Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
2025 Global Leadership Summit - AI and Development Finance: Mark Fitzgerald on Global Leadership and Workforce Transformation
What if artificial intelligence could reshape the world of development finance in ways you've never imagined? Join us for an engaging conversation with Mark Fitzgerald from KPMG as he shares his journey through 25 years of international development finance. Mark's perspective on the transformative power of AI in the job market is both enlightening and challenging, with a statistic that suggests 70% of jobs could be affected by 2030. We explore the intricate blending of stakeholders from governments to NGOs and private enterprises; all united to achieve social impact. Mark's insights reveal how AI not only disrupts but also presents vast opportunities for workforce transformation and sustainable development.
The episode also uncovers the essential qualities that define global leadership today. We touch on how strategic patience and accountability can transform public sector operations, enhancing trust and efficiency. Mark emphasizes the significance of nurturing trust and compassion in leadership, drawing from his rich experience at KPMG. He invites us to consider the interconnectedness of our actions and their global outcomes, highlighting the importance of a global mindset. By embracing diverse focuses like climate resilience and market accessibility, we learn how these elements can shape our world. This episode offers a compelling look into the future, urging us to lead with purpose and empathy.
#KPMG #ideagen #gls2025
Follow Mark's LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-fitzgerald-3aa30b8/
View more from KPMG International Development Assistance Services here: https://kpmg.com/xx/en/what-we-do/industries/government/international-development-assistance-services-idas.html
Watch the entire 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit
Welcome to IdeaGen TV, honored and thrilled to have with me here today Mark Fitzgerald from KPMG. Mark, welcome. Thank you, george. Always a pleasure. Great to have you here with us today. Mark, live for IdeaGen TV and the Catalyze podcast as well. Mark, as we're looking at this year I mean my gosh, we're already into February and streaming into the rest of the year. What inspired you to pursue a career in international development finance and how did it end up with you leading KPMG's practice in this area?
Speaker 2:Thank you. So I'll try and fit that into a few seconds if I could, because it's over three decades and it's kind of evolved over those three decades. I would say it boils down to two particular things. One is I fundamentally believe that development comes from within. Sustainable development comes from within and it has to be led by locally led initiatives and largely, I see the private sector is hugely influential in providing that sustainability. So a lot of what I focused on personally and through KPMG is how we can unlock that engagement through the private sector to achieve social impact and development over time. And I think the other big theme is by doing that you build trust. So with trust it underpins everything that we do. So if you can marry those two, I think for me that's a pretty good, effective focus for a career.
Speaker 1:That's incredible, and we're talking 25 years over 25 years of experience. Hard to believe. That can't be possible. I know what are some of the most significant shifts you've seen in development finance over those 25 plus years of your career.
Speaker 2:A couple of things. One, if I take the more recent kind of focus, it's about blending different stakeholders and their objectives and their expectations around what are they looking to achieve around sustainable development. And it means different things to different stakeholders. So you've got governments, you've got private enterprise, you've got small, medium sized enterprise, you got NGOs and civil society. They all bring something. So we use kind of finance in a very broad way. Yes, it's money, but it's also skills and resources. So when you look at the different components and the stakeholders, they're bringing different elements of that kind of broader ecosystem to develop something that's sustainable.
Speaker 2:But I think that's relatively new, I would say in the last five, 10 years. Prior to that, I would say, there were two main buckets. One was very transactional, very private sector driven in terms of what you would expect to see, and then there was the international development community, kind of focused on producing programs they felt were appropriate to generate social impact. What we're seeing now is those two worlds coming together, which has to be a good thing. It doesn't happen without friction and challenges, but that's a progression that we are totally invested in.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it and so challenges. What are the biggest challenges facing international development funding at this stage?
Speaker 2:So I'm going to go off on a slight tangent, not so much directly related to funding, but it is everywhere in a discussion related to funding, and that's ai um. So we had a major presence in davos in the world economic forum, as we do every year, and that was the major theme of the week um, it was even in the uh kind of the address that president trump had with uh, with the plenary session in davos. What that means, though, in practice is two aspects One is access to what AI could and should be, and then the other point to that is how you then benefit from AI. There are two very different things, and I'll explain why. We had the so-called digital divide, largely because people who could access the internet versus those who could not. One group was very much advancing because they had that leg up in terms of that access, and then the others did not.
Speaker 2:What we have right now is a slightly different situation, where a lot of people do have access to AI tools, largely through their phones, and we have both emerging markets and developed markets, saturation around access to smartphones, etc. So I think we're fixing access. The issue is around benefit. So how do you upskill a workforce? How do you provide the guardrails and the regulatory framework in place for us to benefit from AI? So, round away to answer your question, george, funding at the moment is being developed to support the infrastructure of AI and also how it's being positioned with governments, with private sector and then, ultimately, with citizens. So international community and international development organizations are assessing how their funding models will adjust accordingly, and that's fascinating to see.
