India: 'Big Four' Auditor EY to Hire 2K Employees to Develop in Blockchain, AI

“Big Four” auditor Ernst & Young (EY) will hire 2,000 employees in India to expand its digital solution services across blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and tax technologies. The news was first reported by English-language, Indian news outlet The Economic Times and posted to EY India’s official Twitter Nov. 23.

According to the Times, EY will be recruiting the new talent over the next three years, in parallel to its global plans to invest $1 billion in “new technologies, client services, innovation and the EY ecosystem” over a two fiscal year period, as of July 2018.

Ram Sarvepalli, leader of EY Advisory Services India and partner of EY Emerging Markets Centre, has contextualized the auditor’s bid to pursue blockchain and other bleeding-edge technologies in India as part of a wide-ranging digitalization and automation trend across both government and the private sector:

“There is significant capital available for new startups and big Indian companies are investing in digital [and] this is triggering a massive opportunity and the need for hiring digital talent [...] [D]igital governance and citizen services are themes that almost every state is focusing on.”

EY reportedly has over 2,200 people working on digital and technology solutions across service lines in India, and the auditor is said to have hired “several new partners” to expand its capacity in technology consulting. According to the Times, the auditor is the market leader in advisory services in India, working with over 100 local partners and seeing a “steady increase” in large-scale, complex innovation projects.

As a Cointelegraph analysis piece outlined in October, EY has been working to legitimize and foster enterprise blockchain adoption at scale by developing sector-specific auditing tools such as its in-house block explorer, dubbed “EY Blockchain Analyzer.”

The auditor has also conducted research into blockchain-based platforms and crypto-related models, recently identifying and reporting risks around Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) in particular.

As reported this fall, fintech solutions are thriving under the aegis of the Indian government’s “Digital India” campaign, most recently with the launch of a nationwide digital payments project from Hitachi Payments and the State Bank of India (SBI).