'A perfect alliance across professions' with Alliott Global Alliance

Alliott Global Alliance is rapidly expanding their footprint in Africa. In this podcast, Giles Brake, CEO of Alliott Global Alliance, and Stephen Gitonga, partner and founder of Gitonga Mureithi & Company Advocates, share their back story and vision for the future with Africa Legal’s Tom Pearson. Inspired by the need to provide more than just accounting and tax services to their growing list of clientele, Alliott Global Alliance (AGA) has evolved into one of the largest multidisciplinary alliances of professional firms. CEO of the alliance, Giles Brake attributes this to the synergy between accounting and law firms, which has presented opportunities to collaborate on day to day compliance, tax, private wealth and major international deals. “The reason it worked and clicked is because law firms face many of the same challenges as accounting firms which have clients who are expanding all the time. I think both professions saw huge opportunities to collaborate and to cross refer in terms of the business model,” says Brake. Firms that are part of the alliance meet a strict criteria, Brake adds. In return, they gain significant value by being able to tap into a global resource base, ultimately putting their clients into a safe pair of hands with a non-competing firm that they trust. While AGA’s roots were tightly established more than four decades ago, and its association with law firms began in 2004, its push into Africa was part of an accelerated growth plan that started to kick into action about five years ago. In 2018 Stephen Gitonga, partner and founder of Gitonga Mureithi & Company Advocates joined AGA. This was after the Kenyan-based law firm sought to team up with an international network to boost their global offering. Gitonga says AGA was the perfect fit. “We did not just want an alliance for business, but one that would work for us in terms of training, the sharing of expertise, and the opportunity to collaborate on regional and global tenders, for example. To us, one of the biggest selling points of AGA was the exclusivity you get in your jurisdiction, and that for us was quite appealing,” he noted. Both Brake and Gitonga elaborate on the mutual benefit for the alliance’s accounting and law firms, a unique combination that's really attractive for a progressive international company. Brake says AGA’s vision for the near future is to continue expanding organically throughout the continent. “We need to maintain this growth trajectory that we're on. It's easy to say bigger isn't always better, but I think it is in our case, and I think being bigger will increase the opportunities for our members and of course for their clients as well. That means, however, having the right firms in the right jurisdictions that can meet the growing needs of clients. Everybody knows that Africa has huge promise as an investment location, and some of the markets in Africa are very large. So we need to be there.”