Grant Thornton launches its new “Digital” division

The new division will be led by Roberto Antoniotti, an experienced manager with proven skills in the area of digital innovation and business development accrued in international companies, who will work as CEO of GT Digital alongside with Alessandro Leone - already Partner of Grant Thornton FAS in charge of IT services - as Chief OPerating Officer (COO). Gabriele Labombarda, currently IBC Director for Italy and member of the Grant Thornton global IBC Steering Committee, will instead take on the role of Chairman of the newly incorporated company.

More in detail, the new Grant Thornton division originates from the awareness that the so-called “digital transformation” exposed a market scenario characterised, still to date - and even more so in Italy - by a strong gap, including a regulatory one, that needs to be closed, as many businesses are not only failing to ride the wave of the industrial revolution but, due to an untimely regulatory adjustment, are also suffering from the lack of market competitiveness.

Thanks to the new Digital division, Grant Thornton aims to support the technological development and innovation of Italian businesses, helping them seize the opportunities offered by their reference context.

The action plan of the new division focuses on 3 different business areas: Cyber Security, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Data Driven Company. The first macro-area will focus in particular on the definition of cybersecurity products and services for various industries (finance, insurance, Telco, airports, manufacturing).

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) area will be dedicated to the automation of business processes through the application of “smart” software, i.e. Bots, to perform repetitive tasks in an automatic and quicker way (e.g. massive interactions which require people to access external systems) interacting with IT applications emulating human interaction and thus allowing businesses to dedicate human resources with their specific skills to higher value added activities.

Lastly, the Data Driven Company area will focus on the collection and use of data to support corporate decisions, which all too often are based on instinct; thanks to digital technology and to data modelling tools, data can be interpreted to support the growth of companies in all their areas, from marketing to finance, from sales to product development.

With a view to the launch of GT Digital, Grant Thornton entered into a series of agreements with specialised partners, to offer its clients the best practices on the market. Among these is a partnership with Automation Anywhere, global leader in RPA, thanks to which corporate clients will be able to contact Grant Thornton digital employees via a dedicated digital platform on a pay-per-use basis, removing the barriers currently in place to a large-scale implementation of RPA.

Gabriele Labombarda, partner of Bernoni Grant Thornton and Chairman of Grant Thornton Digital declared: “We welcome Roberto most warmly, as a highly skilled manager with proven experience in the field of innovation. This is an important addition to our organisation and I am sure he will contribute to its growth. Roberto will lead a new important and strategic unit with a huge growth potential”.

“I am truly honoured - declared Roberto Antoniotti, CEO of Grant Thornton Digital - to join Grant Thornton and seize this new and challenging opportunity to lead its digital division. Our target clients will be all Italian businesses, as well as Italian entities of foreign multinational companies; our work is only just beginning and we will be focussing in particular on a few industries, namely finance, with banks and insurance companies, energy and retail (e-commerce, etc.), but potentially also to public administrations, particularly now that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan underlined the need to innovate and digitalise processes”.