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A former top EY executive is launching a UK tax business backed by private capital group EQT Partners in a bid to challenge the Big Four accountancy firms’ dominance of the sector.
Jeff Soar, who led EY’s global law business until last year, has recruited 10 partners ahead of Monday’s launch of WTS UK. The firm intends to hire 100 partners within five years, taking it to about 60 per cent of the size of EY’s UK tax practice.
The Big Four firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — all offer tax advice as a core service, in addition to audit and consulting. “We’ve got a level of ambition that people very quickly will see us as standing toe to toe with the Big Four’s [tax practices] — that’s our goal,” Soar said.
The business will be the UK arm of the WTS network, made up of small tax firms that EQT, Europe’s largest private capital group, invested in last year. The Swedish group will provide funding of more than €500mn to build out WTS more broadly, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Soar is pitching the new venture as “a true challenger to the Big Four” but without the regulatory scrutiny they face due to potential conflicts with their audit businesses.
Referring to Project Everest, EY’s aborted attempt to spin off its consulting arm to avoid such conflicts, Soar said there was a growing sense that the Big Four’s models faced challenges: “Everest did open people’s eyes a little bit to . . . doing something [differently].”
The WTS move underlines the growing influence of financial investors in a professional services sector once dominated by partner-owned business models.
In 2024 Grant Thornton UK sold a majority stake to private equity group Cinven and a spate of firms have since followed suit. KPMG’s former UK restructuring business, which was spun out and renamed Interpath Advisory in 2021, was valued at about £800mn by new private equity owners in January.
Last year, Warburg Pincus pledged $300mn to former Big Four executives to launch one such boutique, Unity Advisory, while FRP Advisory helped fund the launch of Queens Tower Advisory.
WTS UK plans to use a leaner model than the Big Four, eschewing trainees and having about one partner per four or five employees, compared with about one partner to 10 staff at larger firms, Soar said.
The Big Four accounted for about 80 per cent of the £5.6bn of revenues generated by providing tax services in the UK in 2024-25, according to intelligence firm Research and Markets. In consulting, however, they face tougher competition from large consultancies such as McKinsey and BCG, and from boutique firms.
Lower headcount and administrative costs will allow WTS to undercut the Big Four’s fees, Soar said. “AI is the future of tax. Tax is probably the best part of professional services for AI: it’s rules-based, repeatable, data-driven. What’s better?”
While large consultancies have invested heavily in adopting AI, he claimed they were not well suited to adapting to disruption from the technology: “Supertankers take a while to turn around, and we could be the agile business that grabs the opportunity.”
