Fashion has a funny way of working. To the lay person it can seem that styles come into fashion, are all the rage and almost as quickly as they became cool, they become dated and disappear, only to return a few years later, and intermittently in years after that, as retro-chic.
One need only look today as far as the number of people across the world wearing Adidas Samba trainers, first produced in the 1940s, to see how effective retro can be, and that’s without even looking at the Adidas bottom line.
It’s the same when it comes to company names, it seems. Arthur Andersen, the former Big Five accounting firm, infamously went out of business amid the Enron scandal in 2002. The Big Five became the Big Four, and the Andersen name was reduced to a footnote in financial history.
Yet it turns out the name at least partially lives on, and is set to go public in the coming weeks.
[ Revived Andersen tax and advisory firm files to pursue US stock listingOpens in new window ]
Andersen, the tax and consulting business created by alumni of the collapsed firm, has filed for a stock market listing in the US, although it has not yet nailed down the details of how much shares it plans to sell or a price range.
The company had revenues of about $740 million (€648 million) last year, and earlier in 2025 it launched a consulting business named, you guessed it, Andersen Consulting.
The previous Andersen Consulting, which was spun out of the accounting firm, renamed itself Accenture in the years after the collapse of the accounting business.
One wonders why a business would want to use the name of a firm that collapsed amid scandal and recrimination two decades ago, but brands remain powerful long after the companies they represented are gone.
It’s why, in the years after their phone making businesses had effectively fallen away, phones under the Blackberry brand were still being made under licence. Similarly, if you liked the Nokia 3310 phone back in 2002, why not buy a new version of it made by HMD – which has been producing Nokia-badged phones since 2016 and has a niche, but strong, fan base.
Clearly Andersen has shown that the failure of a previous iteration of the name doesn’t preclude future success.
Still, it’s doubtful we’ll see a restored Anglo Irish Bank any time soon.
