industries including insurance, banking, asset and wealth management, private equity, and telecommunications.

In my opinion, the most forward-thinking digital leaders usually excel at constantly instilling a digital-first mindset into their workforce and encouraging employees to cherish every “fail fast” lesson learned opportunity.



MEDIA 7: Can you please take us through your 20 years of strategy consulting and technology operation professional experience? Where did your career begin?
JAMES LEE:
My pleasure. I started my career as a software developer in Asia (after graduating with an engineering degree in Hong Kong) and then spent the next 20 years in North America in various management consulting and digital executive roles. For the past decade, I have been working at PwC with a sheer focus on growing multi-competency teams to assist our global financial services clients with driving data-driven innovations and operationalizing high-impact digital transformations. From a consulting career perspective, it has definitely been a rewarding experience over the years as I was fortunate enough to participate in many large-scale transformations with companies across the globe and met a lot of amazing people along the journey. As a trained engineer with years of strategy consulting experience in the financial services world, I found my diverse background (culture, academics, work, international exposure) has given me a balanced perspective in approaching corporate digital challenges by helping organizations better leverage the power of cloud, analytics and automation within the context of their business.


M7: What is PwC’s new global strategy, The New Equation, about? How does it address some of the major challenges in the world today?
JL:
The New Equation is our new PwC global strategy that responds to fundamental changes in the world, including technological disruption, climate change, fractured geopolitics, social tension, and the continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on two interconnected needs clients face in the coming years:

Build Trust - to meet rising expectations of transparency and stakeholder engagement and

Deliver Sustained Outcomes - with an integrated and multidisciplinary approach that combine expertise in strategy, digital, data & cloud services, people & organization, ESG, cybersecurity, and AI.

Our firm will be making over US$12 billion investment over the next 5 years ($3 billion will be in the Asia Pacific to further expand business in this high growth region) with initial commitments including new ESG Centres of Excellence, Leadership Institutes, accelerated deployment of emerging technologies and increased investment to support audit quality and advisory capacity. As a result, we will be creating over 100,000 new jobs so it is definitely an exciting time to be in the professional services industry.


There have been increasingly pressing needs about ESG(especially the “E”) as evidenced by the recent United Nations IPCC report that the earth climate crisis is unequivocally caused by human activities.



M7: What are some of the successful digital and sustainable transformation strategies that you have implemented through your work at PwC?
JL:
For this question, I think it is very important to define what success means for a digital transformation journey and the answer certainly varies for different organizations. Yet from my years of experience helping global firms strategize and operationalize their digital transformation programs, there are a few key success factors in common and will continue to be crucial:

A top-down approach with clear and measurable goals: Digital transformation is not just another big project but instead a multi-year corporate journey that requires all management teams and staff to stick together to go through the ups and downs associated with the changes. Every successful digital transformation starts with a strongly supportive board with laser-focused strategic vision and an experienced, highly collaborative squad(s) that masters delivery execution with disciplined change management, outcomes-driven budgeting model, and agile-based implementation governance.

‘Employees-Led’, ‘Customer-Focused’, ‘Technology-Enabled’: I know it sounds a bit generic but these are golden rules/guiding principles a digital executive could always rely on to make sensible decisions during ambiguous situations in a transformation. Is this budget decision going to help to upskill our staff to promote the digital-first culture? Which 2 out of these 10 proposed digital servicing ideas will provide the most ‘distinctive’ customer experience? Does this seemingly cheaper or convenient technology option align with our “cloud-first, API-connected” strategy?

“Communicate, Celebrate and Communicate again”: ‘Transformation Fatigue’ is one of the biggest threats for any digital transformation. Over the years, I found the smartest digital leaders were always the ones who mastered the art of active communications and agile goal-based celebrations to continuously instill positive momentum to the organization throughout the transformation journey.

‘Data-driven’: Regardless of AI, IoT, or intelligent automation, data is the fuel that powers any high-speed digital transformation train. A solid enterprise data strategy and a secure cloud data platform are fundamental to every successful digital transformation.

