Accounting Firms Are Buying MSPs — Here's What That Means for Your IT

When KSM acquired Blackink IT, plenty of people in the accounting press treated it as a routine bolt-on. Another regional firm adding a service line, another founder cashing out. But look closer and the deal fits a pattern that has been building quietly for a couple of years: professional-services firms — accountants, law firms, consultancies — buying managed service providers and folding IT support into their offer.

If you run a small or medium-sized business in the East Midlands, this matters more than you might think. The firm that does your year-end accounts could soon be the same firm that patches your servers, manages your Microsoft 365 tenancy, and sells you cyber insurance. That sounds tidy. It might even be convenient. But it raises a question worth sitting with before you sign anything: are you getting genuinely better, joined-up service — or just a bigger invoice from an organisation whose real money is made elsewhere?

Why accountants want your IT

Start with the obvious. Accountancy is a mature, competitive market where fees for compliance work — the statutory stuff like filing accounts and tax returns — are under constant pressure. Software has automated a lot of the routine labour. Clients shop around. Margins on a standard set of accounts are nothing like they were a decade ago.

So firms are hunting for revenue that recurs, grows, and sticks. Managed IT fits that brief almost perfectly. An MSP contract bills monthly, rises as a client adds staff and systems, and is a genuine pain to switch away from. Once you're hosting someone's email, managing their backups, and holding their admin passwords, you're embedded. Churn is low. For a firm used to winning clients one tax season at a time, that kind of predictable annuity income is attractive.

There's a second driver: compliance is bleeding into technology. Making Tax Digital pushed accountants deeper into their clients' software. Cyber Essentials, GDPR, and the security requirements attached to insurance and supply-chain contracts all sit at the awkward border between "accounting problem" and "IT problem". A firm that already advises you on risk and compliance can argue, with a straight face, that it should also be the one securing your systems.

And buying an MSP is simply faster than building one. Blackink came with engineers, tooling, processes, and a client base. KSM bought capability it would have taken years to grow organically. Expect more of the same.

What the buyer sees versus what the client gets

The pitch to you will be seamless integration. One relationship, one point of contact, your finances and your infrastructure managed under a single roof. When your accountant flags that you need multi-factor authentication to keep your cyber insurance valid, the same firm can just go and switch it on. No awkward handoff between the people who understand your business and the people who understand your network.

That's a real benefit, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Plenty of SMEs waste hours acting as go-between, relaying messages between their accountant and their IT company who don't talk to each other and occasionally give contradictory advice. Collapsing that into one provider removes friction.

But integration on the slide deck and integration in practice are different animals. When a professional-services firm absorbs an MSP, the two halves often keep operating as separate teams for a long time. The accountants carry on accounting; the engineers carry on engineering. The "integration" amounts to a shared logo and a combined invoice. You get the bundling without the joined-up thinking that was supposed to justify it.

There's also the matter of where attention — and investment — flows. In a firm whose heritage, leadership, and profit centre is accountancy, IT is the newcomer. When budgets are set and priorities argued over, which side wins? If audit and advisory are generating the partners' income and the IT arm is a recent purchase still being digested, it's not hard to guess which clients get the senior people's time. You may find your IT support becomes competent but unremarkable — kept ticking over rather than genuinely developed.

The squeeze on independent MSPs

Step back and this consolidation reshapes the whole market you're buying in.

For years, UK SMEs have had a healthy choice of independent MSPs — owner-run firms that live and die on the quality of their technical service because it's all they do. These businesses can't cross-subsidise. If their support is slow or their advice is poor, clients leave, because there's no audit relationship holding the account together.

When those independents get acquired by professional-services groups, two things happen. The pool of pure-play IT providers shrinks. And the ones that remain face competitors who can bundle, discount strategically, and lean on existing accountancy relationships to win IT work that was never put out to proper tender. An accountant who already has your trust can slot IT onto the bill without you ever comparing it against a specialist. That's a powerful distribution advantage, and it has very little to do with who runs the better help desk.

The risk for buyers is subtle. Markets with fewer independent specialists tend to compete less on quality and more on relationship lock-in. The thing that kept MSPs sharp — the ever-present threat of a client walking — gets weaker when the client is also tied in by their accounts, their payroll, and their tax advice.

Questions to ask before you bundle

None of this means a firm like KSM can't deliver good IT. Some will. The point is to buy with your eyes open rather than defaulting to the convenient option. A few things worth pinning down:

• Who actually does the work? Ask to meet the engineers, not just the account manager. Find out whether the technical team is the one that came with the acquisition, and whether they've stayed since the deal.
• How is IT priced, and against what? Insist on seeing the IT support costed as a standalone service. If it can't stand up against a specialist quote, the "integration" is doing a lot of heavy lifting to hide a premium.
• What happens when things go wrong at 2am? Compliance firms don't run 24/7 operations centres by instinct. Check the actual support hours, the response times in the contract, and who answers when a server dies on a Sunday.
• How easy is it to leave the IT part without touching the accounts? If the contracts are entangled so that ditching the IT means disrupting your year-end, that's a lock-in, not a convenience.
• Where does security sit? Ask who is accountable for your cyber posture and what qualifications they hold. "Our compliance team handles it" is not the same as a security-led MSP.

The honest version

Consolidation isn't inherently bad for buyers. A well-run firm that genuinely merges financial and technical advice could save you real time and reduce the gaps where problems fall between two providers. The KSM–Blackink deal might work out brilliantly for Blackink's clients.

But the trend as a whole shifts power towards firms whose core business — and whose biggest fees — sit somewhere other than keeping your IT running well. Bundling is sold as simplicity. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just a way to stop you comparing the price. The job for any SME is to judge the IT service on its own merits, ask the uncomfortable questions, and make sure you're paying for support that's actually good — not just conveniently attached to the firm that files your accounts.

That's a test an independent MSP is usually happy to be put to, because quality of service is the only thing holding the relationship together. It's a test worth applying to everyone else too.