Interpath Advisory Ireland, a corporate restructuring and advisory firm, is on track to report about €13 million of revenues for its first full year in business after being set up by a number of former partners of KPMG and Deloitte in Dublin, according to its managing directors.
Ken Fennell and Kieran Wallace, the founding managing partners, said that while the firm was likely to report a loss for the year to March 2024, when accounts are filed early next year, it is currently trading profitably.
“We are continuing to increase our profitability month by month,” said Mr Wallace in a joint interview with The Irish Times. The firm said it was on course to “significantly increase” revenues in the current financial year.
Interpath Advisory was established in May 2021 as KPMG in the UK sold its corporate restructuring business to private-equity firm HIG Capital.
It emerged in early 2022 that then KPMG Ireland partners Mr Wallace and Eamonn Richardson, best known as the joint liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), and then Deloitte Ireland partners Mr Fennell and Mark Degnan, had handed in their notice and planned to join forces to set up an Irish arm of Interpath.
All had to work through long notice periods, which resulted in the managing partners joining between late 2022 and April 2023.
The team now comprises more than 90 professionals and expects to have 120 staff by the end of 2025. Senior hires so far this year include Denis Herlihy, former managing partner of BDO Limerick, to set up a tax team, and Andy Tallon, previously of CBRE’s capital advisory business in Ireland, to establish a debt advisory business.
Clara Coakley, a former executive director with Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs in Europe, recently joined as a director to Interpath Advisory Ireland’s growing debt advisory team.
Staff at the firm were told last week that John Doddy, head of debt and capital advisory at Deloitte Ireland, is also set to join it soon.
The early growth of Interpath Advisory Ireland has occurred against a backdrop of fledgling consolidation across the accountancy and restructuring sector in recent years, largely backed by overseas private equity money.
Mr Wallace said the firm has looked at “four to five” potential deals over the past 24 months. “But for various reasons, they didn’t work out,” he said.
He said they were in talks with one firm at the moment, but declined to identify the other party. “We are keen to grow the business both organically and by acquisition,” Mr Fennell said.
Over the past 12 months Interpath Advisory Ireland staff have worked on restructuring cases such as the receivership of The Square shopping centre in Tallaght, the ongoing windup of IBRC, the liquidation of PFS Card Services, and the administration of Co Down-based electronic manufacturing services provider Nitronica.
The level of corporate insolvencies in the Irish market rose 36 per cent on the year to 650 for the first nine months of 2024, led by services and hospitality companies, according to figures from Deloitte Ireland. It sees the full-year figure nearing 900 for the first time since 2017.
“We don’t see a tsunami of insolvencies coming down the tracks. But there is a new dynamic in the market of companies looking for pre-insolvency advice, which is leading to a lot of restructuring happening outside of formal processes like receivership, examinership or liquidation,” Mr Fennell said.
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