Originally published June 2026, updated June 2026.
For a long time, the global mid-tier accounting networks could tell a simple story about themselves. They were large enough to serve international clients, broad enough to offer audit, tax and consulting, and still close enough to the market to avoid the distance, bureaucracy and internal machinery often associated with the Big Four. The promise was not only commercial. It was institutional. These firms were supposed to represent a different kind of professional-services model: more entrepreneurial than the largest firms, more international than local practices, more personal than global machines. But that middle position is becoming harder to defend because the industry underneath it is changing faster than the language around it. Artificial intelligence, delivery centers, cybersecurity, audit technology, partner liquidity and rising client expectations are all pushing accounting firms toward scale, coordination and capital intensity. The traditional mid-tier answer of «global reach with local autonomy» is increasingly being tested by an operating reality that rewards integration, standardization and infrastructure. (RSM Global Revenue 2025)
That is what makes RSM interesting. Not because it is in crisis. Not because it has taken private equity. And not because it has undertaken a dramatic break-up or sponsor-backed transaction. RSM is interesting because it appears to be trying to answer a question that is becoming increasingly important across professional services. Can a global mid-tier network create enough scale, investment capacity and operational integration to compete in the platform era without surrendering its partner-owned structure to external capital?
In October 2024, RSM US and RSM UK announced that they would form a transatlantic partnership effective 1 January 2026, bringing together approximately 23,000 professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, India and El Salvador with aggregate annual revenues of around US$5 billion. The Financial Times described the move as an alternative to private-equity funding, while RSM emphasized common governance, aligned incentives, client-service integration and future growth investment. At first glance, this looks like another merger. At a deeper level, it is a test of institutional form. (Financial Times – RSM Creates US-UK Accounting Tie-Up, RSM US and RSM UK Partnership Announcement)
RSM remains a network of legally independent member firms. RSM International itself does not provide audit, tax or consulting services, and member firms continue to practise in their own right. Yet the transatlantic partnership points in a different direction. Financial integration, common incentives, shared investment and multinational delivery increasingly resemble the building blocks of a platform. The legal network remains visible. The operating model underneath is beginning to move. (RSM – Member Firms and Correspondent Firms, RSM Ireland – Transatlantic Partnership)
Update June 2026: The Experiment Is Getting Bigger
In June 2026, RSM announced a further expansion of its transatlantic partnership, adding Mexico to the existing alliance between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The partnership now represents more than 25,000 professionals and almost half of RSM’s global revenue. At the same time, RSM US CEO Brian Becker joined the global governing board, further strengthening the institutional connection between the participating firms. On the surface, the announcement appears geographic. Structurally, however, it may represent another step in a much larger experiment: whether a global professional-services network can achieve greater scale, coordination, and investment capacity without relying on private equity. (Financial Times – RSM expands transatlantic partnership)
This question matters because much of the industry’s current transformation is being driven by a different model. Firms such as Baker Tilly, Grant Thornton US, Citrin Cooperman, and numerous accounting roll-ups have used external capital to accelerate consolidation, investment, and platform building. RSM appears to be pursuing a different path. Rather than importing capital to create integration, it is attempting to create integration first. The transatlantic partnership increasingly resembles an effort to build platform economics through governance, shared incentives, institutional alignment, and greater economic scale. In this respect, RSM is not alone. Forvis Mazars has pursued a different but related strategy, creating deeper structural integration across the network while maintaining professional ownership. Both firms are exploring whether the benefits of scale, coordination, and investment capacity can be achieved without fundamentally changing who owns the institution.
More fundamentally, these developments may reflect a growing debate about the future ownership model of professional services itself. Traditional partnerships were built around a generational contract: one generation of partners invests in the institution, develops the next generation, and ultimately passes ownership to those who follow. Private equity introduces a different logic, where ownership becomes transferable to external investors and future exits become part of the equation. The significance of RSM’s expanding partnership therefore extends beyond governance or economics. It suggests that some firms are still attempting to preserve the traditional ownership model while adapting to the scale, investment requirements, and platform economics increasingly reshaping the profession. Whether that approach ultimately proves more competitive than private-equity-backed alternatives remains uncertain, but RSM and Forvis Mazars are becoming two of the industry’s most important test cases.
