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Kirsty Mitchell is head of KPMG UK’s Emerging Giants team, responsible for building KPMG’s first dedicated proposition designed especially to support fast-growth businesses in a way complementary to their needs. The newly launched Access Product focuses on delivering traditional Big 4 support in a very non-traditional way via 4 main ‘pain points’ – Access to Talent, Access to Finance, Access to Markets and Compliance and Governance.

Morgan: As I understand it, the client pays £1000/month for KPMG services and gets in return Access services, consisting of 30 hours of support, workshops and networking sessions, which may be in fixed groups or 121. The question is, what services will the client receive for £1000/month?

Kirsty: The idea is that the KPMG Access team will work with individual businesses to identify what they would most benefit from regarding services. For some this might be R&D support, for others it might be legal for example. If you think about it that you subscribe £1,000/month for ‘Access’, with £12,000 per annum being redeemable against other KPMG support. We’ve designed it this way to try and prevent people from feeling like they’re paying for something they don’t need/have covered elsewhere, but also so it’s not prohibitive to people who are perhaps spending £12,000+ with other advisors; they could in essence transfer those services into KPMG and not pay any extra for Access.

Morgan: The key themes supported are listed as Consumer, Health, ESG, Workplace, Net Zero, and Smart Cities. What sectors will KPMG be able to support within the six key themes, Many of our clients are for example, technology/software based, so where would these fit regarding the themes?

Kirsty: The purpose of structuring Access under themes rather than sectors is to ensure as much cross-market collaboration as possible; I believe this really is where some of the magic happens! For example, if you take ‘Consumer’ you could have a business like Deliveroo in here because this is something that has changed consumer habits. You could also have a retail start up, a coffee shop and an e-commerce platform… suddenly you have a diverse group of companies who could all benefit from working together whilst also all reshaping what this trend looks like. I believe strongly now that ‘tech’ itself isn’t a defining enough feature as we keen we launched support that reflected business purpose rather than traditional sectors – the old ‘square peg, round hole’ analogy so to speak. In essence to answer your question directly, I would challenge what the problem these tech/software companies are trying to solve is and then group them from there. It’s something we would triage with them if they were keen to speak with us but I’m confident given our breadth we have got most areas covered! It’s also a deliberately evolving proposition so we can bring in new themes/cohorts as market demand arises.

Morgan: You stated that you would be happy to work with some of the smaller scaling businesses we are used to working with, but also commented that you aligned with businesses with a £5million plus turnover. If you remember I commented at that point, that this would be more applicable to post Goldman Sachs. Could you clarify please?

Kirsty: Access is designed to support businesses at ‘super seed’ stage grow through Series A and beyond. Again, it’s deliberately designed like this rather than by turnover/revenue because I believe there are some amazing businesses out there with lower revenues and equally some less great businesses that just happen to be making more money! In addition, it varies hugely by sector as many health/bio/life sciences businesses are pre-revenue for a number of years but still need high quality support to reach their potential. As a firm we are equipped to support businesses right through to listing and beyond (we have worked closely with LSE on the Elite initiative) and provided the business can afford the £1,000/month and has the right aspirational and growth mindset then we would be delighted to support them. The reference to £5m+ is where I would say the businesses are beginning to need a hybrid of ‘Access’ support and traditional KPMG client support and we are currently finessing what this might look like as I don’t want there to be a drop off or an extreme change in the client experience.