With the digital era taking over information services, Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch multinational, sees ample scope to ramp up its digital offerings in India, which it considers to be a real growth engine.
The information services provider — which provides expertise through its four verticals of tax and accounting; legal; health and Global risk and compliance — wants to go digital in a big way and align the Indian operations with the global trend in terms of share of digital revenues, said Shireesh Sahai, Chief Executive Officer, Wolters Kluwer India.
In the next five years, Wolters Kluwer India aims to take the share of digital revenues to 85 per cent, Sahai told BusinessLine in an interview here.
This aspiration is significant as two years ago almost the entire revenue for Wolters Kluwer India came from physical products, including medical and other professional books. Now, digital is growing at a fast clip, prompting the senior management to set its sight at ahigher level for growth in digital solutions based revenues.
Physical to digital “Ten years ago, only15 per cent of our global revenues came from digital. Today, in this digital era, it is 85 per cent. My vision is to align our Indian operations to this global level of 80-85 per cent in the next five years,” Sahai said.
Sahai said he sees the smartphone revolution in the country as the biggest opportunity for Wolters Kluwer. The smartphone revolution could be gauged from the fact that India has now surpassed the US to become the second largest smartphone market, he said.
“All the information services that we provide are compatible with smart phones. We have so many global products that can fit well into our India growth aspirations. The advantage for us is the positives such as young India and the increased smart phone penetration in India.”
Sahai said Wolters Kluwer is now focused on bringing more digital tools to the market. “We are trying to bring a start up kind of culture,” Sahai said, adding, “Wolters Kluwer is now a 174-year old start up!”
For the chartered accountants fraternity, Wolters Kluwer has come up with an integrated end-to-end offering ‘Ifirm’ that would help CA firms become future ready.
Already, 200 CA firms have signed up in nine months for this annual subscription-based solution that is expected to make practice management more streamlined through cloud-based software, Sahai said.
It also aids in measuring profitability in a better way and help track jobs that are flowing into such firms.
Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Tax & Accounting, Wolters Kluwer said Wolters Kluwer also plan to bring to India its Team Mate solution focused on internal audit.
“Post the new company law, large number of firms has come under the ambit of internal audit. For CA firms, this (internal audit) is becoming a big practice area. This is a huge opportunity and CA firms will use that tool (Team Mate) for performing internal audit,” Abraham said.
“CA firms are realising they need to modernise. CA 2.0 is an aspirational concept. Our first focus is on top eight metro cities. We want to own the CA space”, Sahai said.