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Business Consulting
Our Consulting team guarantees quick turnarounds, lower partner-to-staff ratio than most and superior results delivered on a range of services.
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Business Risk Services
Our Business Risk Services team deliver practical and pragmatic solutions that support clients in growing and protecting the inherent value of their businesses.
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Corporate Finance
Our experienced Corporate Finance team has provided a range of transaction, valuation, deal advisory and restructuring services to clients for the past two decades.
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Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
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Digital Transformation
Our Digital Transformation team work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
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Forensic and Investigation Services
Our Forensic and Investigation Services team have targeted solutions to solve difficult challenges - making the difference between finding the truth or being left in the dark.
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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting framework that helps teams, individuals and organisations set and track measurable goals.
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People and Change Consulting
Our People & Change Consulting team help clients adapt to the changing nature of the workforce - how they attract, retain, engage, develop, deploy and lead their people.
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Restructuring
Grant Thornton is Ireland’s leading provider of insolvency and corporate recovery solutions.
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Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced payroll teams become your dedicated payroll department, aiming to process your payroll in the most cost effective and compliant manner.
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Outsourcing
Grant Thornton's reliable and cost-effective outsourcing services help you streamline your business operations by taking care of your workload.
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Audit and Accounting Advisory
Our Audit and Accounting Advisory team takes the headache out of multi-jurisdictional audit compliance requirements as well as technical compliance with accounting standards and legislation for clients.
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Business Process Outsourcing
Grant Thornton’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) team serves the needs of rapidly growing mid-tier multinationals operating out of Ireland and other hubs through the provision of services across the full range of finance functions.
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Flexible People Solutions
At Grant Thornton, our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) department have a dedicated team that help finance functions maximise efficiency.
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Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions
Our Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions service offering covers a full suite of compliance services including financial statement preparation and related filings, dual bookkeeping, direct and indirect tax, statistical returns and payroll.
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Global Payroll Solutions
At Grant Thornton, we meet the challenges of our clients. Our Global payroll compliance service offering is tailored to meet all your payroll requirements through a single point of contact.
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Actuarial
Our Actuarial team provides a comprehensive range of services to our insurance clients. From regulatory support for compliance to delivering specialist expertise in insurance & reinsurance.
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Data Analytics
Our team helps to unlock the potential of data analytics within your organisation, allowing you to be more innovative, efficient and customer-centric than ever before.
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Digital and Fintech
Our FinTech team are experts in technology and financial services and have a long track record of helping companies achieve sustained advantage.
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Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
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Financial Services Audit
Our Financial Services Audit team offers expertise and knowledge along with a horizontal approach to solving clients’ problems and queries.
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Financial Services Consulting
We work closely with clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against the very best international standards.
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Financial Services Tax
Grant Thornton Ireland has a team of over 100 tax professionals providing advice to a diverse range of clients in the Financial Services sector.
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FS Business Risk Services
Our FS Business Risk team have real experience of the financial services sector, through working within regulatory bodies or holding leadership positions in Risk, Compliance and Internal Audit functions.
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Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustees Limited
The Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustee service can offer business owners, directors and employees the opportunity to manage their own retirement choices with full transparency.
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Pension Audit
The Grant Thornton Pension Audit team has vast experience in managing schemes and preparing annual reports on them for clients.
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Prudential Risk
Our industry leading Prudential Risk team works with clients on a range of areas including regulatory reporting, regulatory authorisations, on-site investigations and data quality assurance.
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Quantitative Risk
Our Quantitative Risk team members bring a wide range of experience with many of them having backgrounds in banking, investment markets, regulation, professional practice, and academia.
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Sustainability desk
We recognise that businesses are operating at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainability, and pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop bespoke solutions to their needs.
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Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS)
Our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) team designs and implements creative solutions for organisations expanding into new markets or undertaking functional financial transformations.
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Grant Thornton Financial Counselling
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling (GTFC) comprises a team of highly qualified professionals who offer financial advice to individuals and corporates across a range of areas including savings, investments, pension planning, and inheritance and succession planning.
