McKinsey snaps up sustainability specialists
Business consulting firm McKinsey has unveiled the acquisition of two sustainability specialists in the UK.
It is paying an undisclosed sum to buy Vivid Economics, a 130-strong, London-based advisory firm with operations in the Netherlands and the US. The company provides economic consulting in areas such as carbon pricing, net zero transitions and climate and disaster resilience for clients in sectors including finance, energy and manufacturing.
McKinsey has also acquired Planetrics, a division of Vivid, with 10 employees. Again the price was not disclosed. The business develops an analytics platform that enables financial institutions to model and price climate risk for tens of thousands of individual assets and companies.
The increasing overlap between digital transformation and sustainability strategies will have a major influence on M&A activity in our sector in the coming years. McKinsey’s moves follow Atos’ purchase of EcoAct last year, and it surely won’t be long before we see the likes of Accenture or IBM investing in adding specialist tech or expertise around decarbonization or wider sustainability topics.