The acquisition of Cape Town-based Flow, a leading ‘user experience’ design agency, will boost Deloitte Digital’s growing list of digital expertise. The South African team, which are based in studios in Johannesburg and Cape Town, is already an integral and leading player in Deloitte Digital’s network of more than 2700 highly skilled ‘digital natives’ located in 18 studios across the world including the US, Europe and Australia.

“User experience has become the fundamental discipline in placing the customer, supplier, employee and community at the heart of highly engaging digital and physical experiences, whilst delivers extraordinary business value. The acquisition of Flow Interactive enables us to further expand our world class ‘experience design’ competency as we strive to provide the full spectrum of digital consulting, production and agency capability to clients,” said Tim Bishop, digital leader at Deloitte Digital.

“We have a very clear growth path for Deloitte Digital (Africa), which is fundamentally premised on building and offering ‘extreme competency’ across the full digital spectrum through carefully selected acquisitions, partnerships and individual talent recruitment across a wide range of customer-centric digital and omni-channel disciplines.”

Deloitte Digital will also draw on the skills of more than 5200 Deloitte professionals employed across Africa by leverage the footprint of the company’s 29 offices on the continent. The implicit scale of this African footprint will only be to the benefit of Deloitte Digital’s customers, many of whom have extensive operations across the continent.

“Deloitte Digital is creating a new model for a new age – we’re an agency and a consultancy,” said Bishop. “We provide leading digital and creative capabilities with the deep industry knowledge, technology and real business experience for which Deloitte is known. Clients can bring us their biggest challenges, knowing that we have what it takes to bring a new business vision to life. The expert skillsets we have gained through the purchase of Flow will further strengthen this approach.”

Flow Interactive was established by Phil and Debré Barrett in 2007 to meet the growing demand by companies to provide their customers meaningful and rewarding interactive user experience through the provision of cutting edge digital design capabilities. The agency specialises in enabling its clients - which include the likes of Old Mutual, Google, Samsung and Virgin Active - to improve the user friendliness of their digital customer interface, ranging from apps to websites, till points and secure online banking platforms.

“Our aim is to bring simplicity, humanity and delight to human interaction with digital technology,” says Phil Barrett, director at Flow. “More than ever before, clients require integrated digital solutions that enhance the experience of their customers which ultimately translates into an improved bottom line. Being part of a world class network like Deloitte Digital, which has a skills base that spans five continents, will enable us to deliver on that mandate. ”