Erica deVry, Big4.com Staff Reporter
Gartner s report titled ‘MarketScope’ for Global Finance Management Consulting Services has given a “Strong Positive” rating to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC). Gartner s MarketScope report studies and compares the capabilities of nine leading finance management consulting service providers for their services across the globe. The evaluation criteria include market responsiveness, market understanding, customer experience, geographical capabilities, product/service, offering strategy, and vertical-industry strategy.
In the assessment in the MarketScope, "Strong Positive" is the highest possible rating and, according to Gartner, a "Strong Positive" is deemed a provider of strategic products and services or solutions where existing customers will be eager to continue with planned investments while potential customers can consider this vendor as a good choice for strategic investments.
Martin Petry, PwC partner and Global Finance Consulting Leader, said “Our focus is always on our clients and how we can best serve them, and we believe Gartner s findings reflect our dedication to client service. We bring deep and mature finance consulting capabilities to the market, and continue to grow and enhance our global Consulting practice to bring our clients the right teams with the right expertise to meet their unique needs and requirements.”
Finance management services covers the entire service life cycle: assess, design, build and run. These services focus only on the assessment and designing phases, and they also encompass any type of consultation which is directed at improving finance function and its performance. These consulting services mostly include the following:
• Finance transformation
• Change management
• Performance improvement
• Business process improvement
• Finance advisory
• Governance, risk and compliance
• Finance and accounting (F&A) shared services
The MarketScope report and Gartner research and reference checks say that clients mostly want a mix of finance and IT expertise from their service providers. If the service providers are also able to offer "soft skills," such as knowledge transfers and relationship chemistry, the clients are more than happy and mostly hire them again and even recommend them to others.
PwC US Advisory partner Mike Boyle, said “Our finance management consulting teams around the world work effectively together to help our multinational clients address the complexities of an ever-changing global business environment. We feel the Gartner "strong positive" rating is a confirmation that we are successfully helping our clients by working collaboratively with them to assess and enhance their business and finance processes -- integrating people, process and technology to help transform their finance function ."