Andersen Consulting brand set for resurrection

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up Accounting and consulting services myFT Digest — delivered straight to your inbox.

Andersen Consulting, one of the most powerful professional services brands of the 1990s, is about to be resurrected with the help of the man who led the consulting firm for a decade.

The revival comes courtesy of Andersen Global, a tax business founded by alumni of the firm’s former parent company, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal. The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000 when the business was spun off and rebranded as Arthur Andersen. Accenture.

Andersen Global has been quietly building out a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, chief executive of Andersen Consulting from 1989 to 1999, as a senior adviser. It plans to relaunch the historic brand next month, people familiar with the effort said.

Andersen Global was founded 23 years ago by Marc Versatz, a former tax partner at Arthur Andersen, originally as WTAS. It acquired the rights to the Andersen brand and renamed itself in 2014. The business is structured as an alliance of independent member firms and other affiliates with combined annual revenues of $2.5 billion.

Until now, it has focused on tax and legal work but — like Arthur Andersen before it, and most accounting and tax businesses today — it has been lured by the opportunity to sell more services to clients.

In the last six months it has added 20 member organizations in the United States and around the world focused on advicesaid people familiar with the deal.

Many have connections to Andersen Consulting or Arthur Andersen, the people said. These include Veraki, an African IT solutions business led by the former head of Accenture in Nigeria, and Daniels Consulting, a strategy group whose founder Arthur Andersen was a manager when it collapsed.

Andersen Global has also engaged Morgan Stanley to explore a flotation of its US business, which could unlock capital to acquire other member firms and more tightly integrate the new advisory business.

By the 1990s, Arthur Andersen’s consulting business had eclipsed the accounting firm that created it, and its brand still resonates, Versatz said.

“Anderson Consulting was the Coca-Cola of professional services,” he said. “If you’re over 40 in business, you know Andersen Consulting.”

Shaheen is coordinating business development for Andersen Global’s new member firms, aiming to provide a suite of consulting services from strategy consulting and IT transformation to cybersecurity and sustainability. He said it would not compete with one of Accenture’s core businesses as an outsourcing service provider.

“Accenture is a great firm, but we don’t plan to replicate it,” he said.

The new Andersen Consulting will also differ from its 1990s predecessor in that it will not be tied to an audit business, where conflict-of-interest rules prevent cross-selling to audit clients.

“Andersen doesn’t have that freedom issue today and we can be as aggressive as we can,” Shaheen said.

Until he left for the ill-fated dotcom venture Webvan, Shaheen led repeated efforts by Arthur Andersen’s consulting business to gain more autonomy from the accounting firm, which became one of the professional services sector’s great corporate soap operas.

For much of the 1990s, Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen operated uneasily as sister firms under an umbrella organization, but when the accounting business became a second consulting operation in direct competition, Shaheen filed for divorce.

Andersen Consulting was forced to give up the name by an arbitrator as part of a legal separation in late 2000. Accenture, which launched in the US the following year, is now the world’s largest consulting firm by revenue.