Atkins widens scope with new advice service

Atkins Acuity is headed by Dominic Harvey, a lawyer who joined Atkins in September 2015 initially as ‘chief executive, infrastructure and cities advisory’. He previously worked for Norton Rose and then Vinson & Elkins in project finance.

Around him is a new team hired from the likes of McKinsey, KPMG, Arthur D Little, World Economic Forum and Standard Chartered Bank, adding structuring and financing skills to the engineering knowledge that Atkins already has. It has also recruited the former executive director of the Philippines government’s public private partnership (PPP) unit.

The target market is international finance institutions, governments, and large corporations. It has ‘an aspirational goal’ of generating £200m in annual revenues by 2020/21.

Atkins Acuity will initially focus on the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa markets across the core Atkins’ sectors of transportation, energy and infrastructure.

It has already secured work in Turkey, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. In Sri Lanka Atkins Acuity is providing consultancy for the development of flood and drought risk mitigation investment plans. In east and southern Africa it is helping with reform of the energy sector to promote sustainable energy.

Uwe Krueger, Atkins’ chief executive, said: “Atkins Acuity is a direct response to our client’s needs to deliver more rewarding and higher-value partnerships for infrastructure and energy investments. We believe governments, corporates and financial institutions alike are frustrated at bottle-necks in programmes and a lack of delivery – the Atkins Acuity end-to-end advisory service is designed to help change that.”

Dominic Harvey, chief executive of Atkins Acuity, said: “By combining our engineering heritage with this broader offering of skill sets, our aim is to ensure upfront that projects are technically sound, properly structured and bankable in the international market. We’ll support our clients for the long term, building legacy capability to make sure their teams are fully functional and fit for the future.”

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