EY India plans to sustain its hiring tempo for its consulting business in the current fiscal as well in tune with rising demand for its services in the world’s fifth largest economy, Rohan Sachdev, Consulting Services leader, EY India has said.

Today, consulting is the largest and fastest-growing service line for EY India. For its consulting business, EY India hired more than 11, 000 professionals in FY’23 ( it follows July 22 – June 23 financial year). This included campus hires (3,600+) and laterals. 

“Given our sustained growth, we will continue to hire at similar levels in FY24 as well,” Sachdev told businessline.

The average growth in the consulting business in the last two years has seen upwards (50 per cent) growth and this growth trajectory continues, he noted. “You can imagine the sort of velocity in the market,” Sachdev said.

One of the factors that have supported the growth of the consulting business is the firm has recruited several senior external partners. “As many as 75 partners joined us from the industry and other professional services firms in the last two years. This one strategy of recruiting senior people who have the market brand has helped us also,” Sachdev said. Currently, the consulting business has 390 partners including equity and non-equity. 

Consulting services

EY India has two parts to its consulting service line —business consulting and technology consulting.  In technology consulting, there are five parts —data and analytics; cyber; emerging tech and digital; technology transformation and platforms.

Of the near 25,000 people sitting in consulting business, about half are in technology consulting, Sachdev noted.

Business consulting practice includes business transformation, supply chain, finance transformation, enterprise risk, technology risk and financial services risk.

Asked if the economic growth of the country has a correlation to growth of the consulting services business, Sachdev said, “Of course it does. As the economy flourishes, we see the demands on our business also constantly increasing. However nature of demand is changing quickly and is linked to how customer behaviour is changing.”

“Today the focus for everyone is personalising customer experience and rewiring their business. I would call this a front-to-back transformation of how people are looking at business, largely led by technology. Now everyone is thinking of providing end to end service”.

Sachdev also highlighted the opportunities on the government side, noting that India’s digital stack is a key driver of growth. “ Our government business is embedded both at the Central and State level, fundamentally using technology to see how things can be enabled for India”, he said.

Sachdev also noted that a lot of traction is coming for the consulting business from its risk business. “With the complexity of businesses and governance issues, our risk business is seeing a lot of traction”, he said.

Sachdev noted that asset-based high competency managed services is an important area where the consulting business is seeing lot of traction. “People are saying you take this part of my business and run it for me. You are helping that business take one big responsibility of their table and focus on other things”, he said

Sachdev said that India has now emerged as the engineering new age technology destination of the world. 

Growth Drivers

Sachdev said that EY India was the only firm (among the Big four) that has a large sustainable risk business.

“Whether it is internal audit, whether it is technology risk, whether it is specialised financial services risk business, we have strong risk business,” he said. 

Sachdev sees demand in the future would be more for technology enabled services and managed services.

He however noted that growth was visible in all its verticals under the consulting business.

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