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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.
Grant Thornton’s Women in Business report 2021: highlighting a window of opportunity
For 17 years, Grant Thornton has been tracking the global progress of women in senior management. In the last 12 months, unprecedented events have had an unforeseen and unparalleled impact on that progress. The coronavirus pandemic has driven a fundamental shift in global working practices. It has forced millions into a remote working model. It has exposed weaknesses in supply chains; caused businesses to assess the factors essential to survival; and underlined the mid-market as the beating heart of many sectors, central to keeping economies functioning.
At the same time, expansive popular movements including Black Lives Matter, FareShare and Extinction Rebellion have shone a harsh light on inequalities and exclusion in society and the workplace, and the need for changes to business practices in order to create sustainable growth. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues are in the spotlight. And political upheaval has driven expectation for greater diversity and representation at the highest levels. Businesses and their leaders are being held publicly accountable, and the risks for those not truly committed to inclusion are high.
Widening the door to diversity
These seismic shifts have, inevitably, had repercussions for women in business, their prospects and the challenges theynface in the coming months and years. The business landscape appears to be undergoing permanent changes, not least due to the more flexible, hybrid working environments being adopted by many organisations. “Businesses need to consciously look at the positive shifts that have occurred around diversity, inclusion, and women in leadership, and lock those in,” says Kim Schmidt, global leader – leadership, people and culture at Grant Thornton International. “They have to ensure that, as they shape the future work environment, they take the learnings from the pandemic into account. The more flexibility they provide in how and when people do their jobs, the more engagement they’ll get, and the more attractive they’ll be as employers.”
Research studies from 2020 are definitive that women’s employment and career development have both been impacted significantly by the pandemic. But they diverge over whether it has set the gender parity movement back by several years, or if it could prove to be a springboard into senior positions for more women.
“We won’t really know what changes COVID’s made for a couple of years. It could both help and hinder,” points out Francesca Lagerberg, global leader – network capabilities at Grant Thornton International. “Virtual working may help some women get into certain roles, and make those roles more manageable. But with COVID, where some women’s lives are being taken up with just keeping the family running, it could be pushing them back."
A more digital working landscape has removed some of the traditional obstacles to women’s careers. Flexible working – including the ability to set their own hours, removal of the ressure to commute, and the technology to connect and participate fully from a remote location – has long been on the list of actions needed to promote female career progression. While changes in working practices have varied globally, and by sector, the mass movement to home working engendered by COVID-19 has shown these working practices to be both practical and, in some cases, preferable.
Leadership in the new normal
Leadership styles have also come under scrutiny due to the demands of the pandemic. Engagement with staff, a greater understanding of people’s personal needs and circumstances, and support for mental and emotional health have been more vital than ever. Empathy has been a core leadership trait during COVID-19. As these ‘softer’ management styles have proved their worth, a greater appreciation of, and a greater need for, diverse leadership has emerged.
“It has shone a light on the skill set traditionally perceived as more ‘female’ than ‘male’,” says Francesca Lagerberg. “The need to have more empathy in the current environment has been huge. Empathy is vital in the approach to people working within the organisation – if you’ve got people on furlough, if you’ve got people struggling with their circumstances – and the mental health issues that COVID has driven.”
The chance to accelerate change
Progress towards greater diversity and inclusion, and particularly gender parity in senior management, has in the past decade moved slower than it should. But as a result of the upheavals of the past year, it is both more possible and more important than ever before. Our 2021 research has shown an increase in the proportion of senior female managers globally. At 31%, up from 29% in 2020, it has finally passed the 30% tipping point1 needed to catalyse real change. Nine out of 10 businesses worldwide now have at least one woman in their leadership teams. There are more female managing directors and chief executive officers (CEOs) than ever before, with 26% of these roles held by women. How leaders respond to the changed business landscape will dictate whether we now see a significant upswing in these numbers.
“There will be an expectation that leaders post-COVID change the way they lead if they want to bring in talent and keep people engaged. That creates an avenue for women into senior roles,” says Kim Schmidt. “COVID-19 didn’t create this shift – it accelerated existing trends and attitudes towards flexible working, the importance of diversity to innovation and business success, and the need for more empathetic, more transparent leadership.”
At Grant Thornton, we believe there is now a window of opportunity during which mid-market leaders can accelerate the progress of their businesses into a more inclusive future – or choose to revert to previous models. The benefits of diversity at a senior level include improved financial performance, leveraging talent, reflecting the marketplace and customer perspectives, and increased innovation. All of which will help businesses successfully navigate these uncertain times.
This report outlines the position of women in senior management around the world as we witness the emergence of a more diverse and inclusive leadership model, and highlights the actions leaders need to take in order to create a step change in the proportion of high-level roles held by women.