Strategy & Leadership

Rethinking professional services in an age of disruption

March 26, 2018

Global

March 26, 2018

Global
Kevin Plumberg

Contributor

Kevin was a member of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Thought Leadership team in North America and is based in San Francisco. From 2014-2017, he was based in The Economist’s Singapore office and led multi-year integrated content programmes such as Growth Crossings, a series about the new rules of global trade, and the Producers of Tomorrow, an initiative about the future of manufacturing. Prior to joining the EIU, he spent two years as Vice President, Institutional Marketing at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company. In that role, he produced and edited white papers, website articles and newsletters aimed at some of Asia’s biggest institutional investors. Kevin also spent 10 years as a journalist covering financial markets, economics and policy for Reuters in Singapore, Hong Kong and New York. As a correspondent and editor, he covered the global financial crisis from Wall Street and its aftermath in Asia, where he led market-moving coverage of the region’s economic policymakers.

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Businesses face a marketplace being rapidly transformed by digitisation, which is causing fundamental changes to what makes a firm competitive. The pace of change is frenetic.

With the help of machine learning, some law firms are reinventing themselves as legal services software companies that sell licences rather than advice. Large global accounting and consulting firms are taking some of their services in a similar direction, for instance in the area of regulatory compliance. Some manufacturing firms have expanded into digital services, offering other firms help with supply-chain management, product design and prototyping.

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