Resilience in action

Our commitment to a multidisciplinary model and a focus on building the skills of our workforce to meet the complexity of challenges facing organisations and society, ensured that FY24 was one of growth.

This came in a subdued market environment, highlighting our resilience and how we are rapidly developing for a changing world through investing where it matters.

Despite the economic environment, the demand for core services remained strong, while our investments in critical technology are reinforcing our relevance.

The financial year was dominated by ongoing macroeconomic instability and heightened geopolitical tensions. This was compounded in the UK by the political uncertainty in the second half of our financial year ahead of the UK General Election.

In this challenging business environment PwC continued to demonstrate resilience, as demand for our core skills remained high, boosted by long-term investment in people and technology. Nowhere was this more evident than with our rollout of AI - both internally and externally - ensuring we remain at the forefront of client delivery.

While we’ve continued to see high levels of client demand, this has come against the backdrop of a difficult trading environment.

The firm posted 9% growth with combined group revenues rising to £6.3bn. In the UK, growth was 3%, while the Middle East achieved a 26% increase in revenue. The Channel Islands enjoyed a 9% increase in revenue.

Across the group we saw a strong performance from our Audit practice which was up 10%, as we’ve helped clients navigate complex and changing regulatory requirements while growing our non-financial reporting activities. Despite the global deals market being subdued throughout 2023, we posted a year-on-year increase in our Deals business of 5%. Similarly, Tax performed well with a 4% increase.

While Consulting was up 18% overall, this was largely driven by public infrastructure projects across the Middle East; the UK fell back a little due to the sluggish economy. Overall Risk revenues fell by 1%.

In the UK, our Growth Accelerator programme continued to deliver across FY24 with our focus on cloud transformation, customer-led transformation and sustainability reporting all recording strong year-on-year improvements.

We also saw growth in the Egypt Technology and Innovation Center (ETIC) - which is now fully operational in Cairo. A technology hub, the Centre is home to over 800 people who collaborate to build technology enabled services and has been involved in over 200 engagements across the EMEA region in its first two years.

This was another example of our commitment to ongoing investment, which is crucial to the long-term success of the business.

Given the local market conditions in the UK and the lower rates of attrition across our business, we undertook a voluntary severance programme over the year, to ensure that we have the right skills and expertise in place to respond to our clients’ most pressing needs and emerging opportunities.

However, our revenue position meant we could reward UK staff with an on average 3% pay rise where eligible, and a broadly similar bonus pool to FY23. At the same time, average distributable profit per partner fell by 5% to £862,000.

The dramatic emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) onto the market in late 2022 signalled a change in the way business would be conducted and transacted. Our determination to stay ahead of these developments was signalled in May when we signed an agreement with OpenAI that makes PwC among the largest corporate users of ChatGPT Enterprise, and its first reseller.

This followed the rollout of a UK tax-trained AI model for 2,300 of our tax professionals created in partnership with Harvey and OpenAI. Trained on case law, legislation and PwC’s intellectual property, this new tool ensures we provide expert insight for our clients across key areas.

This approach with Harvey and OpenAI was extended to create the PwC Deals platform. It will help us review documents more quickly, generating faster insights and streamlining workflows.

Moving at speed to close these deals was made possible by our existing strategic alliance relationship with OpenAI. Another, with Microsoft, has seen the UK firm agree to adopt its M365 platform for all of its main collaboration tools.

These core relationships are bolstered by a number of alliance partnerships, to which this year we added deals with Quantexa and Clearspeed.

Our community contribution has exceeded £10 million for the second year in a row, with a significantly higher proportion of our people volunteering (33% vs. 28%) this year across a number of programmes, including social mobility, social enterprise, and environmental volunteering.

We have seen an increase in volunteer hours (over 7%), comfortably exceeding our ongoing target of 50,000 hours.

Although our skills-based volunteering percentage has fallen (largely due to self-sourced and environmental volunteering), we have seen an overall increase in the number of beneficiaries our staff have supported.

FY24 saw the continuation of the annual summer ‘Insight Week’ programme, which takes place in the first half of the year. This is supplemented by our student recruitment work experience programme, resulting in us providing 79 more paid work experience places than last year.