Cogital Group set for rebrand

Business services provider – and owner of a number of accountancy firms including Baldwins and Campbell Dallas – Cogital Group, is to rebrand as Azets on April 20.

Based in the Nordics, Azets is Cogital Group’s largest subsidiary firm. The rebrand will see all firms that are part of Baldwins – Campbell Dallas, Scott Moncrief and Wilkins Kennedy, disappear. However, Blick Rothenburg will remain as a standalone company.

Dawn Marriott, CEO of Cogital Group, is overseeing the rebrand and says the company is moving to “phase two” of its life cycle, hence the changes.

“Phase two now is about empowering and enhancing the real strength of the 6,500 employees that we’ve now got to drive value through the business and to actually change how we do things to positively impact our clients.

“We have ended up with a multiple brand environment, which doesn’t really help us in phase two. So, there was always a plan to move towards a consolidated brand. The time is just now appropriate. It’s not really a big fanfare of a change. We won’t be making a big fuss about it, because this is just drawing on what we’ve already got,” Marriott says.

There are no current plans to bring Blick Rothenburg into the Azets brand yet but stops short of saying it wouldn’t happen in the future according to the group’s CEO.

“If it makes sense for our clients and our employees, if it makes sense to revolve everything into Azets, then we’ll make that decision in the future. But for now, we will continue to operate with that [as it is].”

Marriott says there will be no streamlining of processes or job losses.

“No, what we’re looking to do is to drive innovation through technology so it makes us more efficient, so we can spend more time with clients, instead of time wasted dealing with inefficient processes. This is definitely not a ‘let’s streamline it and get rid of heads’. This is just the maturing of our business.

“This is definitely not trying to scale back the organization. This is definitely a growth story,” she adds.

No ambition to rival ‘Big Four’

Cogital Group’s CEO states categorically that Azets has no desire to become a rival to the Big Four, despite becoming a sizeable firm with the capacity to do so, mainly because the nature of their work is different.

“That’s very clear, it’s not an ambition that we have. If you look at the types of work that the Big Four do today, and then look at the types of work and the types of customers that we have, they’re very different. So, we’re very clear that our market is SME organizations, medium sized companies in the UK and Northern Europe, and high net worth individuals who for the most part are associated with those same companies. We don’t have a big percentage of our work that is audit. Audit work is extremely important to us, but it doesn’t represent a significant percentage of our revenue.”