Professional services in the context of IT services

A financial centre (financial center in American English) or financial hub is a location with a significant concentration of commerce in financial services.

The commercial activity that takes place in a financial centre may include banking, asset management, insurance, and provision of financial markets, with venues and supporting services for these activities. Participants can include financial intermediaries (such as banks and brokers), institutional investors (such as investment managers, pension funds, insurers, and hedge funds), and issuers (such as companies and governments). Trading activity often takes place on venues such as exchanges and involves clearing houses, although many transactions take place over-the-counter (OTC), directly between participants. Financial centres usually host companies that offer a wide range of financial services, for example relating to mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, or corporate actions; or which participate in other areas of finance, such as private equity, private debt, hedge funds, and reinsurance. Ancillary financial services include rating agencies, as well as provision of related professional services, particularly legal advice and accounting services.

A consultant (from Latin: consultare "to deliberate") is a professional (also known as expert, specialist, see variations of meaning below) who provides advice or services in an area of specialization (generally to medium or large-size corporations). Consulting services generally fall under the domain of professional services, as contingent work.

The Harvard Business School defines a consultant as someone who advises on "how to modify, proceed in, or streamline a given process within a specialized field".

Regulation and licensure in engineering is established by various jurisdictions of the world to encourage life, public welfare, safety, well-being, the environment and other interests of the general public and to define the licensure process through which an engineer becomes licensed to practice engineering and to provide professional services and products to the public.

As with many other professions and activities, engineering is often a restricted activity. Relatedly, jurisdictions that license according to particular engineering discipline define the boundaries of each discipline carefully so that practitioners understand what they are competent to do.

A consulting firm or simply consultancy is a professional service firm that provides expertise and specialised labour for a fee, through the use of consultants. Consulting firms may have one employee or thousands; they may consult in a broad range of domains, for example, management, engineering, and so on.

Management consultants, in particular, typically work with company executives and provide them with generalists and industry-specific specialists, known as subject-matter experts, usually trained in management or in business schools. The deliverable of a management consultant is usually recommendations for achieving a company objective, leading to a company project.

Arup, officially Arup Group Limited, is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London that provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment. It employs about 17,000 people in over 90 offices across 35 countries, and has participated in projects in over 160 countries.

Arup was established in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup as Ove N. Arup Consulting Engineers. Through its involvement in high-profile projects such as the Sydney Opera House, it became well known for undertaking complex and challenging projects. In 1970, Arup stepped down from actively leading the company, setting out the principles which have continued to guide its operation.

A secretary or administrative professional, also known as an administrative assistant (AA), executive assistant (EA), program support specialist, or other similar title is a person whose work consists of supporting management, including executives, using a variety of project management, communication, business administration, public administration, office management, managerial, and/or organizational skills. In modern times, they also tend to actively participate in the professional service work of the organization such has having a hands-on involvement on the production of deliverables, other work products, and conducting other similar professional duties.

Some high-level administrative professionals or those that work in "General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services," as well as those in an entry-level position that requires specialized knowledge preferably or explicitly acquired through a higher education university degree in a field pertinent to the organization's industry are specialized secretaries or specialized administrative specialists in the general sense while others can be further sub-categorized into many other titles. Depending on a company's organizational structure, the most senior administrative professional may be referred to as an Office Manager or Chief of Staff, though chiefs of staff tend to have additional responsibilities; administrative professional that work directly under a senior executive or c-suite executive are generally referred to as executive assistants. Personal Assistants (PA) and Executive Assistants (EA) generally work directly with an individual executive, personal assistants tend to have duties that assist the executive in their personal and professional lives while executive assistants tend to focus on assisting the executive in their professional capacity.

Professional services networks are business networks of independent firms who come together to provide professional services to clients through an organized framework. They are notably found in law and accounting. Any profession that operates in one location, but has clients in multiple locations, may provide potential members for a professional network. This entry focuses on accounting, legal, multidisciplinary and specialty practice networks. According to statistics from 2010, members of these networks employ more than one million professionals and staff and have cumulative annual revenues that exceed $200 billion.

The accounting networks developed first to meet the US Securities and Exchange Commission's requirement for public company audits. They include the well-known accounting networks like PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG (also known as the Big 4 Audit Firms) as well as more than 30 other accounting networks and associations. They are highly structured entities.

EY, previously known as Ernst & Young, is a British multinational professional services network based in London, United Kingdom. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and PwC, it is one of the Big Four professional services firms. The EY network is composed of member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee.

EY is one of the largest professional services networks in the world. It primarily provides assurance, tax, information technology services (including managed services in areas like Cybersecurity, Cloud, Digital Transformation and AI), consulting, and advisory services to its clients.

Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing which emerged as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, following the recognition that the unique characteristics of services required different strategies compared with the marketing of physical goods.

Services marketing typically refers to both business to consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) services, and includes the marketing of services such as telecommunications services, transportation and distribution services, all types of hospitality, tourism leisure and entertainment services, car rental services, health care services, professional services and trade services. Service marketers often use an expanded marketing mix which consists of the seven Ps: product, price, place, promotion, people, physical evidence and process. A contemporary approach, known as service-dominant logic, argues that the demarcation between products and services that persisted throughout the 20th century was artificial and has obscured the fact that everyone sells service. The S-D logic approach is changing the way that marketers understand value-creation and is changing concepts of the consumer's role in service delivery processes.

Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., doing business as Marsh McLennan and Marsh, is a global professional services firm, headquartered in New York City with businesses in insurance brokerage, risk management, reinsurance services, talent management, investment advisory, and management consulting. Its four main operating companies are Marsh (53% of 2024 revenues), which offers risk management, insurance broking, insurance program management, risk consulting, analytical modeling and alternative risk financing services; Marsh Re (formerly Guy Carpenter; 10% of 2024 revenues), a reinsurance intermediary and advisor; Mercer (23% of 2024 revenues), which provides consulting to employers for health insurance, retirement plans, and pension plans; and Oliver Wyman; 14% of 2024 revenues, including Lippincott and NERA Economic Consulting, which provides consulting services. In 2024, Risk and Insurance Services contributed a total of 63% of revenues and 71% of operating profit, while Consulting contributed 37% of revenues and 29% of operating profit.

It is the largest insurance broker worldwide.

McKinsey & Company (informally McKinsey or McK) is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, McKinsey is the oldest and largest of the "MBB" management consultancies. The firm mainly focuses on the finances and operations of their clients.

Under the direction of Marvin Bower, McKinsey expanded into Europe during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, McKinsey's Fred Gluck—along with Boston Consulting Group's Bruce Henderson, Bill Bain at Bain & Company, and Harvard Business School's Michael Porter—initiated a program designed to transform corporate culture. A 1975 publication by McKinsey's John L. Neuman introduced the business practice of "overhead value analysis" that contributed to a downsizing trend that eliminated many jobs in middle management.

Arthur Andersen LLP was an American accounting firm based in Chicago that provided auditing, tax advising, consulting and other professional services to large corporations. By 2001, it had become one of the world's largest multinational corporations and was one of the "Big Five" accounting firms (along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers). The firm collapsed by mid-2002, as details of its questionable accounting practices for energy company Enron and telecommunications company WorldCom were revealed amid the two high-profile bankruptcies. The scandals were a factor in the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002.