Our History

For more than 150 years, when society has looked to organizations for help to restore fragile belief or to enable progress, professionals from KPMG’s founding firms have stepped forward. They didn’t just observe history, they helped to shape it, becoming synonymous with a pioneering spirit, bold leadership and doing the right thing. That’s a legacy KPMG firms all share and continue to draw inspiration from in our work today.

We helped change ICAEW rules to allow women to qualify and later hired the first female chartered accountant.

In 1924, Ethel Watts became the first woman to quality for membership by examination and would later be employed by Sir Harry Peat - Sir William’s son. Today, women make up a third of the ICAEW’s membership.

When financial reporting was being heavily criticized in the 1960s and 1970s, the Senior Partner of the UK’s Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co helped inspire confidence by developing the first-ever accounting standards.

Following three days of voting, the counting process wasn’t running smoothly, and the Independent Electoral Commission called KPMG in South Africa to help them verify the results.

To ensure data was kept safe, off-site backups of all the votes had to be taken to KPMG’s offices every few hours, day and night. A few days later, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress party won the election and the rest is history.

In 1987, the mega-merger of Peat Marwick International (PMI) and KlynveldMain Goerdeler (KMG) was announced to the public and KPMG was formed.

At the time, it was the largest merger in the history of the accounting business. The firms believed so strongly in integrity that it created a common values charter that set a new standard for the industry.

KPMG’s US firm founders, James Marwick and Roger Mitchell, were selected to conduct an emergency audit and once the Federal Reserve Board was established in 1913, their Firm was drafted by government leadership to help plan the US Federal Reserve System.