[MUSIC] Welcome back. In this video, you'll have an opportunity to meet some of our PWC Professionals, who'll share with you how the data and analytics framework is applied in their area of expertise. >> Hello, I'm John Gotts. I help clients solve complex tax challenges by helping to deliver quality data to the right people and enable them with effective processes and technology. After changing my career focus a few years ago, I have a significant focus on data and analytics to improve how tax professionals work. This is fundamental in tax. We must apply the law to the specific circumstances, and use data for a tax payer to determine their obligation to pay tax under the law. At PWC we think of data as the life blood of tax professionals. Without access to quality data, our ability to provide advice and guide the business in making decisions is greatly diminished. For several years, many tax professionals have worked with data in whatever format was provided to them. This means highly skilled tax professionals must spend time collecting and manually manipulating information for their use. Changes to the source data often require a rework of these manual processes. Not a great use of time for these subject matter experts. These challenges play out both within PWC and at our clients. The solutions we bring to clients focused on people, process, data and technology. Our solutions usually touch on all four areas and almost definitely will touch on data. Helping to deliver quality information to tax professionals when they need it is a key element of our work. There are many ways we approach these challenges, including transforming the raw data, improving the way in which non-standard data is collected and using analytics to help visualize or bring a different perspective to the data. Tax is a challenging and technical area of study which traditionally has not how it's been well understood throughout organizations. Analytics is helping to bring tax to the forefront since a well crafted analytics report can communicate in complex content and improve the ability of the business to make decisions. Taxes are deadline driven environment. So, having a clear understanding of the organization's obligations and tracking the status of those is imperative. For many organizations, this is a manual and time consuming process. We've helped many organizations to leverage technology to reduce the effort and risk associated with these activities. In addition, the technology allows us to standardize the collection of data across the globe in real time. An immediate benefit is that we can generate analytics on data and produce reports that allow people to visualize the information in a different way. For example, we use a world map to display the status of tax filings in each jurisdiction around the world. This can bring life to information which historically has been viewed in a two dimensional spreadsheet and is usually several days out of date. Transparency and information reporting are high in the agenda of tax authorities around the world. This requires tax professionals to produce reports for new and changing requirements. This is extremely challenging using traditional approaches. We have helped several organizations to rethink the approach to collecting information for these reports and reduce the effort and risk in the process. Having collected the information we also build analytics to give them deeper insight into the information so that they can consider how the information may be perceived. This allows them to proactively plan and provide better insight and support to the business. There are diverse skill sets needed to solve problems using data and analytics. For me, most importantly is communication. We often need to address business, finance, technology, and tax technical considerations to solve these problems. It's rare that one person has the professional experiences to solve the problem alone. As a result, communicating within a team of diverse individuals is critical. >> Hello, I'm Vikas Agarwal. I started my career focused on using data analytics to help clients solve problems. This meant thinking about better ways to collect data, analyze it, and present it in meaningful ways. Solving problems using an analytical approach is a differentiator for professionals today. There's such demand for people who can understand business problems, and then apply analytics. The ability to use machines and computers to help us process information has rapidly increased in the last 10 years. Every time we look at a problem today we have to think about how we can collect more information, how we can process it and visualize it so we can get a better answer in the end. I can't think of a use case with our clients that can't be enhanced. By using more analytical techniques that are available today. Personally I work in financial crime. And I helped our client used data to prevent money laundering, fraud, and identify bad actors externally and internally. We used huge amounts of data, customer data, transactional information To find needles in the haystack that lead to the identification of suicidal issues like human trafficking, narcotics dealing, and tax evasion. Today we're using web crawling and machine learning to identify events and potential threats to our society using more data than ever before. As the need for more analytics increases, we need to raise the IQ of every professional to be able to conduct sophisticated analytics and breakdown traditional skills of barriers. >> In this video you heard how we apply data and analytics to solve problems. You also heard about the key skills needed to do so. You can learn more about data and analytics careers and roles at PWC by reading the white paper that follows this video. [MUSIC]
