Facebook, Google tipped to fill business advisory roles

With accounting firms turning to business advisory and financial planning services, SmartFee managing director Adrian Jenkinson believes it will only be a matter of time before the big internet players take over with their wealth of resources.

“If you’re an adviser to a client, you have a relatively small base of people that you can draw on in terms of experience to be able to provide insights to our clients,” Mr Jenkinson said.

“Now, if you’re a Facebook or a Google or an Amazon or even a Microsoft, you have a large proportion of SMEs transacting through your platforms today, whether it’s from an advertising perspective or a payments perspective, and you have a lot of information about how those businesses operate to then have the ability to provide insights to other businesses on what best practice looks like.

“The business advisers of the future will come from big data plays, played out by the organisations that currently have the access to the greatest pool of big data available around SMEs.”

With the industry playing catch-up in the technology space, Mr Jenkinson believes accountants have to set aside time to understand the needs of their clients to plan for the future and prevent widespread commoditisation of their current services.

“The direction that an accounting firm takes in the future will in part be prescribed by what type of clients they are looking to do business with, and what the service and life cycle of that client is,” he said.

“I think advisory type services and even financial planning type services will be part of that service mix, but I don’t think it is prescriptive to say, ‘We used to do compliance and now we do business advisory’, because if everyone is moving to business advisory, then you are basically regenerating the same cycle of potential commoditisation in the future.”