EY: Letting the genie out of the bottle
The proposal to split the firm, now halted, has been the biggest news story in the professional services industry in a decade. And it won’t stop here.EY’s announcement was never just about EY but raised fundamental questions about the future of professional services, especially consulting and audit. In this article, we present the five main questions we hear people—clients and firms—asking.
1. How can professional firms best respond to clients’ increasingly multifaceted and complex problems?
Research we carried out last summer found that eight out of 10 clients thought that the success of a consulting project in part depended on a firm’s ability to take a multidisciplinary approach. More recent research explains why: Three quarters of clients say that achieving their corporate goals will heavily depend on collaboration between different parts of their organisation (see figure 1). In the debate about the EY split, the term multidisciplinary was weaponised, applied to the relationship between audit and other services, which is generally not what clients think of when they talk about it.