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The former UK head of EY and PwC’s former chief operating officer are launching a rival accounting and consulting firm with backing from private equity, vowing to peel off British clients and partners from the Big Four.
The new venture, Unity Advisory, has quietly begun recruiting for a launch expected by June, under the chairmanship of Steve Varley, who ran EY for nine years until 2020. The boutique advisory firm will be backed by as much as $300mn from Warburg Pincus, the private equity group.
Unity’s chief executive will be Marissa Thomas, who was one of the most senior female UK executives at PwC until last year, when she was passed over for the role of senior partner. She left the firm in February.
The pair are pitching their new venture as an alternative to the Big Four that can offer tax and accounting services, technology consulting and mergers and acquisition advice to chief financial officers in the UK, with none of the conflict of interest worries that plague their former firms. Unity will not have an audit business, which Big Four partners often complain triggers heavy regulatory scrutiny and can tie them up with complicated compliance procedures.
“CFOs are open to a new proposition,” Varley told the Financial Times. “The Big Four are a classy bunch of service providers, but people are looking for a proposition that is super client-centric, has really low administrative cost, is AI-led rather than based on legacy infrastructure and, crucially, has no conflicts.”
Warburg Pincus’s backing of up to $300mn to build out the firm underscores the growing influence of financial investors in a professional services sector that used to be dominated by partner-owned business models.
Grant Thornton UK last year sold a majority stake to the private equity group Cinven, following a wave of similar deals for accounting firms overseas. In 2019, Warburg Pincus backed veteran insurance broker Steve McGill in creating an independent speciality risk insurance business.
“Partnerships have a lot of advantages,” Varley said, “but one of the things they don’t do well is medium to long-term investment.”
Varley left EY at the end of 2023 and is chair of the law firm DWF Group, which also has private equity backing. Thomas spent 31 years at PwC, running its UK M&A advisory business and its tax unit before becoming chief operating officer. She was widely tipped internally as a contender for the senior partner role that went last year to Marco Amitrano but failed to reach the shortlist of candidates put to a partner vote.
Thomas said Unity would be hiring staff with Big Four experience, including those who have left those firms for jobs in industry, and targeting mid-size corporate clients with revenues in the £500mn-£1.5bn range, particularly those backed by private equity.
The new firm’s lower central cost base and the absence of audit clients would allow “different fee models”, such as a larger proportion of performance-based fees or “value sharing” from advising on efficiency gains, she said.
David Reis, Warburg Pincus managing director, said Unity would be “a new kind of platform that challenges the status quo in how CFOs and finance teams are serviced”, and that there was “substantial market opportunity for disruption”.
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