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Andersen, the tax and consulting business created by alumni of the collapsed accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has filed for a stock market listing in the US, setting up a test of investor appetite for professional services firms.
The company said on Monday that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but had yet to set a valuation range or decide how much of the business will sold by current partners.
Morgan Stanley has been advising on the flotation, the Financial Times reported earlier this year, and Andersen has been rapidly building out its business to boost its appeal to investors.
In February, it launched its Andersen Consulting unit to offer additional advisory services alongside its core tax and valuation business, and it has been pulling other businesses outside the US into a loose network of affiliated firms that can share work for multinational companies.
Mark Vorsatz, a former Arthur Andersen tax partner who founded the company as WTAS 23 years ago and acquired the Andersen name in 2014, said in a December interview that the US business had revenues of around $740mn in 2024.
“My motivation for going public is access to capital,” he said. “Public capital is the cheapest.”
Professional services companies have a mixed record on the stock market, as investors can be unsure how to value a business that relies heavily on the personal relationships of rainmaker partners.
Shares in FTI Consulting are down 14 per cent this year after one economic consultant, Jonathan Orszag, set up a rival firm, taking senior colleagues with him and forcing FTI to raise pay to retain others.
Several law firms that went public in the UK after a liberalisation of the legal market there have since delisted.
But accounting firms are have started to consider the public markets.
The private equity owner of Baker Tilly in the US is expecting it will exit its investment by floating on the stock market in a few years’ time, according to people familiar with its thinking, while its British affiliate, MHA, conducted an initial public offering on the UK’s Alternative Investment Market earlier this month.
Arthur Andersen’s consulting business was spun off and renamed Accenture in 2000 and has been one of the sector’s most notable success stories. Arthur Andersen collapsed barely a year later after its audit client Enron was unmasked as a fraud.
Market volatility unleashed by President Donald Trump’s tariffs has chilled the broader US IPO market, which many investment bankers had tipped to roar back to life under a Republican administration.
Shares in data centre operator CoreWeave, which in March launched the largest tech offering since Arm Holdings in 2023, are up less than 1 per cent from their IPO price.
The company was forced to slash the size and value of the offering amid wavering investor demand for AI. Several other large tech IPOs have been postponed in the wake of Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcements.