‘Digital (& Sustainable) Transformation’: As ESG is gaining more attention in the boardroom, I am seeing more and more corporate digital innovators leveraging emerging technologies to try to improve their ESG outcomes. From the early digital age of automating manual, paper-based processes with RPA and OCR technologies to more recently using AI, 5G, and augmented reality to facilitate remote work to minimize air travel (oil fuel is a major source of carbon emission), I can foresee a growing trend that companies will increasingly integrate ESG factors into their digital transformation agenda to drive sustainability benefits.


M7: What do you see as the most noticeable change right now happening in the workforce, encouraged by the rise of digital technologies?
JL:
This is a great question. I was recently invited to speak at a global digital banking summit with a few fellow C-level panelists and it is interesting that we all shared similar observations regarding some of the implications for the workforce:

The importance of “Thinking Digital, not just Being Digital”: Digital technologies bring inevitable changes to operation as well as a business model but still many companies didn’t do enough to evolve their corporate culture and business processes (“Excel is still my best friend regardless!”) after having invested millions in technology infrastructure. In my opinion, the most forward-thinking digital leaders usually excel at constantly instilling a digital-first mindset into their workforce and encouraging employees to cherish every “fail fast” lesson learned opportunity.

Upskilling in data literacy and risk governance awareness: For most companies, the primary objectives of digital transformation are to improve customer experience or time to market for products and services. While capitalizing on these benefits as part of what I called the offensive aspects of a transformation, corporations should not overlook the flip side of the coin which are the defensive duties to mitigate risks associated with the use of emerging technologies. Are your AI algorithms making decisions that align with your company’s values? How is your brand affected if you cannot explain how AI systems work to your customers and regulators? Do customers trust you with their data and did you provide adequate customer data protection training to your workforce? These are all legitimate questions that require business leaders to revisit their risk management plan and formulate an upskilling strategy for the workforce (e.g. curriculum to improve overall data and analytics literacy as well as risk governance awareness).


In this ever-changing digital world, we always emphasize to our clients the importance of upskilling so you can probably imagine most of us are vivid lifelong learners ourselves too.



M7: James, I understand you had a lot of experience helping financial services institutions with their ESG data management, analytics, and reporting needs. Would you be able to share your perspective in this space given this is such a hot topic in the industry?
JL:
Certainly. There have been increasingly pressing needs about ESG(especially the “E”) as evidenced by the recent United Nations IPCC report that the earth climate crisis is unequivocally caused by human activities. It is a sad reality but it could get worse if the slim chance remaining to stave off heating above 1.5C is not immediately addressed. It definitely requires stronger global collaborations and I think the financial services industry (as an allocator of capital) will continue to play a pivotal role in the following areas:

Sustainable Finance – promote sustainable economy through prioritizing financing decisions such as sustainability-linked loans, green bonds or carbon tax optimization,

Responsible Investment – promote ESG through thematic investing to achieve better risk-adjusted returns and value creation,

Climate Risk Analysis – mitigate climate-related operational risks (physical, transition) and achieve eco-efficiency by reducing the carbon footprint (e.g. through climate risk scenario analysis) and better managing other environmental risks (water, land, waste),

Resilient Supply Chain – transform supply chain with ESG considerations to enhance operational resilience.

From a data and AI strategy perspective, there are a few key ESG trends that I believe will continue to drive the acceleration of digital transformation in the financial services industry:

Mandatory ESG disclosure: While EU regulators were early movers in leading climate disclosures, other international financial hubs (e.g. Hong Kong Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange) have already followed the footsteps to demand TCFD disclosures for listed companies. In addition, SEC has repeatedly expressed a new, heightened focus on disclosures about climate change. I think this compliance-driven wave will push more companies to revamp their data and reporting infrastructure to cope with the complexity of the 4Vs (volume/variety/veracity/velocity) associated with ESG data. For example, many companies are currently still using manual processes to collect internal ESG data (water consumption, carbon emissions, workforce demographics) and these data sources are usually scattered in disparate databases in various formats. Adding to the complexity of data collection is the need to bring in relevant (and material) external data sources and alternative datasets for ESG analysis.

