Big Four firms

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 Callum Jack.

Risk is no longer something that only keeps the CRO awake at night. It has shot straight up to the top of the CEO’s agenda, which is great news for providers of risk services. The market—which reached a value of US$62bn in 2017—continues to grow, driven by the political climate, regulatory pressures, and, of course, the unrelenting challenge of cybersecurity.

As the market grows, competition is intensifying. Not only are all types of consulting firms fighting for a piece of the action, but new entrants are cropping up too: specialist risk boutiques, software providers, and IT services companies, to name a few.

By Alison Huntington.

We’ve written before about the ‘magnetic middle’ effect, in which clients of consulting firms struggle to differentiate between firms based on the quality of their work alone. Very little separates the top-rated firms from the bottom-rated ones, with firms deliberately making acquisitions and investments to ensure they provide the full suite of services their clients need to a high standard. If this is the case, why are we even talking about quality anymore?

Well, looking at how individual firms performed this year versus last in our annual survey of consulting clients* shows that there’s no room for complacency, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. Firms may have ended up scoring very similarly to each other for the overall quality of their work this year, but some have taken great strides forward in digital, while others appear to be moving backwards.