Speaker 1:Even in the United States, it's Career and Technical Education Month this month, and so, aligning the careers of the future with industry, you're at the nexus of that, right. I mean, this is what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Let me give you a quick anecdote. I had an update this morning from one of our analysts so the chief economist at LinkedIn. She just talked about intelligence and the use of artificial intelligence on the workforce. Writ large, so not specific to any particular country, but their analysis have shown that 70% of all jobs will be affected by 2030 by AI. Now, the amount of change and the amount of impact obviously that depends on the job, but that's the degree that we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:That's incredible and that may be even higher, who knows? Yeah, yeah, and so the role of the private sector, partnerships evolving internationally, and then the role of financial institutions like the World Bank, et cetera. How do you see that changing? I mean, there's so much change in the financial services arena. There's so much change, like we talked about, with skills and upskilling and the need for that and AI overarching around all of that. What are you seeing there?
Speaker 2:So there's a couple of notable events going to happen this year. Prior to the sustainable development goals in 2015, there was a meeting of both government international organizations. There was a meeting of both government international organizations, civil society and the private sector in Ethiopia. It was called Financing for Development. So everybody knew that no one component, no one stakeholder had enough financing to support the achievement and the aspirations of the SDGs. There's a follow-up to that later on in July in Seville, and everybody knows that there's been regression on many of the SDGs, largely because of the pandemic and the financial fallout of that. So there's a reset around where do investments are most needed, most urgent, and also, how do you get a degree of scale and pace? So leveraging the dollar that you invest is crucial. Now you have to amplify it 10 times or 20 times, so something that is at one or two times return is no longer sufficient to address the collective goals that we've all aspired to. So that's one component. The other component just kind of back to AI for a second.
Speaker 2:We did release, with the World Economic Forum during Davos, a blueprint for AI, and this does impact on financing. So let me give you a few highlights. So the title is a bit of a mouthful. It's the blueprint for intelligent economies is a bit of a mouthful. It's the blueprint for intelligent economies, ai competitiveness through regional collaboration. So where that focuses on financing are three main components. One is in how do you build the appropriate infrastructure to support technology advancements. Also, then, how do you create an appropriate and fair data set so you don't create inherent bias? And then you also have to create the right guardrails that don't kind of impede or restrict development but at the same time there's a degree of certainty and trust that the technology can be used and should be used for good purpose.
Speaker 2:So let me focus on the first point there, on around infrastructure, because this is where a lot of dollars are already pledged. If you read any financial times or publication, it's in the trillions. Data centers will cost what they cost and there are well-established players in all regions now feeding into the big tech companies. Those established players are also creating their own power generation entities, because you cannot have a data center without adding generation of power to the grid. And how do you do that in a sustainable way?
Speaker 2:We saw Microsoft announce that they want to reopen three mile island and have nuclear as a potential longer term solution. It's a component, but it is probably 10 plus years away. But that's how far this is going to be reaching in terms of investments and financing with respect to just technology. And then you know, in the short term, is enough power going to be generated by renewables, yes or no? And what does that transition in terms of generation look like in name your economy, uh, if, if they're fossil fuel based or they have a blended uh generation power, etc. Um, so a lot of money is already vested, but how it gets financed, who's the expected set of stakeholders and how it shows itself in something that is truly sustainable, that's an open question.
Speaker 1:Incredible. But you're right there at the nexus of it all, watching it all come together, and that's really what's incredibly exciting from your vantage point correct.
Speaker 2:Well, we feel we have an obligation to provide some insights and guidance to all our clients and, as we look at that complete convergence of stakeholders, they are all our clients. So if we can get some insight or set of expectations from one client and we feel it's relevant for another, we we like to provide that insight and reflection through the day-to-day services that we offer.
Speaker 1:I love it, I love it, and so now there are many challenges globally. What do you see as the most pressing, or at least a few of the most pressing, and how is KPMG working to address them?
Speaker 2:Some are conceptual, some are very tactical. So we clearly have an erosion of trust globally. There are think tanks and entities that track this concept of trust, and they've been doing it for decades. We all operate in that world, even if we don't appreciate it. We have to have trust in the brands we buy. We have to have trust in the banks that we save with. We have to have trust in the capital markets. We have to have trust on and on. So it's an interesting thing to track, though, with governments with. We have to have trust in the capital markets. We have to have trust, you know, on and on so it's an interesting thing to track, though, with governments.
Speaker 2:If you look at um, you know established indices that look at citizens trust in their respective governments. It's not sweden or switzerland, it's saudi arabia, at 86 percent. My own country, ireland, is at 45 percent. The average for the countries that are tracked is 51 percent. The us, by the way, is at 40 percent, and this this is as of last July.
