Accenture: The firm that kept rebuilding itself to keep building Singapore

PLANNING a loan for a first home, calculating healthcare savings or checking monthly payout schemes for retirement. For millions of Singaporeans, managing life’s most important financial milestones begins in one place: the Central Provident Fund (CPF) digital platform.

Few people give a second thought to what works beneath that screen. Yet the CPF digital platform is one of the most comprehensive national financial infrastructures in the world, serving millions of citizens and permanent residents across every stage of life.

Behind it sits a partner that has been engineering the systems Singaporeans rely on for half a century. Working alongside the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB), Accenture helped transform a legacy environment into a mobile-first digital experience centred on one clear promise: making a personalised experience simple.

Modernising 76 business applications and converting 16 million lines of legacy code, Accenture helped streamline over 1,000 complex Web pages into 320 intuitive, jargon-free guides. Instead of navigating dense policy jargon, Singaporeans now get a single, user-friendly dashboard tailored to their specific life stage, whether it’s a young couple weighing a loan for their first home, or a retiree accessing tailored guidance on drawing down their retirement savings.

“Singapore was never just another market for us. Over five decades, we’ve had the privilege to build some of the systems that transformed this country, and that’s shaped how we work across the region too,” says Mark Tham, country managing director of Accenture Singapore.

A journey that mirrors Singapore’s own

Accenture arrived in Singapore in 1975 as Arthur Andersen’s Administrative Services Division, later renamed the Management Information Consulting Division, focused on automating accounting books for a few clients. By the late 1980s, it had already remade itself once to become Andersen Consulting. The work shifted into financial services and government, part of a global pivot away from pure systems integration and toward strategy, operations and change management, the kind of work Accenture is still best known for today. None of these phases was simply a name change.

Fifty years later, it has helped build the country’s social security platform, its digital tax filing platform, and the world’s first National Electronic Health Record. This is not a firm that arrived to complete a project. It is one that grew alongside the country and helped build its future.

Whatever Singapore needed to build next, Accenture moved to help from within. It evolved each time the country’s needs changed to stay relevant to client, market and national demand.

When the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) set out to transform its tax administration, it worked with Accenture to deliver one of the world’s first digital tax processing systems, which significantly reduced IRAS’ tax arrears and unlocked substantial annual savings within the first couple of years. Accenture later returned to replace the very system it had built, and the work has won IRAS multiple national IT and infocomm awards.

In support of Singapore’s vision of “One Patient, One Health Summary, One Care Journey”, the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) was established to bring together patients’ health information across healthcare providers and support better coordinated care. Managed by Synapxe, NEHR connects medical practitioners and healthcare institutions nationwide and supports clinical workflows across Singapore’s healthcare ecosystem. Accenture has supported the development of NEHR since 2011. But nation-building goes beyond the systems people use, it’s about how the nation remembers itself. Together with the National Library Board, Accenture designed a chatbot that turned static archives of The Albatross File into living encounters.

The partnership also celebrated the nation’s past, present and future at the SG60 Heart&Soul Experience, where GenAI was deployed to personalise the immersive, self-reflective showcase for every visitor.

Global scale, local depth

Global foresight paired with deep local knowledge has defined Accenture’s approach since it first opened its doors here. What began as a small team automating accounting systems grew into a firm that reshaped enterprise technology and digital transformation across the region. Its capabilities are now embedded in Singapore’s public services, financial sector, and national digital infrastructure across every decade that followed.

That combination has proved decisive at key turning points. During the dot-com era, a major Singapore bank wanted to leapfrog into the Internet space. Accenture worked with the client’s strategy team to conceptualise and launch an entirely new digital bank – before the term even existed – in just 100 days, including regulatory approval. Rather than replicating the traditional product-centric banking model, Accenture designed a buyer-advocate model focused on helping customers with investments, targeting a younger, more Internet-savvy demographic. It was a market innovation well ahead of its time, and it marked a turning point in Accenture’s relationship with the client. Moving from systems and IT consultant to holistic business creator.

A decade later, that same philosophy shaped Accenture’s work on the National Electronic Health Record and CPFB’s digital platform, bringing the best of global expertise to uniquely Singapore challenges and turning complex public infrastructure into intuitive tools for everyday life.

The pace has only quickened. “Singapore is a living lab,” says Tham. “It may not be the largest market, but it’s where the action is with measured acceleration, done safe and done properly.”

Proof, not prescription

The firm, now advising Singapore’s largest organisations on AI, has spent five decades reinventing itself before the market even forced the question.

In this era, it means bringing world-class expertise and co-developed solutions to businesses across Singapore, helping local enterprises not just adopt AI but build it through deep ecosystem partnerships with leading technology players.

“Every one of our major changes meant admitting that what worked for the last decade wouldn’t work for the next one, and moving before the market forced our hand. That’s a hard case to make internally when the firm is doing well. It’s the discipline that’s kept us relevant for five decades,” says Tham.

That credibility matters when conversations get difficult. Having navigated its own reinvention, Accenture draws on that experience to create the assets and intelligence its clients can build on. That willingness to change itself is what gives Accenture credibility with clients now facing the same reckoning.

“Companies that struggle with AI usually aren’t struggling with the technology. They’ve bought the tool but kept everything else the same, and that’s not going to work. We’ve spent five decades learning that transformation only works when it’s a total enterprise reinvention, a deliberate, enterprise-wide effort to reinvent the operating model, the technology core and how our people work,” Tham says.

At the heart of it all, people

If Accenture has one advantage that has endured for five decades, it isn’t a technology or a business line. It’s the spirit of its people: resilient, client-centric and passionate about solving real-world problems.

For Tham, that same belief shapes how Accenture approaches every new wave of technology. “The real investment is always in our people, not the tools. We’re committed to building a pipeline of local tech talent that is ready for an AI-driven future,” he says.

Accenture guides its people through targeted growth strategies from coaching and training to stretch assignments and role rotations, with AI fluency at the core. This equips them with the hands-on capability to harness AI as a decision-making tool and lead through transformation with confidence.

“Humans design the interactions, and we can’t let the novelty of new technology cloud that. We ask our people to keep learning and transforming themselves every few years, and that’s not a small ask. Five decades in, I want them to know the thank you is owed to them first, not to any system we’ve built,” says Tham.

Accenture’s commitment to its people goes beyond technical skills. It’s rooted in creating a workplace where everyone can thrive. Its culture of inclusion, wellbeing, and belonging has earned recognition such as the WorkWell Leaders Awards, and is why Accenture continues to rank among the world’s most admired companies and best workplaces.

That ambition is grounded in the belief that humans should remain in the lead. As AI grows more capable and autonomous, Accenture’s view is that judgement, creativity and accountability must stay truly human. Technology should amplify what people do best, not decide in their place.

Ask Tham what Accenture wants to be remembered for in its next five decades, and the answer isn’t a platform or a contract. It’s people and not only its own. The firm describes its ambition as being a “net talent creator”: a company that creates more talent than it consumes, and helps people across Singapore’s economy with the AI fluency the coming decade will demand, whether or not they ever work at Accenture.

“Five decades in, our real contribution isn’t the systems we’ve built. It’s the people – ours and the nation’s – who’ll keep building what comes next,” says Tham.