Accenture is acquiring Greenfish, a sustainability consultancy. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This is technology M&A deal number 395 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2022.
Greenfish, founded in 2010, is based in Brussels --with offices in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. The company's 270 employees will tuck into the Accenture Sustainability Services organization.
The Greenfish deal is part of a larger M&A strategy. Indeed, Accenture plans to spend roughly $4 billion on acquisitions during the current fiscal year. Roughly $1.8 billion of that $4 billion M&A budget was spent on 21 acquisitions during the first half of Accenture’s fiscal year 2022, CFO KC McClure indicated during an earnings call on March 17, 2022.
Accenture: Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Expertise
This is Accenture's second M&A deal involving sustainability expertise this month. The other deal involved buying Avieco of the United Kingdom. Additional Accenture M&A deals involving sustainability include Zestgroup and Umlaut. Rivals such as IBM also are acquiring sustainability-focused businesses.
The M&A activity comes at a key time. Some -- though not all -- major corporations worldwide are beginning to shift expand their business priorities beyond profits to increasingly include Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
A case in point: Mastercard plans to link all employee bonuses to ESG goals, Bloomberg reported. Similarly, some investors are starting to seek out ESG performance data before deciding to pump money into specific stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other financial instruments.
Accenture Acquires Greenfish: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement about buying Greenfish, Olivier Girard, market unit lead for Accenture France & Benelux, said:
"Organizations are increasingly pursuing more sustainable business models and improved performance in environmental, social and governance (ESG) terms. This shift brings financial and competitive value to companies, while making sustainability and ESG a priority at all levels of the organization. Acquiring Greenfish would further enhance our deep experience in helping European clients improve their ESG performance and embed sustainability by design in their operations.”
Added Peter Lacy, Accenture’s global Sustainability Services lead and chief responsibility officer:
“The Accenture Sustainability Value Promise is to embed sustainability into everything we do, with everyone we work with, creating both business value and sustainable impact, enabled by technology and human ingenuity. Adding more than 270 deeply skilled professionals in the areas of low-carbon energy transitions, the circular economy and ESG measurement would rapidly accelerate our already-strong leadership both across Europe, and within the critical markets of France, Belgium and the Netherlands.”
Concluded Yann Louise, co-founder of Greenfish:
“We are motivated by this opportunity to join a leading organization to continue to drive sustainability as a top priority. Combining our respective expertise would allow us to reach a larger group of clients, and offer a whole new level of strategic counsel and services, thus accelerating the sustainability transformation of our clients and increasing our impact on society.”
