KPMG enhances client value, onboarding data 87% faster to Digital Gateway with Fabric

In professional services, the most important work rarely happens in isolation. It happens under deadline—when a client needs clarity, a regulator asks for documentation, or a deal hinges on understanding risk across countries. In these moments, teams need absolute confidence in their data: where it came from, who touched it, and whether it can be trusted.

But across the industry, that confidence is often undermined by fragmented systems, with documents, analytics, and calculations scattered across disconnected tools. As expectations for transparency rise and data volumes grow, firms are finding that disconnected data doesn’t just slow work. It puts critical decisions at risk and compromises client trust.

For a professional services firm like KPMG, operating across 138 countries and territories, this challenge compounds across thousands of engagements daily. To ease client and staff collaboration, KPMG built Digital Gateway. Digital Gateway is a one-stop platform where KPMG professionals and clients collaborate in a secure environment to plan, track, exchange, and analyze activities. KPMG applies insights from its own use of Microsoft products to help clients shape business strategy and realize value faster.

“Building and operating Digital Gateway on Microsoft Fabric has given us firsthand insight into what truly enables AI at scale—trusted, unified data; embedded governance; and real-time access. Those lessons directly inform how we help clients modernize with confidence,” says Cherie Gartner, KPMG Microsoft Global Lead Partner.

For example, high-stakes work involving sensitive data—such as M&A or managed services—requires a secure, tightly permissioned workspace. Tax professionals can access sensitive financials and documents; collaborate with specialists and clients; and deliver quickly, all within a governed environment that ensures only the right people see the right data.

Establishing a more unified system 

KPMG Digital Gateway delivered a consistent collaboration experience for users, while the underlying tax data foundation had developed over time across multiple technologies, including Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL, Azure Data Factory, Excel, Alteryx, and custom integrations. As adoption expanded, managing data across that landscape became more complex, requiring additional coordination for preparation, movement, and onboarding. This created opportunities to simplify workflows, reduce duplication, and support more standardized data models for advanced analytics and AI.

KPMG needed a cloud data backbone to unify preparation, pipelines, analytics, and reporting. This would allow Digital Gateway to operate with the resilience, compliance, and real-time insight that global, modern tax work demands.

“For a global tax practice, consistency and security aren’t negotiable. We needed one place where we could train people, secure data globally, and plug our engines into a common interface,” says Rafiq Jalal, Principal, Cloud & Data Strategy at KPMG.

One platform, one source of truth

KPMG replatformed the Digital Gateway data warehouse and analytics layer on Microsoft Fabric to create one source of truth that connects data engineering, analytics, and visualization with AI assistance. Now information flows without delay and without complicated handoffs. “Microsoft Fabric gives KPMG Tax professionals the common data platform they need. It provides a highly secure, standard interface across our global footprint, enabling our teams to focus on what matters to clients and drive client confidence,” explains Jalal.

Fabric consolidates workloads into a single platform that interoperates with KPMG’s existing tech stack. Fabric handles storage, compute, transformation, and analytics. This created a common substrate on which:

• Tax computation engines connect directly to authoritative data.
• Analytics and visualization layers access data without duplication.
• Data engineering is performed centrally with standardized pipelines.
• Security policies apply uniformly across all data operations.

This unified model also helps KPMG support a global tenant strategy. Teams across countries can operate on the same platform while keeping data within local datacenters to meet jurisdictional requirements. Governance remains unified, but operations respect regional compliance boundaries.

Governance and outbound controls keep client data contained

Tax work spans jurisdictions with unique confidentiality requirements. Fabric met KPMG’s strict global security posture with workspace isolation, centralized policy enforcement, and enterprise-grade governance.

KPMG collaborated closely with Microsoft to validate features such as outbound access protection. These are controls that help ensure data created or processed within a workspace can only be written to approved destinations. This gives leaders the assurance that practitioners, automation, or integrated tools cannot accidentally send data outside governed boundaries.

“Client trust starts with security. Every engagement needs clear data boundaries and strong guardrails, so information flows only where intended. With Microsoft Fabric, we strengthen governance across engagements while enabling teams to deliver insights with confidence,” says Jayakumar Pankajatchan, Distinguished Engineer at KPMG.

Self-service provisioning cuts onboarding time

KPMG’s IT team targeted friction that had slowed client delivery. The primary friction was workspace provisioning, handoffs between tools, and manual file movement. With Fabric, workspace provisioning is nearly instantaneous through automation and platform APIs. Ticket queues are replaced with a self-service experience.

“Before Fabric, teams might wait a couple of days while tickets ran and Bicep spun up resources in Azure. With Fabric and our onboarding automation, they start working with data in about 2 hours,” says Pankajatchan.

On the practitioner side, standardized connections and a central processing environment mean teams connect directly to sources and work in one place. No more exporting from multiple engines, reconciling in spreadsheets, and then reimporting to visualize.

“Microsoft Fabric lets us shift our time from moving data to focusing on improving work and outcomes. The time we used to spend on operations now goes into adding more value to our client work,” explains Maximillian Ksoll, Senior Manager, Tax Transformation at KPMG.

Faster start, less operational effort

The impact of KPMG’s modernization is showing, even as the global rollout continues. With a unified data layer in Fabric, Digital Gateway operates on consistent, governed data that reduces tool sprawl, minimizes handoffs, and accelerates how quickly tax teams can move from data intake to analysis. Early signals suggest that bottlenecks that once slowed onboarding, modeling, and review cycles are shrinking significantly.

Onboarding clients and provisioning environments for new engagements—which previously required tickets and setup across multiple tools—decreased 87% from about 16 hours to 2 hours. This allows tax professionals to begin working to meet client needs almost immediately.

The same consolidation is improving how practitioners spend their time. By replacing manual file movement, stitching data across systems, or recreating models in desktop tools, the IT team estimates at least a 25% reduction in operational effort, enabling teams to spend more time on higher-value work with clients.

Building a foundation

KPMG sees these early improvements as the beginning of a longer transformation. With a unified data backbone, the firm can now scale AI-assisted workflows in data analytics, bring more service lines onto Digital Gateway, and enable richer modeling across jurisdictions.

“Fabric is giving us the foundation to innovate continuously—one place to plug in analytics, engines, and the next generation of AI experiences,” says Jalal.

For organizations considering a similar shift, Pankajatchan emphasizes treating Fabric not as a migration project, but as a strategic reset. “Don’t view Fabric as another tool—it is something that’s consistently improving with automatic upgrade cycles, and it is ultimately the strategic core of your data platform. Invest early in governance and design for scale from day one,” Pankajatchan advises.

With Fabric in place, KPMG is positioning Digital Gateway—and the global tax teams who rely on it—to operate with greater agility and deliver deeper insights to clients. This is a platform ready for the next decade of AI-driven tax innovation.

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