The firm reported combined global revenues of $34.8bn (£26.6bn) for the financial year ended June 2018 (FY18). Overall, FY18 revenues grew by 7.4% in local currency and 11% in US dollars (versus FY17). All EY service lines delivered strong growth in FY18: in local currency, assurance grew 4.4%; advisory 10.1%; tax 6.4% and transaction advisory services (TAS) 13.9%. Over the five years since the launch of its vision 2020 plan in 2013, EY has recorded strong 8.5% compound annual growth.

‘EY has been redefining how it uses technology to transform and strengthen its traditional and new service offerings across all businesses, including labour-intensive manual processes and innovations using blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA). EY is using over 2,000 bots across its businesses and client services. Of these, the 700 bots supporting EY internally have saved more than 2.1 million people hours and brought higher accuracy to manual processes,’ said a company spokesperson.

The revenue growth contributed to increased employee numbers and promotions. Headcount grew by 5.7% to over 260,000 globally. In FY18, 747 people were promoted to partner and more than 400 new external partners were admitted. Partner promotions reflected key priorities: 29% of the promoted partners are within the assurance business, 32% of new partners are from emerging markets and women represent nearly 30%. This year the gender diversity in the global executive, the highest governing body in EY, increased to more than 26%.

Mark Weinberger, EY CEO, said: ‘This year more clients turned to EY for support in their digital and transformation strategies, and for our bedrock services across audit and tax. Our significant and innovative investments are driving growth and supporting the delivery of high-quality services. Most of all, our success is driven by the contributions of 260,000 EY people around the world.’

EY revenues by service line – US $M

Report by Rob Munro