Big 4 Alum Start Their Own Thing Hoping Clients Want Something Different and Conflict-Free

Financial Times had a story about a couple Big 4 alumni across the pond starting their own consulting thing with the hope that they’ll compete with their former firms. At first one might be compelled to laugh heartily at the idea of a boutique consulting firm competing for business against the Big 4 when mid-tier firms with billions in revenue can’t even pull such a thing off but they could be onto something.

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.

Marissa Thomas was reportedly an early contender for the senior partner role vacated by the office-loving Kevin Ellis (“a clear favorite to win” according to The Telegraph) but dropped out of the race. That was the official story anyway. Prior to the announcement of the PwC UK senior partner shortlist on which she did not appear, it was said Thomas was advocating for increasing the profit pool shared among partners, a proposition that would have required increasing revenue and cutting costs.

Last year’s senior partner race at PwC UK came with accusations that the Middle East partners — who are a part of the PwC UK partner conglomerate, obviously — refused to support a woman in that role. After indictments of sexism were flung around like so much monkey poop at a zoo, elected senior partner Marco Amitrano went on to say that the Middle East firm is “very progressive” and added that ME leadership actually helped determine the shortlist of candidates that included two women and one man (him). “So the fact that they were part of determining two females and one male when there were other options should underline for you the fact that they are far from not supportive of females,” he told The Telegraph last May. Women, dude. The word is women.

The Middle East partners had approximately one-quarter of the senior partner vote. Notably, the ME region saw 26 percent growth in 2024 against the UK side’s paltry growth of just 3 percent.

Enough backstory though. FT doesn’t suggest Thomas is starting this venture out of spite but it does sound like this crew is dogging the Big 4 model that may or may not have contributed to her dipping out. “CFOs are open to a new proposition,” 18-year EY veteran Steve Varley said to FT. “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.” OK so he acknowledges that their former firms have a shiny exterior at least.

Unity Advisors plans to offer only tax, accounting, and some consulting services but no audit. Seems a fairly straightforward way to eliminate many potential conflicts.

As far as we can tell, this will be Warburg Pincus’s first foray into professional accounting services. Their managing director David Reis went on record to say there’s “substantial market opportunity for disruption” in this sector. They all say that, don’t they.