As we approached the end of the working day in the UK on 11^th April, news broke in The Financial Times that EY had halted its plans to break up its audit and consulting businesses after months of internal disagreement and opposition from executives in the US.

We’ve been tracking EY’s plan, codenamed Project Everest, since it was announced in 2022, and positioned our long standing client, Source Global Research as an expert commentator on the implications for EY, the industry, and consulting clients.

Due to the timings and magnitude of this announcement, we knew that we needed to act fast to get a response in front of those journalists in the UK and globally before their stories went online.

ProServ worked directly with Source’s CEO, Fiona Czerniawska to issue the reaction below, which was subsequently covered in The Australian Financial Review, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Tax, Bloomberg UK, The South China Morning Post, and Financial News.

Fiona Czerniawska, CEO of Source, a research and strategy firm for the professional services sector, said: “The fact that this deal, as constructed, now seems unlikely to go ahead, doesn’t mean that the thinking that underpinned it was wrong. Clients are still looking for different delivery models, and EY’s specific constraint—the extent to which the firm can partner with big technology firms—remains just as urgent an issue to resolve. We should therefore expect to see alternative, perhaps smaller scale options being floated in the future.”

ProServ and Source’s strategy to be the lead independent commentator on the EY break-up has positioned Source and CEO, Fiona Czerniawska so strongly that there has been a substantial increase in journalists worldwide requesting interviews relating to other major professional services industry issues such as consulting firm redundancies.