Stephen Foley

Good morning.

Well, like the other big four accounting firms, it's set up as a kind of federation.

It's almost like the United Nations.

You have all of these locally owned partnerships that all just agree to work together under the PwC umbrella.

The central organization under the chairman, Mohamed Kande, doesn't have the kind of power that a corporate CEO might have.

And it's a historical artifact, frankly, of the fact that the accounting business is

is regulated on a very local basis.

Every country has different accounting regulations.

But of course, now these big four firms do much, much more than traditional tax and audit work.

They have very, very large, multi-billion dollar consulting businesses.

And that, in many people's minds, causes some disjointedness in the way they're able to provide services to clients across the world.

And they're looking to try and integrate things to make it easier.

Well, all the firms have been taking strides to try and knit their organizations together to better compete with the globally integrated consulting firms.

Deloitte has merged many, many, many of its local member firms into big organizations.

EY has a very strong central leadership that can impose standards across the globe.

And PwC is looking for as much of a piece of that as they can.

Now, it's not actually as radical as some of the options out there that some of those other firms that I mentioned have done.

But what it is trying to do is to try and standardize the product offering across the consulting landscape.

So making sure that the same services are provided in the same way to clients wherever they are in the globe.

There's lots of concern about how AI is going to change the jobs across the consulting landscape, about how it's going to interact with clients.