PwC Profile

PwC is the result of a very big merger between two big firms. PwC history goes back more than 100 years ago, since 1849; when Samuel Lowell Price founded an accountancy practice in London. In 1865 Price formed a partnership with William Hopkins and Edwin Warterhouse; Hopkins left shortly after and the firm would be known as Price, Waterhouse & Co from then on. 

By the late 19th century, Price Waterhouse had gained a lot of recognition and began its organic global expansion, opening an office in New York in 1890. In 1904, it opened an office in Liverpool and soon after they had offices elsewhere in the United Kingdom and worldwide, establishing separate partnerships in each country. In 1989, they were on the verge of merging with IBM but the negotiations fell through given the very different views of business that they had.

On the other hand, in 1854 William Cooper founded an accountancy practice in London, seven years later it became Coopers Brothers when his three brothers joined. In 1957 it merged with two other firms, Lybrand, RossBross & Montgomery and McDonald, Currie and Co; from the US and Canada respectively; taking the name Cooper & Lybrand in international practice. In 1980 it acquired Cork Gully to expand its expertise in insolvency and in 1990 it merged with Deloitte in certain countries.

Finally, in 1998, Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers. After the merger, although cyclical, its Management Consulting Services (MCS) was the fastest growing and most profitable area of the practice. The major cause for the growth was the implementation of complex integrated ERP systems (a software program that organizes and tracks large companies’ resources) for multinational companies in the decade of the nineties.

Similar to other firms, PwC went under scrutiny for providing consulting services, particularly financial systems design and implementation, to its audit clients since it was a clear conflict of interest.

In the US, these conflicts increased with the addition of different services, including the outsourcing of IT and back office operations, that end in financial auditing scandals like the Worldcom or the fallout from the Enron which resulted in the creation of the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to regulate how public corporations report its financial records and limit the interaction between management consulting and auditing services. 

Because of this context, PwC became independent from its consulting division and in 2002 hired an outside CEO, Greg Brenneman, to run the new global firm. A new, unusual, name was created called “Monday” which was described as “a real word, concise, recognizable, global and the right fit for a company that works hard to deliver results”. But before this plan could follow through, the entire consultancy business was sold to IBM for approximately $3.9 billion.

In 2009, PwC started to rebuild its consulting practice acquiring Paragon Consulting Group and the commercial services business of Bearing Point. Then, continuing this process, it acquired Diamon Management & Technology Consultants Inc in 2010, PRTM in 2011; Ant’s Eye View, a social media strategy development and consulting firm, in 2012 and Booz & Company in 2013. In that same year, it partnered with Pneuron Corporation to help firms manage big data. 

Today, PwC serves 26 industries and offers a variety of services including assurance, tax, human resources, transactions, performance improvement and crisis management helping solve complex client and stakeholder issues worldwide of large companies, educational institutions, federal government, non-profit and international relief agencies, including 40% of companies in the FTSE 100 Index and 45% of the Fortune 1000 energy companies. Overall, PwC’s consulting practices are expected to grow in the following years.