When Mazars and FORVIS officially launched Forvis Mazars in June 2024, the headline numbers made the story look familiar. The new organisation entered the market with roughly $5 billion in combined revenue, around 40,000 professionals, operations in more than 100 countries and territories, and close to 1,800 partners, immediately placing it among the new entrants to the global top tier outside the Big Four. From the outside, this looked like exactly the kind of move the profession has become accustomed to reading as consolidation: a larger footprint, a broader client proposition, and a stronger claim to global relevance. The message was clear and deliberately so. This was scale, reach, and ambition in a single announcement. (Forvis Mazars)
What actually emerged, however, sits in a more ambiguous and more interesting structural space. Forvis Mazars operates under a single global brand, but it is built on just two members: Forvis Mazars LLP in the United States and Forvis Mazars Group SC, the internationally integrated Mazars partnership operating across the rest of the network. That matters because the model delivers one name to the market, while leaving profits, ownership, and core economics split between two large partnership systems. It is not a classic merger into one global firm, and it is not a traditional loose federation either. It is something in between, designed very consciously around the constraints that prevented a cleaner answer. (Forvis Mazars)
That is what makes the case important. Most large structural moves in professional services either preserve fragmentation and call it coordination, or aim for full integration and then get blocked by economics, regulation, or politics. Forvis Mazars attempts a third route: to create the external force of a global firm without eliminating the internal reality of separate partnerships. In other words, it is not just another combination. It is a structural experiment in whether one brand and shared governance can compensate for the absence of fully unified economics.
Two Firms, Two Different Gaps
The logic behind the deal becomes much clearer once the two sides are viewed not as equals joining from a position of symmetry, but as firms arriving with different deficits. Mazars had spent years building what it repeatedly described as an internationally integrated partnership, a model that distinguished it from the Big Four and most mid-tier competitors, which still rely on member-firm federations. In the Mazars model, governance and profit-sharing were designed to create stronger cross-border alignment than a conventional network would allow, and the firm’s own reporting tied that structure directly to its growth narrative. In the 2022/23 year, Mazars reported €2.8 billion in fee income, up 13%, its third consecutive year of double-digit growth, and explicitly presented that performance as validation of the integrated partnership model. (Forvis Mazars)
But that integration had a visible strategic weakness: the United States. However coherent Mazars may have been across Europe, Asia, Africa, and other international markets, it remained underpowered in the one geography that matters most for large multinational audit and advisory mandates. That gap limited the credibility of its global integration story, because multinational clients do not evaluate “global” in the abstract. They evaluate whether the platform has real weight in the US, and whether that weight can be coordinated with the rest of the world. Without a much stronger US position, Mazars’ integrated model remained strategically elegant but commercially incomplete. (FNLondon)
FORVIS came to the table from the opposite direction. It had been created only in 2022 through the merger of BKD and DHG, bringing together a US platform that started with roughly $1.4 billion in revenue and more than 5,500 people, and then continued to grow rapidly. By fiscal 2024, the US business was reporting revenue of about $1.69 billion, and its integrated report showed combined 2023 revenues of $1.7 billion for legacy FORVIS and $305 million for Mazars USA before the global launch. It had scale, market presence, and credibility in the US, but lacked an international system of comparable reach. Where Mazars had integration without enough America, FORVIS had America without enough integration. The deal solved different problems for each side, which is precisely why it became possible. (Inside Public Accounting)
A Structure Designed Around Constraints
If the two firms had been free to design an ideal structure on a blank sheet of paper, they almost certainly would not have chosen this one. A clean, single global partnership would have solved many of the coordination problems the profession has struggled with for decades, but that path runs directly into ownership rules, liability concerns, regulatory differences, and audit independence constraints, especially in the United States. At the same time, a conventional global alliance would have been too weak a response to the strategic problem both firms were trying to solve, because clients at the upper end of the market increasingly expect something closer to seamless delivery than legacy networks usually provide. The structure that emerged therefore reflects not a perfect answer, but the boundary line between what was strategically desirable and what was structurally feasible.
