Tax

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Large trees grow from small acorns. If I’m honest, tax consulting isn’t the first place I’d have turned to if I wanted to understand the future of professional services. That’s not the fault of tax consultants, but of the rule-bound world they operate in. Like lawyers, there’s a huge amount of intellectual horsepower directed at finding and aggregating often small opportunities. And, with tax authorities increasingly bearing down on what they regard as loop-holes, those opportunities are getting ever  smaller and more specialised. What changes all of this, of course, is technology, and that’s where some important innovation is taking place.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

We’ve talked a lot in our blogs about the bifurcation of the professional services sector into low-cost and high-value markets, each requiring different skills, which in turn necessitates different price points and business models. But the impact, of what could be a massive driver of disruption, is softened by the fact that most services combine an element of both. From audit to corporate strategy and risk, professional services firms have an opportunity to reshape their portfolios, ensuring they can retain a presence in the high-value markets.