A BRAVE NEW WORLD: Grant Thornton commits £500m to transform its client experience for the digital economy
Grant Thornton UK today announces a £500m multi-year investment to redesign how an audit, tax and advisory firm works, putting people, data and digital tools at the heart of an altogether better client experience.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the CFO of a large multinational needing to restructure. There’s never a good time for it; but when a loss-making division is haemorrhaging cash, time is of the essence. Your advisor should be your first port of call. Yet too often, layers of process, politics and one-size-fits-all approaches slow things down. By the time they’ve devised a plan, you’re probably out of time.
That may be an extreme example, but it highlights the stark truth: that the traditional advisory model is no longer fit for a modern digital economy that moves at breakneck speed. Time that should be spent advising clients is still being lost to systems, handoffs and duplication; not because it has to be, but because that's how the profession learned to operate. It adds complexity, not clarity. And that all costs precious time, money and missed opportunity.
That is exactly what Grant Thornton is setting out to change.
The £500m investment will be made through a series of defined milestones, with new tools and platforms going live within weeks and months rather than years. The firm is introducing a new operating model designed around how clients actually need to make their decisions, not how firms have historically organised themselves.
The aim is simple: strip out friction, reduce duplication and give clients faster access to insight, judgement and highly skilled advisors. Because in today’s market, speed, clarity and confidence aren’t nice-to-haves; they’re the difference between value created and value lost.
“There’s a hard truth our profession has to face,” said Malcolm Gomersall, Chief Executive Officer at Grant Thornton UK. “Professional services has become too slow, too complex and too inward-looking for the pace of modern business. It has prioritised process, not decision-making. This investment is about taking responsibility for fixing that. We’re looking at things differently. We’re rethinking how our industry should work, combining technology and human judgement in a way that gives our clients clarity sooner and makes working with us more effective, more valuable and more enjoyable. All of this is underpinned by a commitment to the high-quality standards our clients and regulators rightly expect.”
Working with leading global technology partners and our investors, Cinven, Grant Thornton will introduce connected digital platforms that put information in one place and remove the manual work that gets in the way. Clients will feel the difference: real-time updates on simple, easy-to-use systems; information at their fingertips; problem-solving while they sleep; and more time spent face-to-face with advisors. Building the most advanced and comprehensive intelligence engine will enable them to make better calls, earlier, with greater confidence.
For Grant Thornton’s people, this investment is nothing short of transformative. As digital tools take on routine drafting, administration and manual checking, teams will gain the freedom to do the work that truly inspires them: building deeper relationships, unlocking sharper insights and tackling the complex challenges that shape clients' futures.
“It’s about digital technology and expert strategic advice coming together in new and imaginative ways to help our clients build more value, faster and make the experience of working with Grant Thornton positive, effortless and genuinely useful for their business.
“Digital technology can add layers of complexity to businesses – but it can also make life simpler, smarter and more human. This investment is Grant Thornton’s commitment to that future, and to a better way of working for clients and advisors alike,” concludes Gomersall.