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The organizers of a high-profile financial industry event in London have issued an award to PwC for its custom software development work.

PwC, a Big Four member, nabbed the 2023 Digital Innovation of the Year award at the International Accounting Forum & Awards for three internal software projects. Those projects all focused on making the work of the firm’s financial auditors easier using AI and other automation technologies.

Companies whose shares trade on a stock exchange are required to disclose their finances to investors. Such companies hire a Big Four consultancy, often PwC, to audit their books and make sure everything is in order.

That task is carried out by PwC’s financial auditors, who must navigate complex rules and regulations as part of their work. To make those employees more productive, PwC developed an AI-powered search engine that speeds up the task of navigating audit regulators.

The search engine allows the firm’s staffers to quickly look up rules that are relevant to a client project. Staffers can also upload their own regulatory datasets and run queries against it to find key details.

The second software project that factored into PwC’s award win saw the firm develop an AI-powered predictive analytics application. That application can assist financial auditors with the task of predicting a company’s future income. 

Meanwhile, the third tool that helped PwC nab the award focuses on financial disclosures. Those are snippets of text at the end of a company’s financial statement that disclose important business developments relevant to investors.

According to PwC, the tool allows auditors to review financial disclosures for issues faster. The firm has plans to enhance the software down the road with features that will allow it to automate additional tasks related to sustainability and climate reporting.

PwC originally made almost all its revenue from auditing large companies’ books. But over the past couple of decades, the Big Four member has expanded its focus to other areas including the software consulting market.

The firm’s newly secured 2023 Digital Innovation of the Year award will be a marketing boon not only for its auditing business but its software consulting unit as well. The latter unit, after all, no doubt played a key role in developing PwC’s award-winning AI tools.

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