Big 4 / Consulting Firm
Audit to advisory
We have supported numerous audit and professional service firms as they have grown over recent years. The reasons for their growth have always centred around two main factors.
Firstly the benefit of having a third party involved, creating transparency for investors and counterparties in a neutral third party, but secondly, their uncanny skill at learning and adapting quickly.
While these firms initial modus operandi was the former, it is the latter which has brought them much success in the last 10 years. In Luxembourg, these firms are large – especially in comparison to their size in comparable financial centres. Within a fast-changing landscape where literally every market player is adapting to new guidelines, it is the Big 4 and the Audit firms in Luxembourg who have succeeded most in capitalising on this change, and not without reason. They are very good at it. It is only within a professional services environment, with a ‘project-based’ structure and a vast client-base, that these firms have been able to find the economies of scale to make it work.
Project-based success
Partners are always extremely commercially astute, able to juggle seemingly opposing demands of demand versus time (and resource supply) of their own staff, managing profitability constantly. The big advantage these firms have, is that there is little full time line management required. With project teams working well per client, the model effectively manages itself – managing a project is complicated, but line managing a team on not just output but behavior, is more so.
Academically talented, and polished
Staff working at the Big4 / Audit firms are often very high-level graduates, who are strong academically, and also highly self-motivated.
They are the perfect members of the funds ecosystem to constantly assess changes in regulation, guidelines and leading the way in terms of think-tanks and market participation surveys. By doing this for themselves but also for their clients, they are exposed to a breadth and depth of information that companies would never manage to amass themselves.
By doing do, they have quietly asserted themselves as effective advisors on a whole range of complex fund needs across every major requirement, from traditional funds through to alternative. If something is new and unseen, usually the Big4 or Audit firms are the place to start.