Executive Board highlights and reflections

Economic volatility and global turbulence continued into 2024/2025, significantly shaping our clients’ investment decisions and affecting our consultative businesses. Against the backdrop of changing client demand and a surge in the use of AI, the professional services sector is transforming at a rapid pace. We continuously seek to improve our service delivery to clients while making further progress on societal and technological challenges, together with both our clients and our international Deloitte network. Throughout this period of transformation, we succeeded in improving our underlying performance as reflected in our financial results. In parallel, our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, serving with integrity and creating a strong professional learning culture remains resolute. Finally, we are pleased to have concluded our learning culture investigation.

Creating lasting value for clients and society

While geopolitical tensions, economic volatility and rapid digital transformation remain, our focus on creating lasting value with and for our clients has been paramount. Together with our partners and our people, we have continued to work on further differentiating ourselves through collaboration, tech-savviness, deep industry knowledge and the full breadth of our services and skills in Audit & Assurance, Tax & Legal and our Consultative businesses.

In the past year, the necessity to address and strengthen resilience became even more pressing for our clients, whether from an economic or societal perspective. To reinforce our continuous commitment to this crucial theme, we have signed a partnership with Rob Bauer, former Chair of the NATO Military Committee. Our collaboration centres around rebuilding and strengthening our defence capabilities, as well as our social and economic resilience.

On top of that, we see our clients shifting from experimenting with AI on an operational level to leveraging its possibilities to gain substantial strategic benefits. Leveraging our broad range of services - spanning strategic, technical and innovative expertise - along with our collaborative strength, we are well-positioned to deliver innovative and AI-powered end-to-end solutions to our clients. A case in point is one of our clients for whom our multidisciplinary teams identified areas in which AI could create a competitive advantage and developed an organisation-wide AI strategy that was implemented in close collaboration with leadership.

Sustainability

The changes in sustainability regulations resulting from Omnibus will significantly impact the future demand for our services, primarily in assurance. We expect a decline in compliance and reporting efforts, while structural changes will continue to be required to move towards a sustainable and resilient economy. This calls for cross-sector collaboration, in which we will continue to invest. A striking example is a product we launched to contribute to the energy transition. We created a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) roadmap, which illustrates how the sector can unite to decarbonise in a way that is both feasible and profitable.

Adding to societal impact, we have continued our efforts around Financial Health. Alongside our partners in the private and public sector, we have been a driver of the National Coalition Financial Health. Moreover, in close cooperation with Nibud (National Institute for Family Finance Information) and academics from Tilburg University and Leiden University we published the fifth edition of our research into the financial health of Dutch Households. Additionally, we offered financial coaching to coworkers. This year also marked the 15th anniversary of the Money Exam we organise during Dutch Money Week (Week van het Geld), introducing financial education at primary schools through our Deloitte Impact Foundation (DIF). With our Deloitte Impact Foundation, 1,110 employees have used their expertise, experience and network to do pro bono work. This past year, 31,158 hours were spent on different societal initiatives.

Performance

Our overall operating profitability improved this year by 1.8%. Revenue remained fairly stable with a modest growth at 1.2%, which reflects different results across businesses due to the market conditions. We were able to improve profitability by stricter cost management, both by adjusting our work force to market circumstances as well as by strict control over our overheads.

Our Tax & Legal practice has shown a solid performance with revenue growth of 2% and Audit & Assurance realised revenue growth of approximately 11%. We expect that winning the ING audit will have a significant positive impact on our practice. For our consultative businesses, Technology & Transformation and Strategy Risk and Transactions Advisory, market conditions were challenging. We observed strong performance by our teams offering services in Real Estate, Financial Crime, SAP and Cyber Defence & Resilience.

Transforming the way we work

By transforming our service delivery, our teams can positively impact both service quality and competitiveness with increased use of our global delivery network as a major lever. A nice example is our Innovation Hub in Cairo, which works together with our Dutch teams to leverage the strong skills in cloud, engineering, data and artificial intelligence for our clients. We also have moved to several integrated offerings in Europe to strengthen our client services. This enabled us to step up both our performance and deliver complex international tech‑enabled business transformations.

In 2024/2025, we successfully modernised the organisation of our capabilities and go-to-market by globally aligning our business units, moving from five to four. This enabled us to collaborate and deliver more integrated solutions while providing our clients a seamless experience.

Innovation

We want to be at the cutting edge of new technology. By rolling out technological advancements and new tooling, we are making unique steps to innovate our business in order to improve and standardise our client services. A fine showcase in Audit & Assurance is the launch of Omnia, our advanced auditing platform integrating analytics and AI solutions.

The use of GenAI in our daily work increased substantially, as shown by the step-up in usage of our generative AI model ‘Headstart’ from 74% in November 2024 to 82% in April 2025. Headstart was launched in November 2023 to facilitate responsible use of AI within our organisation and saw impressive adoption rates right from the start.

