Executive Board highlights and reflections
The world around us is changing at unprecedented speed, driven by geopolitical volatility and technological advancements catalysing a shift in how businesses operate. Over recent years, we have turned disruption into opportunity. We helped our clients navigate new realities and supported them in becoming more resilient and strengthening their competitive advantage through AI. We innovated and transformed our service delivery, and with the creation of an EMEA firm per June 1, 2026, worked together to increase cross-border collaboration and maximise potential.
Through our Audit & Assurance services, we help build trust in the capital markets and society. In our audit business, we have seen steady growth and have further established our presence in the Financial Services Industry with our appointments as auditor to two significant clients, ING and Athora. Within Tax & Legal, we have guided responsible AI adoption grounded in data governance, auditability and confidentiality, strengthening compliance and enabling sustainable use.
Within our consultative businesses, we are increasingly progressing towards outcome-based and 'transform to operate' models, expanding our services from advice and implementation to operate. In addition to enhancing clients' data analytics environments with technology and AI, we support them by operating their core, end-to-end business processes.
Our revenue has remained stable overall, with differences across businesses and industries. The focus has been on strengthening profitability while at the same time increasing our investments in both AI, in our people and in transforming our service delivery to our clients. This has resulted in earnings growth of 2.2%, with a modest revenue growth of 1.4%.
Throughout the year, we have maintained a constructive and transparent dialogue with our regulator regarding the enhanced supervision. We are taking decisive measures intended to drive lasting change and reinforce a strong, resilient culture in which quality and integrity are consistently reflected in how we lead, make decisions and serve our clients.
The topics that are widely relevant across society and business, and that have shaped our go-to-market approach, are resilience and AI. With a vanguard of organisations from the public and private sector, we have worked together to contribute to keeping our communities safe and prepared for unexpected future events. We simulated scenarios to model what to do in the event of a 72-hour power cut, committing to action. We also organised Virulent, a national multi-day exercise with 20 organisations across the healthcare and public sector, to test the Dutch healthcare system’s readiness for a future pandemic.
For AI, the time for pilots is over. It has become a strategic boardroom topic requiring an organisation-wide, multidimensional approach. Our ambition is to be the preferred transformation partner for our clients. To gain a deep understanding of AI challenges and identify opportunities for future collaboration, we undertook several inspirational journeys with our clients. This further enabled us to help clients fully embed AI into their strategy, launch new business models and create lasting value, responsibly and with humans in the loop. To strengthen our client delivery, we increased the use of Global Delivery Centers offering deep technological expertise, we progressed with integrated AI-enabled solutions together with our international network and invested in AI infused platforms such as Omnia, to further standardise and automate our services.
Our new agentic AI platform Solaria was launched as technology-agnostic, meaning that it connects to multiple AI models. Solaria was built to guide and accelerate complex business processes using approved tools and data sources, and to create workflows that place human oversight, logging and enterprise guardrails at the core. The AI Transformation Hub served as an accelerator, engaging our people and clients to unlock the value of AI. Through learning sessions and Solaria one-to-ones to level up skills, it became a hub of inspiration and collaboration. Throughout everything we do, we prioritise responsible AI through the ‘human in the loop’ principle. We shared guidance with all employees to clarify responsibilities that come with embracing new technology while preserving the integrity and trust as we lay the groundwork for how we operate and deliver our services beyond this new frontier.
Our organisation is becoming leaner, and we have made strong progress with strategic workforce planning, assessing the workforce we need across all service offerings and how to attract and retain this talent. The demand for experienced professionals with deep technical, subject‑matter and industry expertise is increasing, while we will also continue to recruit and develop young professionals.
Our people are at the heart of our organisation, and we believe it is their judgement, expertise and collaboration that make the difference. We therefore strengthened our Employee Value Proposition across performance, learning, inclusion and reward, and expanded our learning curriculum to emphasise integrity, ethical decision-making and Generative AI. We reinforced competitive pay through a comprehensive salary benchmark and worked on a renewed reward model that better reflects our high performing culture. Our continued commitment to a culture that values diversity, equity and inclusion is reflected in programmes such as our reverse mentoring programme and social hiring, as well as in targeted inclusion events such as Talent Night.
Throughout the integrated annual report, you will also read about the significant progress we have made regarding sustainability, the pro bono work and milestones of our Deloitte Impact Foundation, and initiatives related to our Future of themes focusing on key societal challenges such as the energy transition.
Outlook
This past year marked an important moment in the history of the firm with the creation of one EMEA firm. Combining the strengths of Deloitte Central Europe, North South Europe, and Spain into one EMEA firm. As of June 1, 2026, we will benefit from the increased collaboration among 132,000 Deloitters across 80 countries. We expect this to further differentiate our competitive position by better aligning our organisation with how our clients and their markets operate, and by freeing up capacity to invest in areas such as AI and assets. For our people, this opens up more international project opportunities and better leverage Deloitte University.
In the current time, geopolitical developments are likely to put pressure on economic growth, which makes the outlook for our business in the upcoming year somewhat unpredictable. However, the essence of our future lies in trust and transformation. Trust earned by work we do for our clients, and trust in our partnership and from our people, essential to collaborate and to innovate. With that trust, we want to support our clients' transformation journeys and contribute to a more resilient and equitable world. We believe our breadth of capabilities, and our unwavering commitment to creating impact and our talented workforce position us well to do so. We extend our gratitude to our colleagues for their dedication and to our clients for their trust.
Rotterdam, July 16, 2026
Hans Honig
Chief Executive Officer
Chairman of the Executive Board
Dagmar Enklaar
Chief Operations Officer
Jamie Gatt
Chief Quality & Risk Officer