In 2024, Crowe remained stronger than ever. Our core compliance services such as audit, tax and business process outsourcing continue to drive growth and revenue, and opportunities also continue to be seen in the growing service lines of advisory and consulting.
With challenge also comes opportunity as firms focus on what differentiates them in terms of client experience, quality and ease of doing business. In bolstering our offering, we have also recruited in areas we have seen demand in our emerging and growing service lines such as the likes of corporate finance, sustainability, cybersecurity, governance and risk and artificial intelligence (AI). This ensures the foundations we have laid in 2024 continues our success into next year.
Challenges and disruption in our market will no doubt persist in 2025. This includes resource constraints, the perception of the attractiveness of the profession, the increasing expectations of the regulatory market and continual advancements in technology, data tools and AI. There is an ever-increasing need to continually improve quality in everything we do and no firm is immune to this.
These increasing expectations of what the industry has to offer, and changes in the regulatory market, have seen continued advancements in technology and increasing adoption of AI to support back office functions and improve standards.
A significant majority of consolidation and merger activity within the UK market is being driven by private equity (PE), accelerating activity and opportunities in the UK, US and other jurisdictions.
There are many opportunities and challenges over the next two to five years for firms both within legacy structures and partnerships, and PE structures. This will include technology, people, culture, service proposition, strategic focus, quality and compliance on top of even more consolidation.
The rise in National Insurance will impact all businesses across the economy, increasing the cost of employing people. Professional service firms are primarily people businesses and therefore people costs are a substantial part of our business – the impact is not insignificant.
As such, the drive for growth becomes more pressing as well as increased efficiencies for firms to cover this additional cost.
Looking ahead, change for the industry continues at pace as the calls for better standards become louder. A significant driver will be the government’s Audit Reform Bill in the early 2025.
Within the establishment of a new regulator we would like to see an agenda that is proportionate, focused on improving industry standards and is flexible to enable the market to adapt to future needs and fosters resilience and competition.
More broadly, the macro picture for the next 12 months is that our sector is going to continue to see a lot of private equity activity as well as investment in technology.
These developments will, of course, be on top of a focus on sustainability, continued improvement in quality, increased development of people and culture strategies. There will also be a need for firms to add breadth and depth to their service offering for new and existing clients in an ever an increasingly competitive market.