KPMG and Imperial College sign £20M big data deal

The professional services firm KPMG is to invest £20 million in setting up a Centre for Advanced Business Analytics at Imperial College London.

“More data has been created in the last two years than in the rest of history,” said KPMG’s UK chairman, Simon Collins. “That’s amazing, but we can all drown in data unless we know what to do with it. Our collaboration with Imperial is about developing the people and skills to use that data to drive new industries and new services.”

The centre will focus on the five areas of analytical methods and tools for using big data for analysis of business capital; growth opportunities; skills; operations; and resilience.

Over eight years the two organisations aim to train over 800 PhD students and to complete 15 - 20 projects per year. Two research areas have been identified already, with the team starting work on developing algorithms for uncovering fraud in the banking, and to help online retailers get a better understanding of purchasing behaviour.

The benefit for KPMG is threefold, said Mark Kennedy, Associate Professor at Imperial and Director for the new centre. “KPMG will have early access to the newest ideas in the field, it can chase applications sooner than anyone else, and it will have the option of licencing and purchasing the intellectual property created.”

Any IP will be owned by Imperial, with KPMG having preferential rights to take out a licence.

“We think this is the way things will be done in the future,” said Kennedy. “Doing research this way solves the funding questions.” Kennedy credited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab, as a big influence on how the collaboration is structured.

KPMG and Imperial said there will also be a Global Data Observatory, housed on Imperial’s campus in South Kensington, to bring data visualisation software to bear on complex data.

Alwin Magimay, head of digital and analytics for KPMG in the UK, said this will translate complicated data into ideas with commercial potential. 

“We are still at the silent movie era with respect to evolution of big data,” he said. “Together with Imperial, we will break new ground with a simple objective of generating new insights to create new business value for our clients.”