Alliance helps businesses comply with GDPR

A new alliance between KPMG and Google is offering Irish businesses cost effective tools to enhance customer experience and comply with the new GDPR data privacy rules.

"The alliance will help organisations transform their business and operating models with secure cloud computing, machine learning, enterprise mobility and advanced analytics technologies," says KPMG partner Paul Toner.

“It is fundamentally about helping businesses to transform,” he adds. “This transformation tends to be focused on three areas – growth, reducing risk, and reducing cost. In many cases it can cover more than one of these, growing the business at the same time as reducing cost, for example. We have come together with Google technology to leverage its technology in areas like natural language and data analytics. The solutions are based on a combination of Google’s secure, robust cloud platform and KPMG’s business and process insights and expertise.”

The solutions which will be developed can apply to any sector but at present the focus is on four key areas: financial services, healthcare, the public service, and aviation leasing.

"Aviation leasing is a very important sector here in Ireland, " Toner explains. "The need to transform the healthcare system is well recognised and technology will play a key role there. In financial services there is pressure to deliver improved customer experience and 24/7 services while still holding market position. And in the public sector there is need to deliver more services to more people within existing resources. Digital technology will play a key role in meeting all of those challenges."

Two KPMG solutions available already are KPMG Intelligent Interactions for creating a differentiated customer experience, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Assessment and Compliance solution for managing customer data and privacy.

KPMG Intelligent Interactions automates and enhances customer interactions by using machine technology, including Google Cloud Speech-to-Text and Translate APIs, to determine customer sentiment and intent. It links with other intelligent automation technologies, such as robotic process automation, to help clients automate customer responses and redesign business processes.

For example, voice automation – with capabilities to understand, translate, and identify sentiment and intent – can augment interactions with customers.

Virtual assistants – built with Google Cloud machine learning language capabilities, including DialogFlow, Speech APIs, and Translate APIs – can anticipate customer needs based on predefined triggers.

“Net Promoter Score is now a key performance indicator for most organisations,” Toner points out. “It reflects what customers or users think about them. That can be a banking customer or a hospital patient. Our solution can detect customer sentiment and help organisations redesign products and services or the way they provide them based on the experience of the people who use them. These insights help deliver growth at the same time as reducing cost and risk.”

GDPR compliance

The second solution is in the highly topical area of GDPR, he continues. “Our experience indicates that lots of organisations didn’t invest adequately in preparations for May 25th [the day GDPR came into force]. Unfortunately, we will probably have to await a few high-profile non-compliance events before many organisations fully appreciate the need to have the proper systems in place. GDPR will inevitably move higher up the agenda and organisations will need support to be as compliant with it as they are with the other regulations that govern them.”

The solution combines KPMG’s domain, regulation, customer analytics, enterprise data strategy and compliance knowledge with Google’s machine learning based cloud technology, data management and advanced analytics products to deliver a sustainable platform with single customer views, legal and compliance support, end-to-end modelling platforms, cloud data warehousing and a secure data infrastructure. It helps reduce the costs associated with ongoing compliance, streamline compliance efforts, enable data-driven customer service improvements and support analytics-powered processing.

“Organisations need to get a single consolidated view of the data they hold if they are to be compliant and traditional platforms don’t offer that,” Toner explains. “The Google platform supports that single view while our solution also offers legal and compliance support. Most of all, it’s an affordable and viable solution to deliver true GDPR compliance to organisations of all sizes.”

Affordability is key, according to Toner. “Compliance is not easy. You can’t really blame the companies who haven’t invested enough in it. It’s expensive and costly in terms of time and resources. That’s why we have combined our expertise with Google’s technology to create a viable and cost-effective solution. We are already engaging with a number of clients in relation to our GDPR Assessment and Compliance and we expect to see it being adopted by quite a few organisations in the coming months. The alliance with Google enables us to develop really strong offerings for our clients and these two are just the first of many more to come.”