Former EY Executive Launches Challenger to the Big Four’s Tax Empire

Jeff Soar, who led EY’s global law business, has launched WTS UK with 10 partners and ambitions to hire 100 within five years. Here’s why this challenge to Big Four tax dominance is different — and why private equity is betting big on it.

The Former EY Executive Who Wants to Take Down the Big Four’s Tax Empires

The Big Four have dominated professional tax services for so long that the idea of a genuine challenger feels almost theoretical. Jeff Soar is about to make it very concrete indeed.

Soar, who led EY’s global law business until last year, has launched WTS UK — a dedicated tax consultancy that is explicitly and unapologetically positioning itself as a direct rival to the tax practices of Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC. The firm launches with 10 partners and a five-year plan to reach 100 — taking it to approximately 60% of the size of EY’s UK tax practice and into territory that no independent challenger has seriously occupied before.

“We’ve got a level of ambition that people very quickly will see us as standing toe to toe with the Big Four’s tax practices — that’s our goal,” Soar said at launch. The language is deliberate and the target is specific: not to be a niche boutique serving a corner of the market, but to be a credible full-scale alternative for the largest and most complex tax mandates in the UK.

The Structural Advantage Soar Is Betting On

The pitch is not simply that WTS UK will do what the Big Four do, but cheaper or faster. It is that WTS UK can do something the Big Four structurally cannot — provide pure, unconflicted tax advice without the regulatory constraints that come with running a major audit business simultaneously.

The Big Four’s tax practices have long operated under a shadow that their independent rivals do not. Because Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC all perform statutory audits for major corporations alongside their tax and consulting work, they face a web of independence restrictions that limits which clients they can advise on tax, how they can advise them, and what relationships they can maintain. The regulatory pressures facing the Big Four’s professional services model have been building for years — and Soar is betting that the market is ready for an alternative that carries none of that baggage.

He references EY’s aborted Project Everest — the attempt to spin off its consulting business to escape exactly these conflict constraints — as evidence that the market has already begun grappling with the problem. “Everest did open people’s eyes a little bit to doing something differently,” he said. The spin-off collapsed under the weight of partner opposition and regulatory complexity, but the conversation it started has not gone away. The structural challenges facing Big Four business models are real, persistent, and increasingly visible to the large corporate clients who pay their fees.

Private Equity Reshaping Professional Services

WTS UK is the UK arm of the broader WTS network — a collection of specialist tax firms across multiple countries in which EQT, Europe’s largest private capital group, invested last year. According to a person familiar with the situation, EQT’s Swedish parent will provide funding of more than €500 million to build out WTS more broadly — capital that gives the network firepower to recruit partners, invest in technology, and scale at a pace that traditional partner-funded models could never achieve.

This is the most significant structural shift in professional services in a generation — and WTS UK is simply the latest and most ambitious manifestation of it. In 2024, Grant Thornton UK sold a majority stake to private equity group Cinven. KPMG’s former UK restructuring business was spun out, renamed Interpath Advisory, and valued at approximately £800 million by its new private equity owners in January. Warburg Pincus pledged $300 million to former Big Four executives to launch Unity Advisory. FRP Advisory helped fund Queens Tower Advisory.

The pattern is consistent: experienced professionals leaving partnership structures, taking private equity backing, and building businesses unconstrained by the conflicts and governance limitations of the firms they left. According to Companies House data, the number of newly registered professional services firms with disclosed PE backing has grown significantly over the past three years — a structural shift in how Britain’s advisory economy is being rebuilt.

The growing influence of private equity across European professional services is rewriting the competitive landscape in ways that the Big Four’s partnership model was never designed to respond to quickly. WTS UK is arriving into a market that is already moving — and with €500 million behind it and a founder who knows exactly where the Big Four’s weaknesses lie, it may move faster than most challengers before it.

The implications for European businesses seeking tax advisory services are significant: genuine competition at the top of the market, potentially lower fees, and the ability to appoint a world-class tax adviser without navigating the conflict restrictions that have long made the Big Four’s dominance as much a regulatory artefact as a meritocratic one.

FAQ

Q: What is WTS UK and who is behind it? WTS UK is a newly launched specialist tax consultancy founded by Jeff Soar, former head of EY’s global law business. It launches with 10 partners and plans to hire 100 within five years. It is the UK arm of the WTS network, backed by EQT, Europe’s largest private capital group, which has committed more than €500 million to build out the business globally.

Q: How is WTS UK different from the Big Four tax practices? WTS UK operates as a pure tax advisory business with no audit arm — meaning it faces none of the independence restrictions that limit Big Four firms when advising clients on tax matters. This gives it the ability to work with clients that the Big Four cannot touch due to audit conflicts, positioning it as what Soar describes as “a true challenger to the Big Four” without their regulatory constraints.