The Mid-Tier Strategic Trap
The strategic trap for the global mid-tier is that the old middle position is being squeezed from both sides. Above them, the Big Four have built enormous global operating machines capable of spreading technology investment, AI experimentation, cybersecurity capabilities, audit methodology development and delivery-center expansion across vast revenue bases. Below them, local and regional firms often survive through intimacy, specialist expertise and the ability to stay simple. The global mid-tier sits in between. It is too large to remain operationally simple and too small to absorb platform investments as comfortably as the largest firms. That is not a criticism. It is the structural problem of being large enough to need infrastructure, but not always large enough to fund it through traditional partnership economics. (RSM Global Revenue 2024, Reuters – RSM India Expansion)
This becomes especially visible in RSM’s own evolution. In 2024, the network became only the sixth global accounting organization to exceed US$10 billion in annual revenue. One year later, global headcount had increased to approximately 56,000 professionals. The exact year-on-year comparability is affected by changes in RSM’s reporting perimeter, but the broader point remains. This is no longer a loose collection of local practices serving local clients. It is a large, multidisciplinary and increasingly global professional-services system that requires common infrastructure, technology investment and operating discipline to compete effectively. (RSM Global Revenue 2024, RSM Global Revenue 2025)
That pressure explains why professional-services firms are increasingly reorganizing around different solutions to the same problem. Some have accepted external capital. Others have pursued deeper integration. Still others are exploring alternative financing mechanisms while remaining independent. Although the approaches differ, the underlying challenge is largely the same. Professional-services firms increasingly require platform economics, but traditional partnership structures were not originally designed to provide them. RSM’s response appears to be deeper integration rather than external capital. (Grant Thornton New Mountain Closing, BDO Strategic Reset, Forvis Mazars Launch)
The Transatlantic Partnership
The RSM US-UK partnership is therefore more than an organizational move. It is a strategic signal. RSM’s own announcement states that the partnership aligns governance, financial incentives, client service and future growth investment across a platform generating approximately US$5 billion in annual revenue. That matters because «platform» is not neutral language in today’s accounting market. A platform does not merely coordinate. It concentrates capability, standardizes execution, aligns incentives and creates a foundation for future expansion. (RSM US and RSM UK Partnership Announcement)
The leadership language around the partnership also matters. RSM positioned the move around serving global clients, developing talent and accelerating growth. Brian Becker, RSM US Managing Partner and CEO of the new transatlantic partnership, described the opportunity as strengthening the firm’s ability to serve the evolving needs of middle-market clients. The client proposition remains rooted in the middle market, but the operating response increasingly depends on scale, integration and cross-border infrastructure. (RSM US and RSM UK Partnership Announcement, RSM Ireland – Transatlantic Partnership)
The move also shows why «merger» is too simple a word. RSM remains a global network of independent firms, yet one part of the network is becoming more financially and operationally integrated than the rest. The US, UK, Canada, Ireland, India and El Salvador operations now form a more concentrated platform within the broader network. In practice, this is how two-speed networks begin. Not through a formal declaration that one part of the firm has become different, but through a structural move that gives one part of the system a different economic and operating logic than the rest. (Financial Times – RSM Creates US-UK Accounting Tie-Up, RSM Global Revenue 2025)
The Two-Speed Firm Becomes Visible
RSM is useful because it makes the two-speed firm visible in institutional form. As explored in The Two-Speed Firm: Why Professional Services Firms Are Quietly Splitting Into Multiple Economic Systems Under One Brand, many professional-services firms increasingly appear to be operating through two interconnected but fundamentally different systems. On one side sits the traditional partnership layer. Member firms continue to be locally owned, locally regulated and locally accountable. Partners still manage client relationships, local economics and professional obligations. Audit remains tied to local licensing, trust and regulatory oversight. The brand may be global, but responsibility remains local. This is the traditional logic of professional-services networks: a common name, shared standards and member-firm autonomy underneath. (RSM – Member Firms and Correspondent Firms)
On the other side, a platform layer is clearly forming. RSM’s 2030 strategy emphasizes a multi-year growth and transformation program, broader digital delivery models, enhanced insight generation and wider use of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The network has also simplified its global structure from six regions to three: Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. These are not merely organizational adjustments. They are mechanisms through which a network begins to behave more like an integrated operating system. (RSM 2030 Strategy, RSM Global Revenue 2025)
The two speeds do not necessarily conflict immediately. In fact, they may reinforce each other for a time. Local partners provide relationships, judgment, trust and market proximity. The platform layer provides technology, delivery scale, AI capability, global coordination and investment capacity. That combination is attractive. It is also fragile. The partnership layer optimizes for local profitability, autonomy and client intimacy. The platform layer optimizes for scale, standardization, shared investment and institutional leverage. For a while, both systems can coexist. Over time, however, the question becomes unavoidable: which system gets priority when trade-offs appear?
