KPMG Australia, a major player in professional services, is reshaping how it supports its partners after a year in which local revenue slipped but average partner pay climbed to more than $715,000. Like many large firms it is under pressure to cut costs while maintaining service standards, and the back office has become a key focus. Offshoring is already common across the sector, with up to a third of staff at the country’s top accounting firms now based overseas.
Under the new model, around 200 executive assistant roles will shift to an outsourcing company headquartered in India, with those staff physically located in the Philippines and working Australian hours. That means roughly three quarters of the firm’s existing 260 executive assistants will be replaced by lower cost offshore workers, with the savings equating to about 3.5% of an almost $500 million partner income pool for 2024 to 25. The outsourced team will handle core tasks such as calendar management, travel bookings and email triage, with supervisors overseas reporting back regularly to the Australian firm. Affected local employees have been offered either redeployment options or redundancy packages that include retraining and transition support.
This shift is part of a wider trend across the big professional services groups, each experimenting with different blends of onshore and offshore executive support. Some firms now base close to 40% of their assistants in offshore hubs such as the Philippines and India while others still keep the majority of roles in Australia and use overseas staff mainly for administrative coordination like expenses and travel. Technology is quietly changing the job too, with automation and artificial intelligence increasingly handling routine email drafting, diary management and basic queries, which makes it easier to disperse the work across borders and reduce the emphasis on high end local communication skills.
The broader implications look significant but still uncertain. On one hand the move seems to lower operating costs and helps partners defend margins in a tougher market. On the other it raises questions about whether remote assistants can match the nuanced support, institutional knowledge and client rapport that long term local staff often provide, especially when sensitive government and corporate data sits in partner inboxes. Firms say they are building in strict controls to keep certain work onshore and to comply with contractual and regulatory demands, while offshore providers argue modern security practices such as multi factor authentication and strong network protections make location less important. How well this balance holds over time will likely influence how far and how fast other professional services groups push their own offshoring plans.