That is why the most important word in the whole announcement may have been “unique.” Forvis Mazars repeatedly described itself as a unique $5 billion global network with only two members. That phrasing was not branding fluff. It was an admission that this was neither a normal network nor a fully integrated firm, but a hybrid intentionally designed to compress fragmentation without eliminating it. The organisation would present as one global platform, yet continue to rest on two separate partnerships with their own economic systems, their own control over capital, and their own governance traditions. (Forvis Mazars)
That compromise has obvious appeal. It gives Mazars the US presence it lacked and gives FORVIS the international reach it lacked, while avoiding the legal and economic upheaval of a full merger. But compromise structures never eliminate tension. They relocate it. In this case, the tension moves from market positioning to internal operation, where the challenge becomes whether governance and shared intent can reliably do the work that unified economics would otherwise have done automatically. That is the real question inside the Forvis Mazars model, and it is the question that will decide whether the structure proves innovative or merely intricate.
What the Structure Actually Is
Externally, Forvis Mazars has done everything possible to present itself as one organisation. The branding is unified, the messaging is global, the leadership narrative is coordinated, and the client proposition is built around the idea of a firm capable of delivering audit, tax, advisory, and consulting services seamlessly across more than 100 countries and territories. That is essential, because large multinational clients do not buy coordination as an abstract governance feature. They buy confidence that the organisation in front of them can act as one when it matters. The brand, therefore, is not cosmetic. It is an operating necessity. (Forvis Mazars)
Internally, however, the system remains divided along the most consequential lines. Forvis Mazars LLP in the United States remains owned by its US partnership, while Forvis Mazars Group SC remains the internationally integrated Mazars partnership operating outside the US. Even the headline “one brand, two members” is doing a great deal of structural work, because it means there is no single profit pool, no fully shared ownership structure, and no unified economic engine sitting underneath the global proposition. The firm can coordinate, but it cannot rely on economics alone to enforce coordination. (Forvis Mazars)
That difference matters most in the places clients do not see. In a fully integrated firm, pricing trade-offs, staffing choices, investment priorities, and the economics of cross-border work are ultimately resolved inside one system. In a structure like Forvis Mazars, those same decisions must pass across organisational boundaries that remain real even when the brand suggests they have disappeared. The client sees one firm. The organisation, in practice, still has to manage two centres of economic gravity and make them behave as if they were one. That is not impossible. But it is not the same thing as integration.
Governance Without Unified Economics
To manage that complexity, Forvis Mazars introduced a Global Network Board, with Mazars leader Hervé Hélias as first chair and FORVIS chair Matt Snow as vice chair, alongside a broader leadership structure drawn from both sides. The board is meant to align strategy, coordinate key investments, and create consistency across the network without dissolving the underlying autonomy of the two partnerships. On paper, this is the mechanism through which the organisation attempts to transform shared intent into disciplined execution. It is governance doing the work that full structural integration does not. (Forvis Mazars)
But governance bodies behave differently depending on the economics beneath them. In an integrated partnership, shared ownership and shared profit create a built-in incentive for alignment, which makes governance partly an expression of common interest. In a dual-partnership model, governance has to operate more by persuasion, negotiation, and deliberate coordination, because each side retains control over its own operations, capital, and priorities. That does not make the model weak by definition. It does, however, make it more effortful. Alignment is not embedded in the structure. It has to be produced repeatedly.
This is where the experiment becomes especially interesting. Forvis Mazars is effectively betting that a smaller number of large, strategically aligned entities can coordinate better than a traditional sprawling network of member firms, even without going all the way to unified economics. That may prove right. Two members are certainly easier to align than dozens. But “easier than a fragmented network” and “as effective as an integrated firm” are not the same claim, and the distance between those two claims is exactly where the friction in this model is likely to show up over time.
Where the Model Begins to Friction
The first place the structure is likely to show its strain is in cross-border execution. The more work moves across jurisdictions, the more the invisible boundaries inside the system start to matter, because revenue allocation, cost sharing, staffing priorities, and investment decisions have to be coordinated across separate economic units. In a single profit pool, those tensions are muted by shared economics. In a two-partnership structure, they have to be negotiated, even when the client expects the answer to feel seamless. The client-facing brand reduces visible fragmentation, but it does not eliminate the operational work required to keep fragmentation from surfacing.
