Sandbox - creating new value for our clients and new experiences for our people

Setting the scene

As a leading professional services firm, we want to help our clients solve their biggest challenges. Niall and James, from our Structured Finance Group identified a problem facing a number of their clients. Our clients need to be able to process documents in a range of formats - with agility and at scale - and were looking to us to find news ways to do this using the latest technology. This would bring efficiencies, saving them time and money in what has historically been a manual and time consuming process.

Niall and James were passionate about solving this problem and submitted an idea into our internal innovation programme, Sandbox, to help them tackle the issue. Through Sandbox, Niall and James have been given the freedom, structure and expertise to develop their new venture.

Sandbox creating new value

"There’s been a number of big ticket changes in PwC I think over the last few years - flexible working and new approaches to different things - and I think PwC has always kind of led on that."

Niall Quilligan, PwC

What we did

During the Sandbox programme in Spring 2018, Niall and James were partnered with Curvestone, a company who build digital products and specialise in Machine Learning and AI. Using problem centric thinking and the latest technology advances in this space, they were able to test the application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to process documents at scale. Working together, we are now breaking new ground in how machine learning can be applied to document scanning and analysis.

Making a difference

This is a great example of how, as a firm, we are driving technological advances and solving clients’ problems. Niall and James identified a real client problem and saw an opportunity to do something differently. Our intrapreneurship programme, Sandbox, is helping people like Niall and James to take ownership and responsibility in solving business problems through technology.