Big Four corporate finance

The large accountancy firms run advisory businesses alongside audit, and two of those teams matter for anyone looking at this career. Lead advisory, often called corporate finance, advises on and runs mid market sales and acquisitions in its own right. Transaction services performs financial due diligence, investigating a target's numbers on behalf of a buyer or preparing a vendor report for a seller.

Those are different jobs and candidates conflate them constantly. Lead advisory runs the process and negotiates. Transaction services investigates quality of earnings, working capital and net debt for one side, and hands over a report. Both are credible starts, but they build different skills and the interview answers that suit them are not interchangeable.

The reason this matters in Europe specifically is scale. Across Germany, the Nordics, Benelux, Italy and Iberia these teams advise on a large share of mid market transactions, and movement between them and into banks is normal rather than exceptional. The route barely exists in the United States, which is why American oriented guides do not mention it and why a candidate who understands it is visibly better informed about the market they are applying into.

Independence rules constrain what these firms can do for audit clients, which is part of why the advisory work concentrates in the mid market and away from the largest listed groups they audit.