Correlation of non-financial KPIs and financial performance: It is not uncommon these days CFOs are asked by an investor on an earning call about their firm‘s climate risk exposure or progress in diversity and inclusion. Indeed many ESG materiality assessments indicated that there are correlations between non-financial KPIs and the financial performance of a company. Given that ESG data has to be ‘Investor grade’ and audit-ready for disclosure purposes, I believe more companies will begin to incorporate ESG data and analytics into their digital finance transformation agenda by centralizing data on a cloud data lake coupled with an agile data governance process to enhance both data access and data quality.

Continuous monitoring of ESG performance: I think it is important to point out that the ultimate goal of ESG should not be just a series of sustainability reports for PR purposes. But rather an ability for companies to measure and report ESG progress in a timely manner and for investors and other stakeholders to be able to verify it with data. As I mentioned earlier, with the tightened regulatory requirements and increased complexity of ESG data, I think companies will continue to invest in emerging technologies to address the following ESG data and reporting challenges:

-      Ensure accuracy, agility, and data integrity of the relevant metrics.

-      Reduce the time and cost to prepare ESG disclosures.

-      Improve ESG industry ranking by actively monitoring sustainability KPIs to drive actionable insights.

This is an immense topic that I have a lot of passion about and can easily talk about for another hour with a beer (chuckles). If you are interested in learning more about potential ESG data and AI use cases pertaining to different sectors in financial services (insurance, asset and wealth management, banking, and capital market), I have published a few blog articles that you can easily find in my LinkedIn profile.


M7: This is the last question but it is an important one for our readers. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to the young people who are aspiring to pursue a successful management consulting career in digital transformation?
JL:
I would summarize into 4 key traits which I personally found are important for every management consultant: 

Listening: Management consulting is all about problem-solving for our clients. Regardless of how many world-class strategy frameworks or talented digital/data/cloud individuals a top-tier consulting firm possesses, these are all irrelevant if we don’t listen effectively to the unique challenges faced by each of our clients. Indeed the ultimate responsibility of our digital consulting practitioners is to help clients analyze their problems through active listening and then tailor a ‘fit for purpose’ digital solution approach through our global network of experienced professionals, strategic technology alliances, and intellectual assets.

Proactiveness: Management Consulting is a people business or more precisely a team sport that involves multiple stakeholders in the ecosystem: customers, employees, alliance partners, regulators, industry analysts, etc. I found almost every successful digital consulting leader has a highly proactive attitude and they never shies away from taking initiatives in their approach for innovations, stakeholders management, and professional networking,

Lifelong Learning: In this ever-changing digital world, we always emphasize to our clients the importance of upskilling so you can probably imagine most of us are vivid lifelong learners ourselves too. This trait usually goes side by side with ‘curiosity’ and I think, both are key characteristics for any individual who wants to pursue a sustainable management consulting career.

Empathy: This is my favorite one. As I mentioned before, management consulting is a professional team sport and stress management is an inevitable part of our work life. Throughout my global consulting career, I have assembled many cultural-diverse, multi-competency teams to cope with countless stressful client situations. I found ‘Empathy’ was always my best companion in those situations (for both clients and teams) and it was amazing that every time we were able to emerge as a more united and inclusive team with ever-stronger and trusted client relationships.

ABOUT PWC

With offices in 155 countries and more than 285,000 people, PwC is one of the leading professional services networks in the world that provides assurance, tax, and advisory services.

