Deloitte beefing up advisory biz with slew of lateral hires

Deloitte, a global professional services firm, is ramping up its “advisory” business in India as part of its overall efforts to emerge as a “market leader” in this business segment.

This firm is all set to, in next few months, welcome over 20 partners, along with good number of other professionals, working in deal advisory, tax and M&A verticals, from the rival firms of the big four (KPMG, PwC, EY) as well as other leading consulting companies focused on technology, sources said.

Currently, Deloitte in India gets maximum revenue from its advisory business followed by tax. It stands number two in the industry pecking order for advisory business.

The strategic intent behind ramping up its professional base in the advisory business is to prepare the firm for the opportunities expected in emerging technology areas and newer domains like sustainability (ESG). 

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The focus is now not only on upskill of the  professionals internally, but also go in for lateral hires on a large scale, sources said.

Clearly, Deloitte expects more demand for professional services in newer technology areas and sustainability (ESG) in the coming days., they added.

Deloitte as a firm is building capacity and capability in these areas to make the most of the expected demand, sources said.

As on date, Deloitte has over 500 partners out of total headcount of over a lakh people in India. In April this year, Deloitte promoted as many as 60 professionals to the level of partners from director level positions.

Wooing top professionals

Over the last one year, Deloitte has been attracting into its fold top notch professionals from various leading companies and professional firms including Dr Satish Pai (Tech Mahindra); Arvind Girotra (KPMG); Sanjay Gupta (DXC); Hemalata Vedula (Accenture); Kamaljit Chawla (IBM) and Shailesh Tyagi (EY).

The next round of top level movement could soon happen as some of KPMG’s lead partners including Rohit Berry (Leads Deal advisory and Japan Corridor), Vivek Gupta (Leads Merger & Acquisition Advisory) and Harpreet Singh (Senior Partner for Indirect Tax, also leads tax vertical for Japan corridor and FMCG ) are tipped to move to Deloitte, industry sources said. Team members of leader partners are also expected to move along with them.

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When contacted, the three top lead partners from KPMG declined comment. A Deloitte spokesperson too declined comment.

Though reasons for such a mass movement is not immediately known, a plausible factor could be better career prospect and very lucrative remuneration package. “Acquisition cost of such a large number of professional could be in the range of ₹100-150 crore or even go up to ₹200 crore,” a source told businessline. 

Another reason for Deloitte ramping up hiring could be the fact that its current leadership team under Chief Executive Officer (South Asia), Romal Shetty — who assumed charge of his new role a few months back —is very aggressive in strengthening the professional base.

In his more than two decades of work experience, Shetty has led large transformational programmes across more than 40 countries for Indian and global clients, to shape their growth strategies, profitability, restructuring, technology and people agenda.

In the past five years, Shetty had led the growth of the consulting practice from 2000 to over 10,000 people, with India being the fastest growing practice across Deloitte network.