KPMG and Singapore's A*STAR to collaborate on advanced research venture

KPMG in Singapore has agreed on a three-year collaboration deal with the government’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research to pursue advanced tech innovations for the professional services sector.

Operating under Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry as a statutory board, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) seeks to advance scientific discovery and technological innovation through collaborative research with a view to economic growth and social well-being. In a first for the agency, A*STAR will now join forces with KPMG to develop technological innovations in the professional services sector.

The three-year Master Research Collaboration Agreement (MRCA) will see the Big Four firm and A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research initially establish a joint lab for professional services innovation which will focus on the fields on cybersecurity, text-mining, machine translation, and data and human capital analytics – kicking off with a joint S$5 million investment.

In a joint statement, the firm said that the laboratory partnership will draw on the Infocomm Research institute’s capabilities in cyber security and data analytics together with KPMG’s expertise in professional services, with the institute’s state-of-the-art algorithms allowing the Big Four firm to provide clients with advanced cybersecurity services through speedier and more sophisticated incident detection and response mechanisms to cyber-attack.

Further, KPMG will leverage A*STAR’s Science & Engineering Research Council capacities to enhance client solutions through advances in text-mining and machine translation, with text-mining research seeking to process ever larger quantities of text, documents and data to provide greater insights, and developments in Asian-language focused machine translation technology to allow for a more accurate and speedier engine in the translation of business documents to aid multilingual collaboration.

Ong Pang Thye, KPMG Managing Partner in Singapore, said, “Almost 90 percent of Singapore CEOs surveyed in the KPMG CEO Outlook 2018 say that digital disruption presents new opportunities. This opportunity to collaborate with A*STAR’s I²R in creating a data-science powered lab will not just empower our internal processes, but will also allow us to raise our game in serving our clients.”

A*STAR's Science & Engineering Research Council Executive Director Tan Sze Wee responded in kind: “A*STAR is happy to partner KPMG to drive its digitalisation efforts in the professional services sector. This joint lab with KPMG will bring our strong capabilities in the areas of cyber security and data analytics to help address the needs of the professional service industry and its clients.”