EY eyes back-office transformation with expanded Microsoft partnership

Microsoft will work with EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, to train more than 150,000 of the global consulting firm’s professionals on Microsoft technologies as part of an expansion of the ongoing strategic partnership between the two companies. 

The deepening of the two companies’ existing relationship is aimed at further aligning EY with Microsoft’s cloud technologies to create long-term value for the organisations’ respective clients. 

It is hoped this effort is coupled with an incremental US$15 billion growth opportunity over the next five years. 

Along with training legions of EY professionals across the firm’s global footprint, it will further extend the operation of the EY Microsoft Services Group to provide clients with deeper access to more than 40,000 experienced EY technology consulting professionals to meet changing demands. 

EY, which is headquartered in the UK, announced the launch of the EY Microsoft Services Group in late 2020, with the division focused on helping companies generate value through end-to-end Microsoft-powered digital transformation. 

Building on the existing EY teams leading business consulting capabilities, the dedicated Microsoft Services Group was set up to offer EY clients a new approach to transformation by providing a combination of Microsoft cloud-based services with EY technology consulting and service experience across the globe. 

With the expansion of the organisations’ existing partnership, EY is now dedicating its engineering talent to accelerate the development of key solutions over the next five years.

The increased collaboration will focus on launching new solutions and platforms designed to help organisations address business and societal challenges at scale through digital transformation, the companies said.  

Specifically, the expanded relationship will concentrate on helping clients reinvent back-office operations and innovate in key regulated sectors like financial services, energy, health, government and manufacturing. 

It is anticipated that the collaboration will create managed services that fuel client transformation and unlock additional value.

“Today’s announcement is the next step in our long-standing relationship with EY,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft executive vice president and chief commercial officer. “It means we will be able to provide greater overall technical expertise for our customers’ cloud strategies through new solutions and platforms.  

“In addition, our collaboration will enable customers in regulated industries to bring the power of the cloud to their back-office operations, fundamentally changing how they harness data to drive critical business functions,” he added. 

EY teams already help companies transform their businesses by leveraging the combination of both Microsoft Power Platform and Azure. Now, EY professionals can help to accelerate innovation with what it claims it one of the largest enterprise deployments of Microsoft Power Platform across the globe. 

Additionally, EY and Microsoft are together developing something called the ‘EY Trusted Data Fabric,’ which is described as a “first-of-its-kind enterprise data offering” that will automate the processing and adoption of data and provide access to data with advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered data management capabilities across multiple EY platforms. 

Combining the EY Trusted Data Fabric with Microsoft’s Power Platform is expected to add more capabilities to EY Azure-native managed services platforms. 

Moreover, the companies’ collaboration on cloud solutions for regulated industries will work to integrate existing offerings such as the EY Financial Crime Platform and EY Comply into the vendor’s Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services solutions. 

“The power of the EY and Microsoft relationship is deepening as we help people around the world, and support clients to do more with their data in areas previously underserved by technology, such as tax and finance,” said Andy Baldwin, EY client service global managing partner.  

“We are building on our collaborative success in multiple domains to help businesses and governments save costs, monetise data, realise long-term value and create agility.  

“With this significant expansion of our relationship, we will leverage Azure, Power Platform and combined EY and Microsoft engineering capabilities to support organisations and businesses to modernise back-office operations, leverage the cloud and accelerate transformations with new Microsoft-enabled solutions and platforms,” he added. 

EY entered into an alliance with Microsoft way back in 2018 to work on a financial crime compliance platform designed to target financial crime operations, including transaction monitoring, list screening and ‘know your customer’ (KYC).

In 2019, EY said it had leveraged the Microsoft Azure platform to development a solution designed to help enterprises quantify the impact and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The EY Trusted AI platform was developed on the EY Client Technology Platform with the help of Microsoft Azure, and designed to offer its users an integrated approach to evaluate, monitor and quantify the impact and trustworthiness of AI.