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Exasol today unveiled its no-compromise analytics database, which delivers more productivity, savings, and flexibility for enterprises to better manage data in the cloud, SaaS, on-premises, or hybrid. With processing times up to 20 times faster1 than any other analytics database, Exasol provides an unmatched price/performance ratio, helping customers achieve 320% 2 ROI in reduced licensing, implementation, maintenance, and training costs. Businesses interested in trying Exasol in their own tech stack with their own data can do so at no cost for a limited time through its Accelerator Program. Under the leadership of Exasol’s recently appointed Chief Executive Officer, Joerg Tewes, the new release underscores the company’s commitment to delivering what customers need – a solution that doesn’t require them to make trade-offs between cost, efficiencies, and flexibility. With Exasol, customers can run analytics anywhere their data lives – on-premises, cloud or across multiple clouds – with no rip-and-replace, no need to move data sets, no cost shocks. With the latest enhancements, Exasol seamlessly integrates with any data stack and analytics ecosystem, and dynamically scales to accommodate even the most complex data sets, removing friction and unburdening data teams to accelerate business outcomes. “Exasol believes customers shouldn’t ever have to make compromises with their analytics databases, especially during these times of economic uncertainty and reduced IT budgets. This is why our offering allows users to see significant performance and efficiency gains, while working within their budgets and existing tech environments,” said Joerg Tewes, CEO of Exasol. “We have hundreds of global customers using Exasol with extremely complex data, at scale. From financial services and retail customers reducing queries from hours to seconds, to agriculture firms working with complicated models supporting DNA sequencing, our customers spend more time analyzing and optimizing with less time and headcount.” The latest enhancements to the database enable organizations to: Avoid replacing databases and get more out of existing tech stacks: Through Exasol’s performance enhancements, scaling optimization, and real-time processing, their entire tech stacks are more efficient. Gain the best price/performance ratio: Market-leading concurrency, fast in-memory processing and query compute distribution provides greater performance on less hardware infrastructure. Run analytics or machine learning (ML): Exasol's ML capabilities are built directly into the in-memory database engine, to deliver even greater efficiencies and cost savings. From uncovering hidden patterns in an organization’s complete data that significantly cuts down data preparation time, to enabling customers to effortlessly utilize open-source machine learning models, Exasol's ML capabilities provide customers with unmatched efficiency and scalability – Exasol makes ML actionable at scale. Manage data where it lives: Workloads can be moved between platforms and uniformly automated and managed through a modern technology stack, whether it’s between self or fully managed SaaS, even on an ad-hoc basis. “Exasol is a strong member of the AWS Partner Network, with its evolution and expansion of capabilities on AWS cloud,” said Mor Hezi, Head of EMEA Technology Partnerships at AWS. “We’re thrilled to continue building our relationship with Exasol, and look forward to fostering further collaboration and mutual growth. Together, we are transforming businesses." “Exasol has allowed us to push the boundaries of how we harness value out of our data, at a speed and scale which we never imagined,” said Cesar Picco, Senior Software Engineer at T-Mobile, USA. “We were immediately impressed with Exasol’s performance as we were able to handle multiple data science workloads simultaneously with over 200% improvement at significantly reduced effort. And this was just the beginning of our journey. In order to improve our 5G network decisions, we leverage our already existing massive amounts of business and network data to more accurately analyze potential network infrastructure. In the world of telcom, more coverage means happier customers, a superior customer experience, and ultimately a better value for our customers. Now, with these latest enhancements, we’ll be able to further explore the possibilities that lie in BI visualization, data mapping and modeling, and so much more. As the only database that offers this level of speed, efficiency, cost, and flexibility, Exasol continues to raise the bar, and we’re looking forward to more innovation, market disruption and customer satisfaction with this rollout.” “Exasol plays an important role in our HR Data Factory and is the central data platform which, as the "digital twin" of the employees, manages data at Mercedes in a DSGVO-compliant manner. With its in-memory architecture, the Exasol database offers excellent opportunities to analyse and securely manage data with unprecedented performance,” said Jochen Linkohr, Head of HR DataFactory Team at Mercedes-Benz. “We appreciate the almost maintenance-free use of the database for many years. It enables us to increase efficiency and optimise costs, which in turn has had a positive impact on our business. We look forward to continuing our long-standing relationship with Exasol and using the new features to sustain our business." To take advantage of the limited time Accelerator Program, and try Exasol in their own tech stack and data sets, businesses interested can go to www.exasol.com/poc. The Accelerator Program allows them to immediately start a complimentary SaaS trial or participate in a proof of concept with three months and five terabytes for free, so they can experience what no-compromises means for their organization. About Exasol Exasol is the no-compromise analytics database that provides increased productivity, cost-savings and flexibility, redefining how businesses use data. With 20x faster processing, Exasol provides insights in record time, empowering businesses to solve complex problems, become more data-driven and bring innovation to life. Exasol also delivers ROI of more than 300% with reduced licensing, implementation, maintenance and training fees, eliminating cost shock and vendor-lock in. With Exasol, businesses have flexibility to manage data the way they want – in the cloud, SaaS, on-premises, or hybrid – without rip-and-replace disruption. Hundreds of global brands like T-Mobile, Revolut, and Allianz rely on Exasol to innovate, grow and win. Join them – try Exasol for free to experience what no-compromise can do for your organization.

