PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) who are one of the worlds biggest auditors have confirmed they will be accepting Bitcoin payments from their customers.
The company say “stepping further into blockchain and crypto-assets by accepting Bitcoin payments from its clients as from 1 October 2019,”.
To put this move into context, they the company “ranks as the second-largest professional services firm in the world.” PwC is one of the Big Four accounting firms (along with KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte).
Thomas Campione who is the leader of Blockchain and crypto assets at the firm said:
As part of the Firm’s market assessment, what quickly became clear is that we could not continue to invest in the field, promote it, build solutions for clients and support their transformation while not also being exposed to it. Our role is to lead and it is only by being an active leader with exposure that we at PwC Luxembourg can understand the challenges inherent to the crypto world. It is very difficult to properly appreciate the challenges of AML/KYC-enhanced due diligence in a world made of public/private keys, with the complexity and risks of custodial solutions, or to comprehend the decentralised finance ecosystem growing “next door” without being exposed to it in its day-to-day activities.
While, John Parkhouse, Territory Senior Partner and CEO of PwC Luxembourg, stated:
The development of blockchain technology, and the emergence of a new decentralised economy supported by the rise of crypto-assets, are heavily reliant on an individual’s ability to understand the disruptive and pervasive impact of these new concepts. Even more importantly, it depends on the ability of the ecosystem to move synchronously. Upskilling will be key and the capacity to build and grow the ecosystem will be at least as important to harvest the true benefits of the technology. This is true whether it is about dramatic cost-saving through process streamlining, improvement of social capital due to new decentralized business models, or by unlocking hidden-value currently stuck in the economy through tokenisation.
If this is not a glowing endorsement of cryptocurrencies I really don’t know what is. This firm is responsible for auditing some of the biggest companies in the world. They are the first point of call in regulation in some cases and they now see that the world is evolving and cryptocurrencies are needed in an everchanging landscape.