Speaker 2:So it is an issue, because if there is a lack of trust in those that set legislation, it's very difficult then to charge a path for creating conducive environments for investment, for sustainable development, for social impact. So that's one. For sustainable development, for social impact. So that's one. And then, very closely related is how do you inform citizens, how do you inform stakeholders and investors with the right information? We've never had access to more data than today. We've never had the ability to analyze that data more than today, and yet the distrust on what people are receiving has never been higher. So on one hand, you've got absolute increased transparency and an individual can decide what data they get, what data they analyze, et cetera, and then the other people don't trust it.
Speaker 2:So put all that together, george, we're seeing a convergence of an erosion of trust that does impact the day-to-day. So that's on the kind of concept and then on the tactical. I think the bigger issues are ever-present, you know, core humanitarian support, responding very quickly and meaningfully to humanitarian and natural disasters. Hunger and food security remains heightened in many parts of the world. Obviously, conflict is a big part of that. And then natural resources what are we doing? Where to what natural resource and how that gets shown in both investments, extraction, use? Those are ever present and they're accelerating in terms of their importance.
Speaker 1:Well, Mark, your insights are invaluable and you're seeing it country to country, region by region. What strategies have you found to be most effective with aligning the corporate goals with the mission of this international investment arena?
Speaker 2:So I would answer it in two ways appreciate we all have, hopefully, good intentions, that each stakeholder that I've articulated want to do something for good reasons, but it shows itself in different ways, and be okay in explaining what that is. Be clear around your expectations. Be clear around what it is we can offer to reach a goal that hopefully everyone then can coalesce and be comfortable with. So that would be one. Secondly, back to money.
Speaker 2:There is plenty of money in the world to address these issues, you know writ large. How do we channel them to a way that is clear, that is trackable, that's going to be reasonable in terms of where the money goes and is it digestible and fair to those who are giving the money in terms of the end use? So how do we unlock that in a way that is efficient and also recordable? And I think the third area is largely going to go back to where we kind of started around. Technology is not going to fix all our problems, but it is a massive tool to help many of our barriers and challenges if we use it in the right way. That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right and that's so insightful, and the background that you provided is what I think is most impactful is the understanding that the underpinning is trust, right, and the trackability of where these funds are going. Ultimately, the transparency is what you're referring to, right? It's a transparent framework for what is the distribution and what is ultimately the impact of that distributed funding. And so how does KPMG help governments, how do you help governments and other organizations, nonprofits, et cetera, around the world, ensure that financial accountability and the transparency that you've alluded to in these types of programs? Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:So some of it gets really down into the weeds, but it all is all done so in the framing we've just gone over. So one example would be we help both local, state and federal governments with how they manage their grants and that can be a pretty smooth distribution of grants for the existing programs. But every now and again we get a dramatic event, like the floods we had in the Carolinas or, you know, a hurricane in another part of the country, and grants and money needs to be distributed quickly and you need to know who you're working. Grants and money needs to be distributed quickly and you need to know who you're working with and you need to know where it's going and what it would ultimately be used for. So we help those governments at all levels with the platforms, using enhanced technology, how to get money from here to here in a quick way but also a recordable way. So you build efficiency but you also build trust.
Speaker 2:One is going to happen and two, you can keep track of what's going on. So that's just one very small example, sure, and you can amplify that you know across many other uh countries and and sectors. You know there was a lot of that developed during the pandemic around health services and where to go and where to potentially get supported. We also do a lot of work with governments around how they're going to pay for all of this. So how do you create a tax regime that's fair, that is easily implemented and then trackable? So it's a bit of everything, george. So it's a bit of everything, george, but what we want to do is leverage everything that we can with all our clients to help the public sector, and vice versa.
Speaker 1:And what I've heard you say a few times and it's awesome to hear, is trackable and recordable. Those two words, I think, are synonymous with accountability, and that's what KPMG stands for, which I think is why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suppose it goes naturally to a brand that's focused on its origins as an auto firm and obviously that's a big part of our business still and we feel there's an obligation to provide that credibility to a number, whatever that number is, either to support capital markets or to promote trust in citizens in terms of public sector spending.