The second friction point lies in investment. Building global technology platforms, common data models, sector capabilities, or scalable delivery infrastructure requires sustained, coordinated funding over time. That is difficult enough inside one firm. It becomes more difficult when the returns, costs, and strategic priorities are not distributed evenly between two separate partnerships. The question is no longer simply “is this a good investment for the organisation?” but also “is this the right investment for both sides, on terms both sides will continue to support?” That is a much harder governance problem than the external narrative suggests.
And then there is the execution risk that scale alone does not solve. In July 2024, the UK Financial Reporting Council said BDO and Forvis Mazars needed urgently to improve audit quality, after Forvis Mazars’ audit quality inspection results fell to 44% from 56% the year before. That does not invalidate the strategic rationale of the global combination, but it is a useful reminder that structural ambition and operational delivery are not the same thing. A more global platform may improve market relevance. It does not automatically resolve quality, consistency, or execution discipline inside the firm. (Reuters)
The Role of the Brand
In a model like this, the brand is doing more than marketing. It is carrying part of the structural load. A single global brand allows Forvis Mazars to show up in the market as a credible alternative to larger global competitors, particularly in situations where clients need reassurance more than they need a legal tutorial on how the firm is organised. The brand creates the appearance of structural resolution even where the underlying structure remains more conditional and negotiated. In that sense, it is not just an identity layer. It is a mechanism for external coherence.
But a brand only helps if the operating model can sustain the expectations it creates. The stronger the external promise of seamlessness, the more exposed the organisation becomes if internal coordination fails to keep pace. This is the hidden risk in all hybrid structures: they can outperform looser models when alignment is strong, but they can also disappoint more visibly because the market has been taught to expect something closer to one firm than the economics actually support. Success therefore depends not only on strategy or structure, but on whether the lived client experience consistently matches the implied promise of the brand.
That makes culture unusually important. A conventional network can often survive a fair amount of local inconsistency because the market already assumes some looseness. Forvis Mazars does not have that luxury. The whole proposition depends on convincing clients that one brand can behave like one firm across two economic systems. That requires a level of discipline, mutual trust, and leadership continuity that goes beyond what the structure itself can guarantee. The brand may be the most visible part of the model, but it is also the part most exposed if the underlying coordination weakens.
Not Integration, but Coordinated Fragmentation
Forvis Mazars is often described as innovative, and that is fair as far as it goes. It is trying to solve a real industry problem: how to create more genuine global scale and consistency without pretending that full legal and economic integration is easy to achieve. In a profession full of federated structures that routinely promise more coherence than they can deliver, an attempt to narrow that gap deserves to be taken seriously. This is not empty branding. It is a real structural response to a real constraint.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to confuse innovation with resolution. The model does not eliminate the tension between global coordination and local economics. It manages that tension through governance, shared intent, and a smaller number of strategically aligned entities, which may prove materially better than a classic network but still falls short of fully unified economics. In other words, Forvis Mazars is not integration in the strongest sense. It is coordinated fragmentation made more disciplined, more credible, and more marketable than the older versions the industry has relied on for years.
That is precisely why it deserves attention. The profession is full of structures that sit awkwardly between what firms want to be and what they are capable of becoming. Forvis Mazars makes that in-between state unusually visible. It does not hide fragmentation behind dozens of member firms. It concentrates the challenge into two very large entities and then asks whether governance and brand can do enough work to make the whole system feel coherent. That is a much cleaner experiment than most of the industry offers, which is exactly why the result will matter.
Closing Thoughts
From the outside, Forvis Mazars can be read as a step toward greater global integration, and there is some truth in that reading. The structure gives Mazars the US scale it lacked, gives FORVIS the international reach it lacked, and creates a larger, more credible platform for clients that increasingly expect cross-border consistency. In a market that rewards relevance, reach, and the ability to look globally coherent, that is no small achievement.
