Eight companies are attacking the financial statement audit. Our accounting census found that two of them reach the audit fee a different way: they buy ownership stakes in audit firms.
Modus pairs its audit platform with an investment strategy that takes stakes in audit-first accounting firms. Current, formerly Crete Professionals Alliance, runs a national platform that takes ownership stakes in independent CPA firms and pushes AI through them. Neither platform holds a license of its own.
A licensed firm still signs the opinion. That’s all the license guarantees.
What held in all four editions
A line comes back defensible in the Index when nothing on the market does the billed work at all. Each edition censuses its own market, so the four lists sit side by side rather than adding up.
In accounting, four of seventeen service lines came out defensible: the financial statement audit, the employee benefit plan audit, reviews and compilations, and forensic accounting. In law, four of twenty-one practices: white-collar defense and internal investigations, public-company reporting, public-company M&A, and first-chair trial practice. In consulting, two of fourteen: board and C-suite strategic advisory, and change management facilitation. In marketing, one of sixteen: brand strategy and identity.
Set those four lists beside each other and the same feature runs through them. A licensed firm issues the opinion, disclosure counsel signs the filing, the forensic accountant defends the report under cross-examination, and the trial lawyer stands up. Consulting has no paperwork to point at. Nobody countersigns a board recommendation or a change program, but the client hired a named advisor and calls that person when it doesn’t work. Every one of these is work a person is answerable for afterward, and that was the common feature every time a census found no substitute.
The fee doesn’t follow the work
Protecting the work and protecting the price turn out to be different things, and the accounting edition shows it three ways.
Ownership is the first. Outside capital reaches the audit fee through a member firm, and no regulator has to approve anything for that to work.
The second is that the license is obtainable, and one attacker of the employee benefit plan audit went and got one. Lead investor M25 wrote in May 2026 that Oath had received its CPA license that week and was accepting audit clients, with former PCAOB board member Christina Ho as its Chief Assurance Officer. Its product is still in early access. The route is open to anyone willing to build a firm.
Human Interest works the third way, on the fee itself. Its Audit Relief product bundles the annual employee benefit plan audit into what a retirement plan sponsor already pays it, and credits the sponsor up to the full value of the standard audit fee. The company says sponsors save $10,000 or more per plan year in audit fees, and that auditor time on the engagement falls from 40 to 80 plus hours down to about five. So a firm can watch that fee go to near zero.
Brand strategy holds without anyone’s license
The agency edition tests whether any of this is really about licensure. Brand strategy and identity is the single defensible line out of sixteen in marketing, with three companies selling against it. Positioning, naming, and creative direction have no substitute a client can buy off a shelf, and no regulator requires a brand to hire anyone for the work.
That line survives for the same reason the audit does, minus the statute. A client commissions a brand platform from people who will stand behind the recommendation and still be there when it tests badly. The accountability here is contractual and reputational, and clients pay for that the same way they pay for a signature.
Licensure is one way to enforce accountability. It isn’t the source of the protection, and that matters for every firm whose best work carries no license at all.
Check what your engagement letter quotes
Look at your own defensible lines and read the engagement letter beside them. Most firms price them on the preparation: the fieldwork, the document review, the analysis, the deck. That work is the part AI compresses first, and it compresses whether or not anyone reopens the engagement letter.
The part a client can’t get elsewhere is the judgment and the name at the bottom. When the hours underneath come down and the fee is still quoted in hours, the firm hands the saving to the client and keeps the liability.
Four editions asked the same question of four different markets, and each came back with a short list of work a firm keeps. What none of them settles is what the engagement letter should say once the preparation underneath that work is gone.