Speaker 1:The trust piece is also huge and the ability for our global audience to understand the breadth and depth of what you're doing and your capabilities and who you assist, from the local level all the way to global governmental entities. It's incredible to hear and to see, and I want to focus also on leadership, because without leadership a lot of this is not as effective. And so, given your experience 25 plus years hard to believe again what leadership qualities in your experience, Mark, are most critical for navigating global, very complex challenges.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give you two words that may seem a little bit of odds with each other, but they're equally important. You've got to have patience, but you also have to have courage. Sometimes people think that courage means you need to be abrupt and create something that just might break a certain apathy. Maybe, but I think it's more around courage, around a concept and having absolute clarity in delivering that concept to whoever you need it to be heard by and, as I say, it's always going to be a multitude of stakeholders. So you need to have absolute consistency on your purpose and delivering that message to those that are involved in the project or program that you want to implement. But you also have to have patience.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned earlier, not all those stakeholders are starting from the same place, so nothing is one dimensional in this world. You don't ever just deal with one party to implement something that's going to have significance, certainly at a country level. You've got to have the patience to have them in, you know, integrate into the concept, provide their input, acknowledge that input. You can agree to disagree, etc. Etc. But you've got to do that, otherwise you may get a small win in the short term, but are you going to be sustainable. Are you going to have that long-term impact? The data is very clear on that. You're not. You may have a year or two of progression, but over the longer term, without that patience, you really are not going to to see those longer term returns. But then it moves back around to courage. You've got to have the courage to be, you know, wedded to your convictions and be patient and then deliver over time.
Speaker 1:And you know we've seen, you know, throughout history a lack of courage and what that looks like. And then we see what courage looks like, and so it makes total sense. And then we've seen patients. So I mean those two words, you're right, could be in opposition, but actually they work together Because you have to have the courage and then, in aligning with that, the patience to see through that courageous.
Speaker 2:You know Some people confuse patience with a lack of a decision, and I see it very differently. You choose to be patient and it and that's your decision to be patient.
Speaker 2:And it can take courage to be patient because there's a lot of people pushing you to move faster, right, but the whole room isn't with you yet, so you need to, you know, make that decision. So there's a there's a lot of people pushing you to move faster, but the whole room isn't with you yet, so you need to make that decision. So there's a number of nuances to those two words, but I think in general, those are themes I've picked up on over the years.
Speaker 1:Incredible perspective and certainly based on 25 plus years of experiencing and leading. Those two words are extremely powerful for our global audience to take away. Based on 25 plus years of experiencing and leading, those two words are extremely powerful for our global audience to take away. And so what do you characterize as a global mindset and how critical this can be when working across the planet.
Speaker 2:Well, first and foremost, just be aware that we are all connected. I'm a big proponent of eating, shopping locally and knowing your local community. That's absolutely crucial, I think, just to being a good citizen, but just being aware and open to the reality that pretty much everything around us has a long thread that is generally global when you get your food from, who produces it? What does the security situation look in? Name your location. How does that impact global markets? How do we manage international trade in a way that we all benefit from? Could we do that better? How do we collectively take responsibility for not just being local but understanding that by being local, you have an impact globally?
Speaker 2:And some people focus heavily on climate resilience. Some people focus on technology and making sure that that's shared appropriately and in an equitable way. Some people focus on just bringing good products to market and doing that in a way that people can afford. So, whatever way it shows up, I think just being open to the fact that what you see in front of you has a story behind it that is usually global, and if we do that, then I think we can start to understand how different pieces of the kind of playing board start to fit together. There are dramatic elements as well geopolitics, wars and conflicts and so forth and those have an impact for sure, but those are the headlines. I'm thinking more day to day, you know, everything's calm. How does the world work? Right, be open to that and I think you will find the right answer.
Speaker 1:Well, between leadership and the process, I think, in having you know things that are common sense. That's what we're talking about here. So common sense, in whatever context you can pull that together, includes understanding the geopolitical elements around you. Yeah, and so we arrive at the end of the interview and I say to you what is your call to action for our global audience today?
Speaker 2:As ever. I want to thank you for the interview and also those who are listening in. I think that the main focus would be let's not assume trust as a concept that will be ever present. We need to nurture it. We need to all play a role in making sure that that doesn't get eroded to a point where it's meaningless. So that would be number one on my list and number two would be let's be a bit more compassionate with each other. We with each other.
Speaker 2:We have seen an escalation of anger and opinions and diversity of ideology and so forth. That I think existed throughout history, but the amplification and the scale and the pace that that shows itself with today is really not helpful. So have the courage and patience to have your convictions fine. That shows itself with today is really not helpful. So have the courage and patience to have your convictions fine, but be patient with those who may not and listen to them. And if we can do that, then we can work on the trust element together. We're not always going to agree, but we cannot let those concepts erode to a level where they are irretrievable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it goes back to common sense patience, trust, leadership, all the elements around, everything you just highlighted in your leadership of 25 plus years at an amazing company and organization, kpmg. Thanks for all you're doing. Thanks for your leadership, thanks for changing the world. Thank you, george Mark Fitzgerald, kpmg. Thanks for all you're doing. Thanks for your leadership, thanks for changing the world. Thank you, george Mark Fitzgerald, kpmg.