Big Four firm KPMG hires six new partners externally

KPMG has been busy boosting its partnership ranks in recent weeks, including six senior recruits with a background at Accenture, PwC, Ernst & Young and Deloitte.

In its latest senior-level recruitment drive, KPMG has this month poached two partners from Accenture – Kylee Anastasi and Dhawal Jaggi – and welcomed Emma Pitfield from professional services firm Genpact.

The November influx following an earlier partnership intake in September, which included Deborah Henderson, Tim Plenderleith, and Kanika Gupta Sikand.

Kylee Anastasi joins KPMG’s Infrastructure, Assets & Places team in Sydney, a year after being recruited by Accenture as a managing director from PwC’s partnership. After kicking off her consulting career as an associate director with a three-year stint at Ernst & Young, Anastasi spent over a decade at PwC between the US and Australia – joining the firm’s partnership in 2017 before crossing to Accenture in late 2021.

A former Managing Director in Strategy & Consulting at Accenture, Dhawal Jaggi has also switched teams to KPMG, joining the firm’s Data & Cloud consulting partnership in Melbourne. Jaggi spent altogether more than a decade at Accenture, starting out as the Head of Operations & Process Transformation for the ANZ region after joining from IBM Global Business Services. Earlier, he spent two years at PwC.

Emma Pitfield joins KPMG’s Finance Strategy and Performance partnership team in Melbourne via a two-and-a-half-year stint as a vice president and ANZ business lead for Consumer & Health transformation services with Genpact. Prior, she spent over two and a half decades at McDonalds between Asia, Australia, and the Middle East, latterly as a technology segment director, and also has a short stint at Deloitte on her resume. 

Kanika Gupta Sikand has returned to KPMG after a near six-year stint in a Group Regulatory Reporting role at NAB. Sikand joins KPMG’s CFO Advisory (chief financial officer) practice in Melbourne after having previously spent close to nine years with the firm up until the end of 2016, during which time she rose to senior manager.

After close to two and a half decades with Aurecon stationed throughout Australia, Asia, New Zealand and Africa, most recently as a director for the engineering and design consultancy’s global manufacturing business, Tim Plenderleith joins KPMG’s partnership in Melbourne, with responsibility for advising clients in the Life Sciences, Consumer and Industrial Markets, and Retail and Technology sectors.

Deborah Henderson joins KPMG’s Data & Cloud partnership team out of Brisbane, following a year and a half serving as PwC’s National Data and Analytics Lead for Microsoft. Earlier in her career she spent five years as a data & analytics and business intelligence manager at Avanade (Accenture and Microsoft’s joint IT services venture), before which she spent a previous five years as a manager at Accenture in South Africa.