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Deloitte develops audit technology for smaller firms to use
Deloitte plans to begin offering auditing technology next week to smaller accounting firms through a new venture it recently formed.
Deloitte created Auvenir as an in-house startup and tasked it with developing its own auditing technology that could be offered to small firms. Next week, Deloitte plans to announce the North American launch of the technology, known as the Auvenir Audit Smarter platform, which leverages artificial intelligence to help auditors with their work.
Auvenir doesn't use Deloitte's own proprietary auditing technology, but it was developed with input from Deloitte's audit team. The Auvenir team also interviewed a number of small to midsized audit firms and their clients across North America to identify the issues they encounter with audits. It has been beta testing the Audit Smarter technology with several auditing firms in Canada.
Deloitte global audit and assurance innovation leader Chris Thatcher said he was tasked by his boss with coming up with the kind of technology that a startup might develop in competition with Deloitte. “One of the things he was quite concerned about, that kept him up at nights, was a couple of guys in a garage thinking about how you could do audit completely differently to how we would have done it traditionally in the past,” he said. “My boss basically challenged me to think about defending ourselves from disruption.”
His first hire for the new venture was Pete Myers, who became CEO of Auvenir. “We hired Pete to essentially build a team of startup guys, people from an entrepreneurial background and a technology background,” said Thatcher. “We did think quite long and hard about whether we should actually bring in some of the Deloitte auditors, but one of the things we realized early on was that at least in the early stages of the company we wanted to keep it autonomous, so we purposely did not bring in the Deloitte auditors other than from an advisory capacity just to make sure this could be ramped up just as quickly as it could be ramped up. But we've largely kept the business to operate as independently as we possibly could and create an independent venture which is now being launched to market as Auvenir.”
Myers set up the unit as a kind of skunkworks within Deloitte to develop the technology, and he ended up dealing with many other auditing firms besides Deloitte.
“From our perspective at Auvenir, we spoke to hundreds of auditors and clients, primarily in that part of the market, the smaller auditing firms and smaller clients, and what we found is that a lot of the technology that's available to them is not the right size technology for the size of engagements they're dealing with,” he said. “A lot of the technology is a little bit more complex and cumbersome for what they need. It's really about building something that's the right size for small engagements. Those small engagements could be taken on by a small accounting firm, or they could be small engagements that are being taken on by a larger firm. The other play in here is we want to open this up for any accounting firm. We're not restricting who uses it. It's available to any firm out there.”
Thatcher wanted Myers to take a fresh approach to the audit market. “What we challenged Pete's team to look at was the problem of a new entrant to the audit industry, and we purposely didn't ask them to think about what technology Deloitte could use,” he said. “We said we really want you to take a different view. If you were to enter the audit market today, what would you do as a startup, as a new entrant? Essentially what they're doing is not just about technology. It's also about creating a different type of business model, which is really creating a technology platform that audit firms will use, not just Deloitte, but all audit firms could use, and really trying to create a compelling platform for the industry, for the profession.”
