Alphabet soup 

KPMG's roots date back to 1870, when accountant William Barclay Peat hung out his shingle in London. In 1911, his firm merged with New York-based Marwick Mitchell & Co., forming a business that later became known as Peat Marwick. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Glasgow accountancy Thomson McLintock partnered with Dutch and German accounting firms to create Klynveld Main Goerdeler (KMG), an alliance of independent practices operating throughout Europe.  

The 1987 tie-up between KMG Main Hurdman and Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co. was considered the first megamerger of modern accounting, and the resulting entity, eventually named KPMG, organized its consulting activities into a separate business unit in 1997. Three years later, KPMG spun off KPMG Consulting with an initial public offering. The now-separate consulting business took over KPMG's consulting work for several companies, eventually changing its name to BearingPoint in October 2002. The bulk of BearingPoint's assets are now owned by Deloitte, which purchased them after the company filed for bankruptcy protection early in 2009.  

As part of the spin-off that created BearingPoint, KPMG signed a non-compete agreement with its former consulting arm, which limited KPMG's ability to provide certain types of services. Following the spin-off, KPMG continued to provide advisory services, but any limitations on its ability to provide a full range of services ended when the non-compete agreement expired in 2006. Today, KPMG's advisory practice generates more than one-third of the company's overall revenue in the U.S.  

Service matters 

Within its suite of management consulting services, the firm currently has fourteen service lines for clients-some of which have been recently added to reflect changing business priorities in the digital age: analytics; business integration; business intelligence; business process management; change management; growth enablement; integrated business planning; organizational design; outsourcing; shared services; strategy and operations; talent management; technology enablement; and transformation.  

On the risk management side, meanwhile, the firm's service lines are: financial risk management; forensic; internal audit; risk and compliance services; and IT advisory.