AI as the Forcing Mechanism
RSM’s AI investment makes that tension sharper. In June 2025, RSM US announced a US$1 billion investment over three years to expand its artificial-intelligence strategy, including agentic AI platforms designed to enhance performance, drive innovation and support client-facing solutions. RSM explicitly linked the investment to the coming transatlantic partnership, positioning both as part of the same long-term strategy. That linkage matters. AI is not being presented as a local initiative or a service-line experiment. It is being tied directly to the firm’s emerging multinational operating model. (RSM US AI Investment Announcement, Wall Street Journal – RSM AI Investment)
This is where AI stops being a technology story and becomes an institutional story. As explored in The Professional Services AI Paradox: How the AI Platform Economy Is Colliding with the Partnership Model, the most important consequences of AI may not be productivity gains at all. They may be the governance, ownership and economic questions created by large-scale AI platforms. A US$1 billion AI program requires capital, governance, data discipline, cybersecurity, workflow standardization, adoption and integration into service delivery. It does not fit naturally inside a loose federation where every local practice optimizes its own economics. AI at scale rewards common processes, shared platforms and reusable knowledge environments. The more valuable the AI layer becomes, the more the institution must decide who funds it, who owns it, who controls it and how the benefits are distributed across the network.
That is why AI may become one of the strongest accelerators of centralization in professional services. Firms often describe AI in terms of productivity, innovation or client service. The deeper issue is economic. If AI depends on centralized platforms, local autonomy weakens. If AI creates reusable institutional assets, traditional models of partner ownership and revenue attribution come under pressure. RSM’s investment is strategically significant not only because of its size, but because it reveals the type of operating model a serious AI strategy increasingly requires. (RSM US AI Investment Announcement, Wall Street Journal – RSM AI Investment)
India and the Delivery Engine
The India expansion is the second part of the same story. Reuters reported in 2024 that RSM’s US arm planned to more than double its India workforce to 5,000 employees within three years. The expansion covered consulting, audit and tax roles serving North American clients through its global capability center. Reuters also noted that RSM’s India team was involved in developing AI-powered assistants and supporting internal research and development activities. (Reuters – RSM India Expansion)
This is not simply a labor-arbitrage story. As explored in The Silent Engine: How Global Delivery Centers Are Rewiring Professional Services Firms, delivery centers increasingly become places where process knowledge, workflow discipline, automation capability and AI experimentation accumulate. Once that happens, the delivery center stops being a back-office function and starts becoming part of the operating core. Client relationships may still sit in Chicago, London or Toronto, but execution knowledge increasingly concentrates elsewhere. Over time, that changes where future delivery models are designed and where institutional capabilities accumulate.
For RSM, the strategic significance extends beyond cost efficiency. Once delivery capacity, AI development and operational knowledge become concentrated inside global centers, the economic center of gravity gradually begins to move away from the traditional local partnership layer. This is the same dynamic visible across much of professional services. The more work becomes industrialized, digitized and platform-enabled, the more value shifts toward the infrastructure that makes that work possible. (Reuters – RSM India Expansion, Reuters – US Accounting Firms Tap India)
The Forvis Mazars Comparison
As explored in Forvis Mazars: One Brand, Two Firms and the Structural Experiment That Runs Against the Industry, the most revealing comparison is not with the Big Four. It is with Forvis Mazars. Both firms are trying to solve the same structural problem: how to create enough scale, integration and international coherence to compete in a market that increasingly rewards platform economics without becoming a private-equity-backed platform. The difference is that they start from different institutional positions. Forvis Mazars was built around a far more integrated partnership structure, whereas RSM historically operated as a network of independent member firms. (Forvis Mazars Launch)
That distinction matters because RSM is not extending an already integrated model. It is creating a more integrated platform inside a historically federated structure. The transatlantic partnership therefore represents a bigger institutional shift than it might initially appear. Integration is not simply a structural design choice. It changes how investment decisions are made, how incentives are aligned, how revenue is shared and how governance is exercised. The challenge facing RSM is not whether deeper integration is desirable. The challenge is whether it can be achieved without undermining the autonomy that helped make the network successful in the first place. (RSM – Member Firms and Correspondent Firms)
Why BDO Is Not the Same Third Way
As explored in BDO’s Third Way: The Accounting Network Trying to Stay Independent While Learning to Live with Private Capital, BDO provides another useful contrast. BDO’s challenge is how to preserve independence while finding new sources of investment capacity through consolidation, private capital or alternative financing mechanisms. RSM’s challenge is different. Its emerging answer is not capital without private equity, but integration without private equity. Both firms are responding to the same structural pressures, but they are pursuing different routes. (BDO Strategic Reset, Financial Times – BDO to Fuse National Firms)
That distinction helps explain why the current transformation of professional services cannot be reduced to an ownership story. The underlying issue is not private equity itself. The underlying issue is platform economics. Firms are increasingly searching for ways to fund technology, AI, delivery infrastructure and cross-border operating models. RSM’s answer appears to be building a stronger operating core through integration rather than external ownership. (BDO Strategic Reset, Financial Times – BDO to Fuse National Firms)
The Governance Risk
The strategic risk in the RSM model is not that integration is wrong. The risk is that integration creates its own governance demands. Once common incentives, shared platforms, delivery centers and AI investments become central to the operating model, the organization needs mechanisms to allocate costs, resolve disputes, set priorities and manage trade-offs. Partnerships are built around negotiated alignment. Platforms require operational discipline. Networks tolerate diversity. Platforms require consistency. This is where the politics of the model begin.
