EY’s global platform roll-out is focused on offering BFSI clients long-term value

EY is targeting better value for financial services clients with the global roll-out of its Nexus business transformation platform. It’s the latest in a series of Big Four moves that make the shift from traditional consulting models to products and platforms.

Yup, even the Big Four realize their consulting-based business model is ultimately expensive labor. This move to products brings together intellectual property (IP) development, best-of-breed technology ecosystems, and services to drive a new model focused on enhanced value and annuity-based business in enterprise accounts.

In support of the banking and capital markets, insurance, and wealth and asset management sectors, EY recently announced the global expansion of EY Nexus for Financial Services, a business transformation platform originally announced in 2021. Earlier in 2022, Deloitte announced its ConvergePROSPERITY banking suite, extending the functionality of its healthcare-focused Converge offerings. PwC launched a “global digital banking solution” in partnership with Microsoft in late 2021.

EY Nexus offers “assembly as a service”–composable platform-based solutions

Originally launched in March 2021, EY Nexus is a cloud-based business transformation platform offering a range of EY-built assets enhanced with partner solutions designed for specific functions and sub-sector offers across banking, insurance, and wealth and asset management. EY’s IP consists of reusable components like a data ingestion engine, an events engine, and a consent engine coupled with API-based connectors to a best-of-breed roster of core banking, insurance, and wealth and asset management platforms, fintechs, and data sources.

Various accelerators complement these foundational assets to create industry solutions like intelligent disputes, an underwriting workbench, and a wealth and asset management interoperability engine. EY uses Nexus to help established banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) firms, often grappling with legacy challenges, rapidly innovate. In EY’s words, this ushers in the advent of “assembly as a service,” where Nexus + ecosystem + EY services helps create composable platform-based solutions rather than generating loads of cyclical integration requirements.

After quietly building Nexus and a curated ecosystem behind the scenes, EY is ready to get loud

The firm’s recent press release announced significant upgrades to Nexus for Financial Services as part of its “3-year, $10 billion investment in technology, strategy, and people.” This investment reinforces the global substantiation of Nexus, highlighting expansion from its origins in the US to the launch and training of 400+ developers and about 2,000 system integrators in EY’s eight global technology hubs. In conversations with EY leadership, HFS also noted significant new solution development, progress with partner onboarding, and an array of 60+ clients with insurance as the most developed industry segment, all underpinned by a massive internal push to educate, train, and proselytize Nexus within EY. This big internal push fuels significant external global development with BFSI enterprises—and even into adjacent sectors. EY offers clients the option to implement Nexus on-premises or hosted by EY. Either way, Nexus is driving platform-based annuity-based business for EY, heralding a new path forward.

The Bottom Line: EY and its Big Four siblings embrace composable platforms to drive new value to clients (and new revenue models for themselves). BFSI enterprises in need of extensible solutions to drive componentized modernization can benefit.

As the Big Four embraces ecosystem-enabled platforms, EY’s seems the most fully-baked based on investment, clients, and geographic availability. And, given the potential split of its consulting and audit business, this platform-fueled approach heralds the future of its consulting identity as focused on transform, orchestrate, and manage capabilities. Enterprises seeking componentized modernization should investigate but consider the relationship in a managed services construct with clear contracted outcomes rather than licensed technology—a relatively nascent area for the Big Four.

Additionally, enterprises should keep a close eye on who is included in ecosystems. The quality and capabilities of ecosystem partners matters. Sarbanes-Oxley rules forbid Big Four firms from doing substantive consulting work with firms they audit, impacting each firm’s partner roster. The ability to create composable solutions with a range of best-of-breed partners is ideal. Just make sure the partners you want are part of the mix.