The Big 4 aren’t too big to fail.
They’re too human to matter.
Creating another dinosaur to compete
Just doesn’t make sense
I have been a great supporter of Indian firms in all kinds of professional services. Accountancy being one of them. In the pre venture capital era, the only chance at entrepreneurship that an educated person had was by setting up a professional services firm. CA, CS, Law, Architect …. It required little capital, broke even quickly, got some kind of status and the regulator provided some kind of market protection.
The professions were by and large self regulated and govt free. Yet govt supported. And then liberalisation happened. Global players sensed domination and control. Things they were willing to spend large sums on. And suddenly the market was swamped by highly opaque players who advised on governance but violated every law themselves, claimed quality yet led every single scam themselves and so on.
The legal system in India is easy to game. So that was never a fear. What they did was to illegally acquire all the bell weather firms in India and through them got control of ICAI. ICAI elections for office bearers were fought with minuscule budgets. The Big4 threw money and captured ICAI. When the regulator himself had been captured, there was little to fear. All kinds of proxy leads were planted.
The profession was ruined. Confused kids were weaned away from being on their own and pulled into the comfort of highly paid jobs. Audit dominance was used to cross sell other services creating probably the largest fraud machine of independent India.
And then hell broke loose. Satyam had been audited by PwC and it was a joke. Not to be outdone, Deloitte took a step further with ILFS. Technology free KPMG was selling Ai generated reports with imaginary data. A set of wannabe competitors emerged – Grant Thornton, BDO, Mazers….. they all had the same play book.
The govt woke up and put in place a new regulator called NFRA. The profession revolted. How could independent CAs not do the clients bidding. When Big4 was willing to sign anything. PwC and Satyam being a case in point.
Audit, tax, and compliance were never about insight. They were about processing at scale.
AI now does that better—instantly, continuously, and without sleep.
When:
• Sampling is replaced by full-population testing
• Annual audits are replaced by live assurance
• Junior armies are replaced by models
• Trust is embedded in code, not logos
…the firm itself becomes the bottleneck.
But building a “Big 4 challenger” in 2026 is like building a better fax machine after email.
The future of trust won’t be certified by people. It will be compiled, monitored, and enforced by systems. Blockchain allows trustless systems.
Audit doesn’t get disrupted.
It gets deleted.
India will soon eliminate the need for manual audit for all small cos
Super CA – India’s accounting LLM
Goes live later this year.
Big4 have no role left
For 95% of India’s companies.