The more successful the platform layer becomes, the more pressure it may place on the traditional partnership layer. If AI tools, delivery centers and transatlantic investment programs begin producing measurable advantages, other member firms may feel pressure to join or align more closely. If they do not, the network could become increasingly uneven internally, with one integrated core operating according to a different economic logic than the rest of the organization.
This is the two-speed network problem in practical form. One part of the institution begins behaving like a platform business with shared investment, cross-border operations and centralized capability. Another part remains closer to the traditional member-firm model. The challenge is not whether both can coexist. The challenge is whether governance can manage the tensions between them before those tensions become visible to clients, talent and partners.
The Partner Economics Question
RSM UK’s financial performance adds another layer to the story. Revenue reached nearly £600 million in 2024/25, while the Financial Times reported that average equity-partner pay increased to approximately £821,000. That matters because partner economics are not a side issue in professional-services transformation. They are often the mechanism through which strategic change is either enabled or blocked. (RSM UK Financial Report 2024/25, Financial Times – Record Pay for RSM Partners)
Strong partner economics can make integration easier because they create confidence. Partners are more likely to support structural change when the current business is performing well and the future opportunity feels credible. But strong partner economics can also make integration harder because the opportunity cost becomes more visible. Every pound invested in AI platforms, delivery centers, cybersecurity or cross-border integration is also a pound not distributed today. Long-term platform investment must compete directly with current partner income.
This tension is not unique to RSM, but RSM makes it unusually visible. The transatlantic partnership reportedly received overwhelming partner support. The harder test comes later, when investment decisions become real. Which geographies benefit first? How are costs allocated? How are returns measured? How much autonomy do local leaders retain? These are not implementation questions. They are governance questions.
Closing Thoughts
RSM is not simply becoming bigger. It is becoming structurally more interesting. The firm appears to be building a more integrated operating core inside a wider network that remains legally decentralized. It is investing heavily in AI, expanding delivery capacity, simplifying its global structure and creating a transatlantic partner-owned platform with common governance and aligned incentives. None of these moves alone proves that RSM has solved the mid-tier strategic trap. Together, however, they show a serious attempt to answer it without private equity.
That is why the RSM case should not be read as another accounting-network growth story. It is a case study in institutional adaptation. The firm is trying to preserve the advantages of the partnership model: trust, professional ownership, local intimacy and middle-market proximity. At the same time, it is building the infrastructure of a platform through AI, delivery scale, shared investment, cross-border incentives and operational integration.
The question is whether a professional-services network can become sufficiently integrated to compete with platform economics while remaining sufficiently partnership-based to preserve the culture, incentives and independence that made it attractive in the first place. If RSM succeeds, it may offer one of the most important independent alternatives to private-equity-backed platformization in the global mid-tier. If it struggles, it may reveal something more fundamental: that the economics reshaping professional services are becoming too powerful for traditional network structures to absorb without changing what they are.
What This Means for Boards
Boards and senior leadership teams should pay attention to RSM not because every firm should copy its structure, but because it makes several strategic questions unavoidable. The first is whether scale can still be built internally without external capital. The second is whether AI and delivery-center economics strengthen the partnership model or quietly shift power toward centralized infrastructure. The third is whether partner-owned networks can align incentives across borders before private-equity-backed platforms establish a new competitive benchmark.
The RSM case also reinforces a broader governance lesson. Structural change in professional services rarely announces itself as structural change. It appears as a regional merger, an AI investment, a delivery-center expansion, a new strategy or a governance simplification. But when these moves accumulate, they begin changing the institution itself. Boards should therefore stop treating AI, delivery centers, global integration and partner economics as separate agenda items. They are increasingly different expressions of the same underlying question: what kind of professional-services firm is this becoming?
For mid-tier firms in particular, the issue is now urgent. Remaining independent no longer simply means refusing private equity. It means proving that the firm can generate the investment capacity, operational integration, talent model and platform discipline required to compete without external ownership. That is a much harder test than independence language suggests. RSM is now one of the clearest live examples of that test.
Large professional-services firms are entering a period where ownership structures, governance models, operating platforms and economic incentives are increasingly being reshaped simultaneously.
I work with boards and executive teams on independent perspectives related to these shifts across governance, operating models, platform economics and institutional transformation inside professional services firms. Feel free to reach out.