Moore Global Brand Guidelines: A 1907 City Practice, Moore Stephens & the 2019 Rebrand

An auditing practice near the Guildhall.

Moore Global, officially Moore Global Network Limited, is a network of independent accountancy, advisory and consulting firms with its headquarters in London. English Wikipedia says it has more than 37,000 people in 119 countries and that the International Accounting Bulletin ranks it twelfth among accountancy networks.

The network traces its origins to 1907, when Harold Moore and Albert Partridge set up a small auditing, tax consulting and insolvency practice, Moore, Partridge & Co. The company’s history page says the firm occupied a building not far from the Guildhall in the City of London and grew steadily until the outbreak of war in 1914; by the end of the conflict Partridge had left.

In 1918 Harold Moore formed Moore, Stephens & Co with John Robinson Stephens, who, the company says, had managed the firm while his new partner served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. The Stephens name stayed in the firm’s title for just over a century.

The firm looked abroad early. Its history says it opened an office in Glasgow in 1921 and established Moore, Cross & Co. in Brazil a year later, and that shortly afterwards it developed close relations with the Greek shipping community, ties it says continue today. That first international push, the company says, was driven by the needs of shipping clients; over time the overseas offices took on clients across many other industries. Maritime work still appears among the industries listed on the network’s website, alongside sectors such as energy, mining, hotels and wine.

Moore Stephens International, a court case and a UK merger.

In 1968 the Moore Stephens International network was formally established, and by 1979 it had member firms in most of the world’s main economies, according to the company and English Wikipedia. The firm’s name was shortened to Moore Stephens in 1986.

A third generation of the Moore family, Richard Moore, became chairman of Moore Stephens International in 2004; the company says he stepped down at the end of 2019, after the move to the Moore Global name.

The Moore Stephens name also appears in a case on English company law. In Stone & Rolls Ltd v Moore Stephens, decided in 2009, the House of Lords ruled by a majority of three to two that an insolvent company, whose sole controlling director and shareholder had used it to carry out a fraud, could not sue its auditors, Moore Stephens, for negligence, because the fraud was attributed to the company itself. English Wikipedia calls it a leading case on fraud and the illegality defence, and says it was the last case argued before the House of Lords.

The network’s British base then changed. In November 2018 BDO and Moore Stephens announced plans to merge their UK businesses, and the deal was completed in February 2019, according to English Wikipedia’s article on BDO; it says the combination put BDO ahead of Grant Thornton as the fifth-largest accountancy firm in the UK. The international network continued under its own name and leadership in London.

Design and documentation.

Mid-tier accounting networks are built from independent firms that agree to share a name, standards and referrals. The networks in this guide describe themselves that way: their legal pages typically state that the international body provides no client services and that each member firm is a separate legal entity. The brand therefore has to do a lot of work, because it is often the main thing the member firms have in common.

Their identities tend to be restrained. A plain wordmark, usually set in a sans and paired with one strong colour, carries across dozens of countries and languages, and a short strapline or brand promise often sits beneath it. Many networks have moved from long lists of partners’ surnames to shorter names, initials or a single shared label, and some member firms have dropped their local names to take the network brand.

Their websites follow a common pattern. A global map or country selector leads to member firms; service pages are grouped under audit and assurance, tax and advisory, with industry pages for sectors such as manufacturing, real estate, nonprofits or the public sector. Insight articles on tax changes, regulation and technology fill the news pages, and many networks publish annual revenue figures and awards in press releases.

Two further page types are typical of the profession. Transparency reports, which many audit firms publish, set out governance and quality-control arrangements. Graduate and early-career recruitment pages are prominent too, because recruiting trainees is a constant task for the profession. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand’s founding, ownership and network, and marks clearly what rests on the firm’s own word.

Helping you thrive in a changing world.

The rebrand came later in 2019. Accounting Today reported on 9 September 2019 that Moore Stephens North America was shortening its name to Moore North America as part of a wider rebrand of the Moore Stephens global network, with a new logo, visual identity and brand positioning. The network then had more than 260 independent firms in 112 countries and more than 30,000 people, the magazine said, and Moore North America was one of eight regional members of Moore Global Network Limited.

The new positioning line was “Helping you thrive in a changing world.” Moore Global’s chief executive at the time, Anton Colella, said in a statement quoted by Accounting Today that the new identity was fit for “a world defined by global decision-making, data-driven insight and the need for agility.” The same line still frames the network’s website, which describes Moore as a partner for “navigating constant change with confidence” and says its core values of integrity and partner-led, personal service are unchanged.

The website groups its work into services such as audit and assurance, tax, advisory, legal, outsourcing and corporate finance, and runs leadership programmes for member firms: Moore Ambition, launched in 2020 for younger managers — English Wikipedia says its first intake had 147 people and that more than 1,000 enrolled in 2022 — and an executive leadership programme run with Harvard Business School.

Leadership is changing again. Accounting Times reported on 5 November 2026 that Moore Global had appointed David Tomasi, chair of Moore Australia, as global chair from 1 January 2027, succeeding Andy Armanino after seven years in the role; the network’s chief executive is Vivienne Muir.

For a design guide, Moore Global shows how a network can drop one of two partners’ names and keep the other as a single word. Compare BDO, which absorbed the UK Moore Stephens firm in 2019, and Crowe, another network that cut its name to one surname. For this guide we use a teal, a coral and a chalk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Moore Global’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.