From the inside, however, the picture is more complicated and, in some ways, more provocative. This model runs against several of the structural pressures that I expect to reshape much of the profession. It does not rely on external capital. It does not solve complexity by simplifying governance into one economic system. It does not centralise control in the way capital-backed platforms increasingly do. Instead, it places a very large bet on stewardship, coordination, shared brand, and the idea that two complicated partnership structures can sustain enough alignment over time to behave like something closer to one firm. That is not where I expect much of the industry to go, which is exactly why I find the case so interesting.
My broader prediction has been that capital, platform economics, and more centralised operating models will increasingly overpower legacy partnership structures, particularly where governance is complex and investment needs are rising. Forvis Mazars is a meaningful counterexample to that thesis, at least for now. It is trying to survive and compete without private equity, without unified ownership, and without the cleaner economics that usually make scale easier to govern. That does not mean the model will fail. But it does mean it is swimming against a strong industry current, and I am genuinely curious to see whether it can survive, and even thrive, on those terms over time.
Viewed through a broader industry lens, the Forvis Mazars structure increasingly resembles what I described in The Two-Speed Firm: the emergence of multiple operating and economic realities inside the same professional-services organization. The challenge is no longer simply coordination across member firms. Increasingly, it is the coexistence of structurally different governance, capital, technology, and operating models underneath the same brand. In that sense, Forvis Mazars may not simply represent an unusual merger structure. It may represent an early preview of a broader industry direction where firms increasingly attempt to hold together fundamentally different economic systems inside a single global organization.
What This Means for Boards
For boards, the relevance of the Forvis Mazars case lies in what it reveals about evolution under structural constraint. When full integration is politically, economically, or legally difficult to achieve, firms do not simply stop evolving. They build hybrid structures that sit somewhere between strategic ambition and structural reality, and then rely on governance, leadership discipline, operating alignment, and institutional trust to hold the model together over time.
That is often the real work of transformation inside professional-services firms. Not designing the theoretically perfect structure, but building a model that is coherent enough operationally, economically, and culturally to remain competitive despite its internal tensions.
The challenge in such systems is therefore not only structural design, but ongoing coordination. Where alignment depends more on governance and cooperation than on fully unified economics, the organisation becomes increasingly sensitive to leadership changes, diverging investment priorities, local political dynamics, and external pressure. Over time, the effort required to maintain alignment can itself become one of the defining operational characteristics of the firm.
Boards should therefore look beyond the elegance of the organisational diagram and ask a more difficult question: where does real alignment actually come from once economics, incentives, and governance remain partially separated? If the answer depends heavily on culture, goodwill, informal coordination, and continuous negotiation, then governance discipline needs to be considerably stronger than the simplicity of the external brand structure might initially suggest.
That is what makes this more than a case about one firm. It is a broader reminder that professional services is entering a phase where structures will increasingly be judged less by what they promise strategically and more by how much coordination cost they impose operationally, how resilient they remain under pressure, and how effectively they absorb internal tension over time.
Forvis Mazars may ultimately demonstrate that a hybrid model can remain globally competitive without external capital and without fully unified economics. But if it succeeds, it will likely be because governance, operating discipline, and institutional alignment prove stronger than many of the structural forces currently pushing large parts of the industry toward greater centralization and integration.
I work with boards and executive teams on independent perspectives related to professional-services transformation, governance, operating models, platform economics, and the changing economics of professional-services firms.
If your leadership team is working through similar questions around ownership structures, governance alignment, investment pressure, or operating-model evolution, you may find my Future of Professional Services board sessions and Transformation Reality Review valuable. Feel free to reach out.
Sources
Primary Sources
Forvis Mazars – global launch and network structure. (Forvis Mazars)
Forvis Mazars – global facts and leadership. (Forvis Mazars)
Mazars / Forvis Mazars Group – integrated partnership and annual reporting. (Forvis Mazars)
FORVIS / Forvis Mazars US – firm scale and integrated report. (Forvis Mazars)
Secondary Sources
Financial News – Forvis / Mazars deal context and no-PE stance. (FNLondon)
Reuters – audit quality pressure on Forvis Mazars in the UK. (Reuters)
Accounting Today / IPA – launch scale, partner count, and US firm context. (Forvis Mazars)