Investigations

In the recent internal investigation into answer sharing, the internal learning culture and the learning behaviours of Deloitte’s professionals, which has now been settled with the PCAOB and where we have fully cooperated with the regulators, we acknowledged with disappointment that the outcomes do not reflect our identity as a firm or the values we strive to uphold. The investigation was thorough and intensive, yielding valuable lessons and opportunities for immediate and decisive changes. As we move forward, we are dedicated to learning from this experience and ensuring that our practices align with the high standards we set for ourselves. We have started the development of an Ethical culture programme based on several analyses including an external assessment. There will be enhanced oversight from the AFM regarding Deloitte’s company culture, with continued supervision from the Supervisory Board.

The internal investigation concerning an internal speak up that, in violation of our professional standards, modifications were made to a limited number of audit files prior to inspections by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. This is unacceptable behaviour, and we have taken appropriate measures in light of the public interest, with the Ministry being informed of our findings.

Talent

Our people are at the heart of our organisation and we conduct our bi-annual ‘Engage for Change’ surveys to obtain key insights into our people's experiences. The disappointing engagement results at the start of the year clearly reflect the rapid pace of change and transformation within our organisation. The survey’s outcome resonates the impact of alignment of our business units, the internal learning investigation, and the pressure on performance following changing market demands. This has required a lot of flexibility from our colleagues, asking them to balance multiple priorities simultaneously. The quality of leadership has proven to be an important factor in engaging our teams, highlighting the importance of further supporting and developing our leaders in alignment with our 3C – courageous, curious and compassionate – leadership philosophy.

An important part of our employee value proposition is continuous learning. In 2024/2025, around 1,640 colleagues attended a learning programme at our Deloitte University in Paris to promote their professional development and advance collaboration across EMEA.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI)

We maintain our commitment to a culture that values diversity, equity and inclusion. This is reflected in our focus on inclusive policies and programmes and our drive to enhance our colleagues’ talent experience.

In 2025, we introduced bereavement leave to allow colleagues to take off time to grieve the loss of a family member, and we extended our care leave. We also organised activities and learning sessions around DEI, such as leadership sessions on neurodiversity, Iftar and webinars during Pride Month. Earlier in the year, we hosted a Talent Night offering the stage to colleagues to share their unique personal stories on inclusion. These events are part of our holistic approach to creating an inclusive culture, on top of our policies and targets. Additionally, we have taken the first steps towards more social hiring as we aim for 2% of our workforce to consist of people with barriers to employment in 2030.

Next to this, we have been focusing on building a solid pipeline to improve gender equality. This is a priority because the gradual positive trend in the growth of female managers is reaching a plateau. To further advance female leadership across the organisation, we launched a new programme called Sponsorme, in which each Executive Committee member mentors and advocates for two highly talented female (senior) managers. We also feature the RiseUp programme, focusing specifically on authentic leadership, for which 15 mid-career women are eligible.

Leadership

We were happy to welcome Jamie Gatt as our new Chief Quality & Risk Officer, whose appointment meant the Executive Board was once again complete.

We were also pleased to see new Executive Committee members joining this past year. Frédérique Demenint-van der Ven succeeded Carlo Renne as Risk and Reputation Leader, and André van IJperen followed in the footsteps of Dominique van Seggelen as Consumer Lead.

Looking forward

Entering the new year, our commitment to acting with integrity and building trust is strong and we have applied the lessons learned to improve on this. The past year’s experiences once again underscored the importance of speaking up, which will remain an important topic in our programmes and communication.

Strategic workforce planning has become more complex due to the impact of GenAI and the use of delivery centres. This prompted us to intensify our focus on attracting the right talent with specific capabilities and skills, and supporting their development and growth within our organisation. Doing so demands strong leadership and a step-up in investments in leadership programmes. Another important role of leadership is teaching and passing on experience and knowledge. While the benefits of flexibility and hybrid working are clear, we believe that learning from one another - from peers and leadership alike - is essential and requires being on the work floor, too. Therefore, we attempt to strike a balance between strengthening our workplace culture and facilitating a steep learning curve for our talent.

Overall, we expect market volatility to persist, along with the strong need for transformation and the growing impact of GenAI. The latter are clear drivers for us in the medium term, making us look forward with confidence. With our talent and range of capabilities, we are well placed to contribute to resilience in our society, and support our clients in more strategic implementation of GenAI, providing them with trustworthy information and helping them transform and adapt to this rapidly changing world.

We would like to conclude with a special thanks to all Deloitte colleagues for their hard work and collaboration, and to our clients for their trust, enabling us to make an impact together.

Hans Honig
Chief Executive Officer
Chairman of the Executive Board

Dagmar Enklaar
Chief Operations Officer

Jamie Gatt
Chief Quality & Risk Officer