Our stakeholders and their expectations

Being successful is not about maximising profits in the short term. It requires building a sustainable business, for all stakeholders.

We operate in an increasingly dynamic environment. This impacts not only our business, but everyone around us, particularly our key stakeholders.

We know that no sustainable organisation can operate in isolation and are acutely aware of our responsibility in meeting and managing stakeholders’ expectations and needs. This awareness, supported by our proactive approach, is underpinned by our purpose and strategy.

Our people

Our people want growth, engagement, and the acknowledgement that they are making a difference.

Our people are the heart of our organisation, and we invest significant resources in making PwC a great place to work.

With over 5 500 professionals in South Africa, and more than 276 000 professionals around the world, we come from many different backgrounds and places. Guided by our purpose, culture and values, we work together to build trust in society and solve problems for clients and the communities in which we live and work. As technology continues to change our world, we are focused on upskilling our people to prepare them for the digital world of tomorrow.

Find out more about how we inspire our people here.

Our clients

Our clients are asking for more value and higher quality, technology-enabled solutions, with cost considerations always top of mind.

In line with our purpose, our aim is to help our clients succeed, and we are continually adapting our services to ensure their sustainability, and ours. Our clients range from leading multinational companies to small start-ups, from family businesses and governments, to charities and private individuals.

Externally, we’re concentrating on what’s most relevant to our clients and their industries. Internally, we’re focusing on operating as one — a single, unified ‘one Africa’ firm with an integrated approach to service delivery. This applies across South Africa, other African countries where we have a presence, and all lines of service.

Front-office transformation

A critical component of our strategy is to evolve our approach to the market and the client experience, powered by technology and data. We have been implementing Salesforce — a global, cloud-based customer relationship management system — across our network and now have 75 000+ users in 19 PwC territories. While the technology is important, this programme is about supporting our client relationships with cutting-edge technology and data.

Salesforce gives us a 360-degree view of our clients and deep insight into our businesses. This transformation is designed to help us collaborate more effectively, create a better client experience, help our people be more efficient, and drive data-led decisions.

Our goal is to use the combination of people and technology to be the most relevant organisation for our stakeholders and one of the most cloud-enabled organisations in the world.

Helping clients deal with challenges and capitalise on opportunities

Our clients see many opportunities driven by technological advances and demographic changes, but also more challenges driven by growing complexity in areas like regulation and geopolitical events.

Our latest Global CEO Survey found that business leaders are increasingly concerned about threats outside their control such as uncertain economic growth, policy uncertainty and social instability. They are also contending with significant gaps in their own capabilities and challenges finding the right talent. Many feel that they are struggling to extract the maximum value out of their financial, client and market data.

It is our role to help clients deal with these challenges, anticipate and manage risks to growth, and help them capitalise on opportunities to innovate and expand. This includes helping clients use emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence successfully and responsibly so they benefit both business and society. This is something we’re delighted to do for a large and growing number of organisations and individuals around the world.

Global platforms

Our global platforms are designed to bridge the gap between clients’ issues and opportunities, recognising the capabilities we offer in these areas. By pulling together as ‘one firm’ and focusing our collective expertise, we are working together to bring a consistent point of view to client conversations. While these platforms are designed to deliver ‘one firm’ to our clients, we have different conversations with our audit and non-audit clients. While the full solution is not appropriate for our audit clients, such clients can still benefit from our insights and thought leadership.

Committed to quality

Quality is the foundation upon which our strategy is built

The quality of our work is central to everything we do, and we invest significant and increasing resources in its continuous enhancement. We are also investing heavily in new technology to drive continuous improvement in the capabilities and effectiveness across our services. We are proud to have been the first of the global professional services networks to have published its internal audit quality inspection results. In South Africa, we are publishing our internal audit quality inspection results for the second year.

Find out our approach to delivering quality.

Society

Society at large demands that we stay true to our core values, to serve the public interest and to contribute towards the growth and development of our country and continent.

For many years, South Africa was ranked as the world’s leading nation when it comes to auditing and corporate reporting standards. This reputation has been tarnished by a string of recent corporate scandals, with auditors standing accused of failing to expose financial irregularities in the companies they audit.

We know that the profession has work to do in rebuilding and regaining lost trust. Regulators and other state and professional institutions set the rules by which we have to operate. To this end, PwC South Africa is a founding member of the South African Auditing Profession Trust Initiative. Its mandate is to identify proactive responses to the concerns prevalent in the financial markets and, importantly, the role that the audit profession has to play in adding value to such markets.

Find out more about SAAPTI.