EY has completed the acquisition of Fabernovel, a Paris-based innovation and digital transformation consulting firm that supports customers across Europe. The deal adds around 350 employees to EY Consulting’s team, making it one of its larger acquisitions in the past decade.
Together, EY and Fabernovel will continue to work with large organizations and start-ups to promote more resilient business models that reconcile societal and environmental challenges with economic performance.
The strategic investment of EY complements the previous transactions in Belgium of VODW (a frontrunner in customer-centric thinking and digital solutions), Cognistreamer (innovation management) and Krios Solutions (SAP advice and implementation).
Stéphane Distinguin, founder and chairman of Fabernovel, said: “Joining EY means seizing the opportunity to better contribute to a new stage of the European economy while continuing to be inspired by the models of the tech giants that we have relentlessly shared. It also means leveraging 19 years of research and projects to give wider expression to our values, our teams and our brand so that they become major competitive advantages for our customers and our ecosystem.”
EY has plans to grow its consulting services, both organically and through continued acquisitions, and has progressed this rapidly already with a particular focus on its client’s digital transformation agenda.
Michel Brabants, EY consulting leader at EY Belgium, said: “This acquisition is another strategic transaction for EY. We’re already achieving considerable organic growth in our Belgian consulting business – it grew more than 10 percent last year – but we are also committed to looking for opportunities for external growth, especially when we find firms with cutting-edge innovation and a really strong talent pool like Fabernovel. This European acquisition will enable us to significantly augment the services we provide to our clients in terms of customer driven innovation and digital transformation”.
Bertrand Baret, managing partner of EY Consulting France and deputy managing partner of EY Consulting Europe West, concludes: “As a market leader in digital transformation, combining consulting and the creation of innovative products and services, Fabernovel is the ideal partner to achieve the ambition of our NextWave strategic plan in Europe. Fabernovel’s 350 talents, combined with EY highly complementary skills, will become the foundation of this transformation, with an ambitious goal of building a world-class, multidisciplinary team of 1,000 innovation-focused employees within three years.”