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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, BIG DATA MANAGEMENT, DATA SCIENCE

Precisely Advances Leading Data Quality Portfolio, Providing Unparalleled Support to Customers on their Journey to Data Integrity

Businesswire | June 01, 2023

Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, today announced a series of innovations to its industry recognized data quality portfolio. The announcement underscores the company’s continued commitment to helping organizations on their path to data integrity - empowering data leaders and practitioners to better understand their data and ensure it is accurate, consistent, and contextualized for confident decision-making. Thousands of customers around the world rely on data quality solutions from Precisely for their best-in-class address validation and enrichment, sophisticated entity matching, financial reconciliation, and enforcement of data quality rules for their business. Integration with other Precisely solutions, including data governance, data observability, data integration, and data enrichment empowers customers to seamlessly address new use cases in their rapidly changing, data-driven world. With the latest product updates, Precisely has further enhanced capabilities in its well-known solutions, building upon decades of leadership in the data quality market: Precisely Spectrum Quality – now offers expanded capabilities for editing, visualizing, and interacting with graph data for use cases requiring a single view of critical data. It also supports the latest United States Postal Service (USPS) CASS™ Cycle O, allowing customers to benefit from improved address validation and matching to ensure accurate and efficient delivery of mail, and take advantage of reduced mailing costs. Starting in July, it will also provide the option to integrate Spectrum OnDemand directly with Precisely Property Graph – enabling users to understand the intricate relationships between addresses, parcel boundaries, building footprints and points of interest. Precisely Trillium – offers improved connectivity with double the number of supported data sources now available for Trillium Quality and Trillium Discovery customers. The updates enhance performance and enable data quality rules to be applied to data originating from sources such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and SAP S/4HANA. Starting in July, support will also be available for USPS CASS™ Cycle O. Precisely Data360 – has been advanced with the option to integrate Data360 DQ+ with Spectrum OnDemand, allowing customers to validate emails and phone numbers, on top of being able to validate and geocode addresses using Spectrum’s well-known strengths. Several enhancements have also been made to Data360 Analyze to provide secure and easy access to Microsoft Azure Key Vault, and enable more efficient coding in Python. These new updates follow the recent announcement of the Precisely Data Integrity Suite’s new Data Quality service, which provides complementary benefits for users of Precisely data quality solutions including Spectrum Quality, Trillium Quality, Trillium Discovery, and Data360 DQ+. The new Data Quality service means customers can run data quality processes wherever data lives – including in the cloud. It also empowers them to harness additional value by seamlessly integrating with other Suite services, including Data Integration, Data Governance, Data Observability, and more. The announcement comes at a time when organizations are under more pressure than ever to execute on increasingly sophisticated data initiatives, requiring access to high levels of accurate, consistent, and contextualized data to achieve successful outcomes. In fact, new research1 from the Center for Business Analytics at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business revealed data quality as the number one challenge for organizations (50%), as well as being the top priority (53%) for data leaders to address in 2023, with 66% of all respondents rating the quality of their organization’s data as average, low, or very low. “Advanced data programs ultimately rely on high-integrity data to achieve successful outcomes, and ensuring that your data is accurate, consistent, and contextualized is a critical step on the path to building that trust,” said Emily Washington, SVP – Product Management at Precisely. “We are proud to continue to evolve our unique blend of software, data, and strategic services to meet customers wherever they are on their data integrity journey and help them to stay agile in the dynamic market landscape.” Register for the new data quality webinar series to hear directly from Precisely product experts on how customers can take advantage of these latest updates. 1.2023 Data Integrity Trends & Insights Report, Center for Business Analytics at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in partnership with Precisely – full report coming June 2023 About Precisely Precisely is the global leader in data integrity, providing accuracy, consistency, and context in data for 12,000 customers in more than 100 countries, including 99 of the Fortune 100. Precisely’s data integration, data quality, data governance, location intelligence, and data enrichment products power better business decisions to create better outcomes. Learn more at www.precisely.com.

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