-
Business Consulting
Our Consulting team guarantees quick turnarounds, lower partner-to-staff ratio than most and superior results delivered on a range of services.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Digital Transformation
Our Digital Transformation team work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
-
Forensic Accounting
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Restructuring
Grant Thornton is Ireland’s leading provider of insolvency and corporate recovery solutions.
-
Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced payroll teams become your dedicated payroll department, aiming to process your payroll in the most cost effective and compliant manner.
-
Outsourcing
Grant Thornton's reliable and cost-effective outsourcing services help you streamline your business operations by taking care of your workload.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Flexible People Solutions
At Grant Thornton, our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) department have a dedicated team that help finance functions maximise efficiency.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Financial Services Audit
Our Financial Services Audit team offers expertise and knowledge along with a horizontal approach to solving clients’ problems and queries.
-
Financial Services Consulting
We work closely with clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against the very best international standards.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pension Audit
The Grant Thornton Pension Audit team has vast experience in managing schemes and preparing annual reports on them for clients.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Tax Incentives
Our Tax Incentives team help clients access vital cash funding and tax incentives to enable them to achieve their growth ambition.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 European Central Bank (ECB) has published its report on the state of climate-related and environmental (C&E) risk management within the European banking sector, a follow up publication to their supervision newsletter article published in August (The clock is ticking for banks to manage climate and environmental risks). The report covers 112 banks directly supervised by the ECB with €24 trillion of combined assets, and is based on the responses to a questionnaire circulated earlier in the year. The questionnaire consisted of a self-assessment of the banks current practices against the 13 supervisory expectations, together with a request to submit implementation plans detailing how and when the bank would meet these expectations. It provides a snapshot of European banks’ preparedness to adequately manage and disclose their exposure to C&E risks, shares examples of best practice, and highlights the areas where further progress is required.
Subscribe to our mailing list
Update your subscriptions for Grant Thornton publications and events.
Key Points
Alignment
As noted by the ECB previously, almost all banks that participated in the exercise are only partially - or not at all - aligned with the 13 supervisory expectations (Guide on climate-related and environmental risks). Many of them do recognise, however, that C&E risks will have a material impact on their risk profile within the next three to five years, especially in terms of financing, day-to-day, and business model risks. The review found many of the banks who have chosen to report C&E risks as being irrelevant or immaterial have no proper risk materiality assessment in place.
Governance
The ECB notes banks progress in adapting governance policies and attributing formal responsibilities within their organisation for the management of these risks. Examples of the types of roles noted in the report include executive heads of sustainability, as well as supervisory and executive functions of the management body through specific directorates and committees. This formal ownership sends a clear message that the banks upper management are actively engaging with the new regulations and are aware of its impact.
Good Practices
The good practices noted in the report range from materiality assessment and strategy-setting procedures to specific qualitative and quantitative indicators in risk appetite statements and credit risk management. They highlight the importance of taking a strategic approach, especially in areas where data and methodological gaps are perceived to hinder the full implementation of the expectations in the short term. The examples demonstrate the ability of institutions to develop relevant risk management capabilities for the sound, effective and comprehensive management of C&E risks.
These include;
- Assigning specific C&E risk responsibility to members of the executive function and management body;
- Integration of C&E-related criteria in lending and investment policies. To alleviate market risks some banks are engaging in exclusionary or phasing out policies towards sectors they have deemed unsustainable;
- Engagement with corporate clients to ensure that each client has a dedicated transition plan (with a formal diversification strategy) in place; and,
- Integrating C&E risks into reporting practices in the form of gap analysis and data collection and reporting tools.
Areas where further progress is required
Blind Spot
Biodiversity loss and pollution
The ECB found most institutions have a blind spot for physical risks and other environmental risk drivers, such as biodiversity loss and pollution. While institutions’ materiality assessments demonstrate that both physical and transition risks are often found to be material, their risk management practices for physical risks are less advanced than for transition risk. Transition risk refers to an institution’s financial loss that can result, directly or indirectly, from the process of adjustment towards a lower-carbon and more environmentally sustainable economy Institutions have generally started by collecting data and developing capabilities for transition risks. Conversely, only a handful of institutions have started taking into account other environmental risk drivers, such as biodiversity loss and pollution. For virtually all institutions, such other environmental risks are still a blind spot.
Challenges
Data and methodological gaps
Some institutions have already made progress in this regard, for example by developing client scorecards with a qualitative risk classification (e.g. low, medium or high) or by using proxies as key risk indicators in the risk appetite statement. However, a considerable number of institutions have indicated longer lead times and do not plan to produce any short-term deliverables before the end of 2022.
Next Steps
- The ECB expects all institutions to take decisive action to address the shortcomings set out in a dedicated supervisory feedback letter, alongside a peer benchmarking issued in Q3 2021.
- The ECB have also announced they will perform a dedicated supervisory assessment on institutions’ public disclosures in the near future. In tandem with this the European Banking Authority is working towards the publication of Pillar 3 implementing technical standards (ITS) on ESG risks disclosures.
- The 2022 ECB stress test will focus on Climate Risk (Climate risk stress test - Methodology ) with submissions to the ECB beginning around March 2022, and feedback from the ECB issued later in the year. Examples of the questionnaires are also included in the Annexes of this report alongside instructions on how to fill in the templates for all three modules.
Why Grant Thornton?
Grant Thornton provides a full suite of ESG advisory services for Financial Services institutions across:
- Strategy
- Risk Management
- Integration
Grant Thornton’s Financial Services Risk, Consulting and Advisory teams are comprised of dedicated experts who are experienced in supporting banks and investment firms with a variety of regulatory challenges.
Our team understands that regulation continues to drive the strategic agenda for banks. Working together with our dedicated Sustainability Team, we believe our skillsets combine the best of scientific knowledge with real world financial and regulatory experience to deliver practical, actionable solutions. We specialise in assisting clients across the financial services sector in navigating through the complex maze of C&E regulation and support clients to identify regulatory obligations and work towards full compliance balanced with your business needs.