Leaders Message

Filling the ‘trust gaps’ and becoming a pillar of society

In July 2023, we announced our medium-term management vision for 2030, ‘Assurance Vision 2030’. This plan outlines the environment surrounding us in 2030 and envisions what the firm should be like in the future. Our goal is to realise PwC’s purpose of ‘building trust in society and solving important problems’, and to remain a pillar of society in any era.

In formulating this vision, we exchanged opinions with a wide range of employees. As a result, we realised that uncertainty in society is increasing, and that various ‘trust gaps’ may emerge.

Indeed, geopolitical risks continue to rise, divisions over issues such as energy and climate change are deepening, and society is rapidly changing due to the dramatic advancement of technologies such as generative AI. Existing rules are not able to adequately govern these changes, resulting in areas where the necessary trust has not been established in society—trust gaps.

The first thing we need to do is to further improve the quality of our audit work. PwC provides consistent, high-quality audits using a globally standardised audit methodology, while taking into account the business environments of each country. In December 2023, PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC and PricewaterhouseCoopers Kyoto merged to form PricewaterhouseCoopers Japan LLC. By combining and further enhancing the quality strengths of both firms, we will continue to strive to provide even higher quality audits.

We will continue to use our accounting audit techniques, which have a history of over 170 years, to contribute not only to accounting audits but also to establishing trust in a broader range of areas. These areas include supporting the disclosure of sustainability information and providing assurance that the information is reliable. Furthermore, we will strengthen our research and development structure for building services that provide trust, such as building a system to ensure the reliability of all data obtained from GPS, IoT and other sources in smart cities. In this way, we will continue to prepare to fill the trust gaps in future society.

The most important element in advancing these initiatives is human resources. We all value a ‘speak up’ culture that encourages everyone to speak up freely about anything, regardless of seniority. In addition, in 2023, we will formulate our own code of conduct (Critical Few Behaviours) through a bottom-up effort by our employees, with ‘evolution, collaboration and challenge’ as our criteria for judgement. We will create an organisation where diverse human resources can thrive while sharing a common understanding, and advance career development that is tailored to each individual.

We will continue to actively listen to the opinions of our stakeholders and make unremitting efforts to fill the trust gaps in society.

1 July 2024

PricewaterhouseCoopers Japan LLC
Chief Executive Officer
Masataka Kubota