Our team is about to complete a more than year-long project where we created the underlying principles, roadmap and conceptual prototype for making the decision-making process of the Government of the Republic and ministries more data-driven. In addition, we prepared a comprehensive methodology and working tools for local governments to assess risks and crises and improve preparedness, as well as established uniform bases for quantifying disaster losses in Estonia. The project was initiated by the State Chancellery and financed by the Directorate General for Structural Reform Support (DG Reform) of the European Commission.
Unstable national security and economic environment conditions have brought many new concerns to the leaders of different organisations. Reacting to these new needs, we expanded our portfolio of risk management services by adding a crisis management consulting service and helped various organisations in creating crisis management principles, assessing preparedness for crises, and preparing business continuity plans.
In summer, in cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, we started a long-term development project financed by the Directorate General for Structural Reform Support (DG Reform) of the European Commission to develop a joint vision and action plans for the Real Time Economy of the Baltic Sea countries. In addition to the vision, the team made up of experts from seven countries is also creating validation models for new Real Time Economy ideas, a cross-border e-Receipt validation model. In parallel we are also mapping and piloting Artificial Intelligence application possibilities in Eesti.ee's digital gateway for enterprises.
We started cooperation with Gofore, a well-known and recognised Finnish software company, and successfully participated in the tender of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, which resulted in the Ministry concluding a framework agreement with seven partners, who will undertake various analyses, studies, prototypes and pilots in the realm of Real Time Economy (RTE), Single Digital Gateway (SDG) of the European Union, Eesti.ee's digital gateway for enterprises and life event services. The volume of commissioned works is up to 12 million euros during the next four years. As such, we are making our worthy contribution to the continued development of Estonia's digital success story.
Throughout several projects, we analysed possibilities for the systematic development of quality management in the field of health care at the institutional level. We advised the Health Insurance Fund regarding the consideration of treatment quality from the insurer's point of view and explored the possibilities of using the Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM) and Experience Measures (PREM) information to improve the quality of healthcare. It is expected that aspects related to quality will receive more attention in the financing of treatment in the future. Considering the certain universality of the challenges in the field, the wider PwC network has also played an important role in the respective projects through the involvement of colleagues from PwC Australia, PwC Netherlands, PwC Switzerland, PwC Spain and PwC Denmark.
On behalf of the Ministry of Finance, we analysed the capabilities of the Prosecutor's Office from an organisational point of view, including identifying the variability in the workload of different regions and fields of work and proposed optimisation alternatives of the organisation in terms of workstreams, structure and location. We made suggestions regarding the optimal and effective use of the assets of the Prosecutor's Office, workload, distribution of positions, the optimality of management levels and the need for structural changes.
We supported our internal audit and risk management clients in the financial sector with the key topics of the past year – suitability of the general risk management framework and policies in changed circumstances, prevention of money laundering, assessment and management of risks associated with outsourcing, compliance with investment restrictions and business continuity.
In addition to our annual CEO Survey, we launched a new initiative to collect the opinions of CFOs in order to discuss the changes in the economy more regularly and from different perspectives. Together with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, we conducted a survey of financial executives – CFO Insights 2022 Survey. More than 300 CFOs participated in the survey, and we discussed the results and trends in a panel discussion at the PwC conference "All necessary knowledge of financial accounting, taxes and ESG". Based on the survey results, CFOs are most afraid of economic uncertainty, market volatility and the geopolitical situation.
Data analysis is at the heart of our activities. One challenge is always the availability of data and its processing, which takes time and is often cumbersome. We developed two new digital solutions for the PwC family, which help people in our different service lines to automatically order documents from the Estonian Business Register and analyse company data. From October 1, 2022, the business register publishes data sets that are mostly updated once a day, which enabled us to quickly develop and design an analysis service that allows exploring the financial results of individual companies or a group of companies. Such digital solutions help us focus on creating added value in client projects and spend less time on data mining.
As part of continuous search of digitisation and innovation, we explored and discovered the opportunities of metaverse. We organised our first team meetings in the virtual world PwC Global Campus Metaverse and discussed with the team what experiences this phenomenon offers us already now and could potentially create in the future. We were brave and showed the world of the metaverse to our clients at the PwC annual conference. If in 2022 we were able to experience this among our own team, but in 2023 we hope to invite our customers and partners to discover the possibilities of the virtual world as well.
