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France, Belgium, Luxembourg — a market rapidly turning institutional, a pattern already well known in insurance brokerage
Ten years ago, selling an accounting firm — or part of its client base — was still largely settled peer-to-peer, over a few months, around an informal agreement and a cheque. In 2026, that same move now sits inside a structured, increasingly financialised market, contested by consolidators and investment funds. The accounting profession is going through, roughly a decade behind, exactly what insurance brokerage has already been through: a wave of concentration driven by owner demographics, the digitalisation of the profession, and now artificial intelligence.
A profession being reshaped, in numbers
France: an "exceptionally active" market
France counts roughly 21,600 chartered accountants registered with the Order, spread across just over 19,000 accounting firms, a base that has grown steadily over the past decade. But the market structure remains highly fragmented: most firms have fewer than ten partners, and nearly a third of principals are approaching retirement age within the next decade.
That demographic wall, combined with mounting regulatory pressure (mandatory e-invoicing, growing compliance obligations) and the rise of digital tools, has opened the door to consolidators. Private-equity-backed deal activity in the sector has multiplied roughly tenfold across Europe in two years: around 200 deals recorded in 2024, versus fewer than 20 in 2022. Groups such as In Extenso (targeting €650 million in revenue in 2025, over 7,000 employees), Archipel (€65 million raised from Eurazeo, six firms integrated since 2025, exclusive talks with Naxicap Partners in late 2025 to double in size), as well as Cogest, Exco, Fiducial and Cerfrance, are actively acquiring.
On pricing, an Interfimo study covering 240 financed transactions between 2022 and 2023 puts the average sale price at 87% of pre-tax revenue. Valuation methods have professionalised too: the market now reasons in multiples of adjusted EBITDA rather than a percentage of revenue, typically ranging from 5x to 10x depending on size, recurring revenue, and portfolio quality — up to 7-10x for the most sought-after deals.
Belgium: fragmentation only beginning to unwind
The Belgian market shows a comparable structure on a smaller scale: around 3,700 active firms, nearly three-quarters of which employ fewer than five people. Talent shortages affect almost every firm, and close to one in two has already started rethinking its organisational model. Nothing legally bars consolidation, provided the majority of the governing body remains made up of registered professionals — a safeguard that stops neither aggressive price competition nor gradual buyouts by better-funded hybrid platforms.
Luxembourg: still fragmented, but drawing investor attention
The Grand Duchy counts more than a thousand accounting firms, including around 500 chartered accountants supervised by the Order (OEC), and close to 465 registered groups employing roughly 13,800 people — with the four largest firms accounting for about 70% of that workforce. Fragmentation is the norm here too, but investor interest is clearly rising: local consolidators, international private equity players, foreign accounting firms and corporate services providers are starting to look at a sector that had so far sat outside the major M&A waves already reshaping neighbouring regulated activities (fund administration, management companies). The same underlying drivers apply: rising technology costs for small firms, tightening compliance requirements, and above all, a lack of succession options for owners nearing retirement.
The common driver: digitalisation, automation, and now AI
What's accelerating consolidation across all three countries is the same dynamic: technology has driven a productivity leap for well-equipped firms, leaving the rest behind. Over 70% of chartered accountants already report using at least one AI tool, and that share keeps climbing. The measured gains are concrete: monthly closings running about 30% faster for AI-equipped teams, and up to 25% revenue growth in advisory work for firms that have built their offering around automation. At the same time, the shortage of qualified staff — tens of thousands of unfilled positions according to industry observatories — is pushing the least equipped firms toward an exit, unable to keep pace.
The phased rollout of the EU AI Act, with its training, traceability and documentation obligations for higher-risk uses, adds a further layer of complexity that small firms struggle to absorb on their own. The result: scarcity no longer sits in accounting expertise itself, but in the capacity to invest in distribution, data, and tooling — ground on which consolidated groups hold a structural edge over independent firms.
A script already written: insurance brokerage
None of this will surprise insurance brokerage professionals. The sector went through the exact same trajectory roughly a decade earlier: digitalised policy administration, automated underwriting, an ageing population of independent brokers, and now AI further accelerating the shift toward more integrated platforms. Brokerage has consolidated heavily too, driven by broking groups and funds structuring large-scale portfolio acquisitions.
And the parallel runs deeper: in brokerage as in accounting, it's the mid-size and large transactions that benefit from a structured framework — specialised M&A firms, proven valuation methodologies, organised due diligence. Small sales and partial portfolio transfers, by contrast, remain largely left to informal, unstructured deals — no competitive process, no secured payment framework, no structured signature process, often based on nothing more than a relationship between peers.
The gap in the market: small sales and partial transfers
That is precisely the gap Assurdeal has filled in insurance brokerage over the past fifteen years: giving small portfolios and partial client transfers a market framework — verified matching between sellers and qualified buyers, escrowed funds, electronic signature, end-to-end traceability — that previously only existed for large deals.
Kinkoza now applies the same logic across several certified, regulated professions, starting with accounting. Rather than leaving small-scale sales or partial client transfers to be negotiated without a safety net — often under the pressure of an impending retirement or a poorly prepared opportunity — the platform gives the profession a structured transactional framework: verified matching between sellers and buyers, escrowed funds via Trustap, and a transaction process designed to protect both the small independent firm and the individual buyer.
The goal isn't to compete with the M&A firms that already serve large transactions well, but to finally bring a framework to what has never had one: the small firm sale, the partial client transfer, the first-time buyer navigating the market without a network or advisor. That's exactly the segment where Assurdeal proved itself in insurance brokerage — and it's the one Kinkoza is now structuring for accounting, ahead of extending the same model to other certified professions across Europe.
Sources: Order of Chartered Accountants (France, Belgium, Luxembourg), Interfimo (2024), Deal Makr, Basel Advisory, TEO Advisory, ComptaPerspectives, Paperjam, Hayot Expertise, OMECA, CPA.com, Sage (2025).
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