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Inheritance Planning
Our services on Inheritance Planning mirror those on Succession Planning whereby the foundations of the plan are derived from meaningful conversations with those that wish to pass on or protect their asset base.
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Personal Tax Compliance & Planning
The Grant Thornton Personal Tax team helps clients remain compliant and up to date with all of their tax obligations whilst ensuring that they are solutions driven and manage their finances in the most tax efficient way possible.
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Succession Planning
We have extensive experience guiding our clients successfully through the succession process. This involves advice on both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the process. While there is a business at the core of each succession plan we advise on, it is all predicated on understanding the people and their respective wishes.
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Company Secretarial
Grant Thornton’s Company Secretarial team contains qualified Company Secretaries. Clients are assured that they will meet all of their obligations under the Companies Acts and other relevant legislation and regulations.
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Corporation Tax
Our Corporation Tax team is made up of more than 40 highly experienced senior partners and directors who work directly with a wide range of domestic, international, and financial services clients. We place a strong emphasis on direct service to clients and we pride ourselves on the close personal relationships we build and the deep understanding of their businesses we develop
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Employer Solutions
Attracting and retaining key talent, managing employment costs and ensuring compliance with complex tax rules presents one of the most serious challenges today for many businesses. You need to ensure that your business complies with increasingly complex tax legislation and can adapt to updated Revenue guidance in a cost-effective way and we are here to help.
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Financial Services Tax
The Grant Thornton team is made up of experts who are fully up to date in terms of changing and evolving tax legislation. This is combined with industry expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the evolving financial services regulatory landscape.
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Global Mobility Services
Grant Thornton Ireland offer a different approach to managing global mobility. We have brought together specialists from our tax, global payroll, people and change and financial accounting teams across Ireland and Northern Ireland, while drawing on the knowledge and insights of our global network of over 143 offices of mobility professionals to provide you with a holistic approach to managing global mobility.
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International Tax
We develop close relationships with clients in order to gain a deep understanding of their businesses to ensure they make the right operational decisions. The wrong decision on how a company sells into a new market or establishes a new subsidiary can have major tax implications.
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Tax Advisory
The Grant Thornton Tax Advisory team blends commercial experience and knowledge with tax expertise to advise clients on the full range of transactions including sales, mergers, restructurings and succession planning.
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Tax Incentives
Our Tax Incentives team help clients access vital cash funding and tax incentives to enable them to achieve their growth ambition.
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Transfer Pricing
Our Transfer Pricing team has extensive experience across all industries. They can assist clients in overcoming challenges and deliver sector specific, sustainable solutions.
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VAT
Grant Thornton’s team of indirect tax specialists helps a range of clients across a variety of sectors including pharmaceuticals, financial services, construction and property and food to navigate these complexities.
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Real Estate Tax Advisory
The Irish real estate market has experienced considerable change in recent years. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of challenges for investors, but has also brought about significant opportunities. With this in mind, taxation is now more than ever one of the key factors for real estate investors when appraising investments, financing methods and development structuring.
The funding market for Irish businesses has changed significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. Before the recession the Irish funding market was mainly focused on debt rather than equity investment. While we did have venture capital funds the market was not as developed as those in the UK or US. Similarly there was a limited amount of private equity funding available.
From 2008 onwards market conditions were very challenging for any business with funding needs. The banks’ difficulties meant that there were limited debt options available and there were limited alternatives available at that time.
There are now a number of different options for businesses to raise finance with real alternatives now available. We now have a large number of funds including Broadlake, MML Capital, Green coat Capital, BlueBay, Atlantic Bridge, Development Capital and Cardinal Carlyle fund all active in the Irish marketplace.
These funds have grown their Irish presence over the past five years many of them with investment from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), Enterprise Ireland, the pillar banks and other investors.
There is now real access to equity funding with a significant number of players involved. This is having the effect of stimulating the growth of many business areas including the Irish tech sector.
There is a difference, however, between the start-up area and more mature firms. Real progress has been made in the funding market for start-ups over the last six or seven years.
The Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN), for example, has been very active at matching start-ups with mature, successful investors who bring money and expertise to the table. Recently HBAN announced its 5 year business angel outlook that predicts business angels will invest €85 million in 264 high potential start-ups in the period running 2017 to year-end 2021. John Phelan, the National Director of HBAN, and his team have significantly increased the profile of the HBAN network around Ireland.
This type of blended support is hugely important. In many cases early stage entrepreneurs have not gained the business skills to make their venture a success or to realise its full potential. Getting funding and advice from someone is incredibly valuable. Enterprise Ireland does a lot of work in that area both its own programmes as well as through the four Business Innovation Centres (BICs) which it supports around the country.
Grant Thornton is involved in ‘The Entrepreneur Experience’ with Cork BIC. The Entrepreneur Experience offers emerging entrepreneurs unparalleled access, advice and mentoring from some of Ireland’s most successful business leaders. The two day programme includes networking, workshops and presentations for entrepreneurs who have a new idea or business plan which is not yet ready for investment, or who have an investor ready proposition, or have an established business that is seeking to scale.
These entrepreneurs get to meet some of Ireland and Europe's most successful business leaders who share their experiences and inspiration. These business leaders also offer one to one mentoring and coaching to the entrepreneurs over the two days. A huge amount of energy goes into this programme, which is chaired by Pete Smyth founder of Broadlake.
Other options open to start-ups seeking funding include the Local Enterprise Offices, Microfinance Ireland, and various crowdfunding platforms. Overall, there are lots of opportunities for start-ups to raise equity and loans and it has to be said that the banks are also making a big effort to assist them.
As businesses grow and move on to next stage venture capital often becomes the next step in the funding journey. Firms like Atlantic Bridge, Kernel Capital, Delta Capital Partners, ACT Ventures and Frontline Ventures are doing great work in this area.
There are also some quite innovative options available. BMS, for example, has a venture debt offering. It is suited to established companies that need funding to get from one stage to the next. It is a high coupon product and can be very useful as an equity alternative.
Some of the equity funders out there are interested in opportunities in the tech space. The tech sector offers the growth prospects to match the appetite and expectations of venture capital firms. Few other sectors can match this.
It also has to be said that the venture capital firms and funds do bring more than just cash with them. For example, Atlantic Bridge is a very successful organisation that wants to help companies get to the next stage in terms of internationalisation. They are doing a lot of work with some very interesting high growth companies.
Of course, the capital structures involved in venture funding may not always suit a particular company but there are lots of alternatives out there for mature profitable businesses. We frequently work with such companies to put in place a funding package that matches their needs and stage of development.
In this regard, we have worked with InterTradeIreland on a programme during 2015 and 2016 which gave businesses an insight into the various alternative sources of finance available to them. Consisting of 12 workshops run over the course of a year, the Funding for Growth programme covers the main sources of funding including bank funding, trade credit and finance and alternative funding sources including private equity and crowd funding.
Participants in the workshops heard from funding providers and a Grant Thornton corporate finance expert and received practical advice on applying for and securing funding for growth.
We met hundreds of SMEs seeking to grow during this programme and it was quite an inspiring experience.
A key point in all of this is that entrepreneurs should not ignore M&A either for their business’s growth journey or in terms of their ultimate exit path from the company. The largest and most successful tech companies in the world have tended to grow by a combination of organic expansion and acquisition. This has recently been evidenced by Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn.
Businesses should remain alive to acquisition opportunities which could see them make step changes in their growth, development and market reach. Similarly, acquisition by a larger competitor or a global player may well be the very best next step for a business and its founder.
Finally, there comes the question of actually getting the funding. No matter how much finance is available in the market you still need an investible proposition to get it.
To do that you need a few things: you need a clear business plan; you need to be able to present your idea succinctly; you also need to be able to show that you have a business and not just an idea; you need to be able to engage with your prospective funder and get your message across in very small amount of time; you need to be able to attract the right people to work with you and back you; and above all, you need to work very hard at it.
Finally, business owners should not feel that they have to take the first offer they get. You should aim to get to a position where you find an investor who will add value to your organisation.