One letter from each of four countries.

KPMG is made of four surnames: Klynveld, Peat, Marwick and Goerdeler. Each belongs to a different strand of the firm’s past, in the Netherlands, Britain, the United States and Germany, and the initials were chosen when two international groups merged in 1987, Wikipedia says.

The P comes from London. Wikipedia traces it to Robert Fletcher, who worked as an accountant from 1816; the firm he worked for took the name Robert Fletcher & Co. in 1839, and William Barclay Peat joined it in 1870, becoming head of the firm by 1891, when it was renamed William Barclay Peat & Co. The M comes from James Marwick, who founded Marwick Mitchell & Co. with Roger Mitchell in New York in 1897. A 2022 EBSCO Research Starter on the firm, by Elizabeth Mohn, says Marwick had opened a firm in Glasgow before moving to the United States, and that he and Peat met in 1911 and agreed to combine their firms; Wikipedia dates the merger that formed Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co. to 1925.

The K is Dutch. In March 1917 Piet Klijnveld, whose name the firm spells Klynveld, and Jaap Kraayenhof opened an accounting firm in Amsterdam called Klynveld Kraayenhof & Co. The G is German. Reinhard Goerdeler joined Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft in 1953, according to EBSCO, and in 1979, Wikipedia says, Klynveld Kraayenhof, the Anglo-American firm McLintock Main LaFrentz and Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft formed KMG, Klynveld Main Goerdeler, as a grouping of independent national practices, with Goerdeler as its chief executive.

Peat Marwick, meanwhile, had become international. EBSCO says Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. restructured in 1978 and took the name Peat Marwick International. In 1986 it and KMG announced they would merge, and the next year, EBSCO says, they formed KPMG, a name taken from Klynveld, Peat, Marwick and Goerdeler.

From KPMG Peat Marwick to KPMG.

The four-letter name took more than a decade to settle everywhere. Wikipedia says the merged firm was called KPMG in the United States and elsewhere in 1987, but Peat Marwick McLintock in the United Kingdom, where the name of Thomson McLintock, a firm founded in Glasgow in 1877, was still attached. In 1991 the firm was renamed KPMG Peat Marwick, and in 1999 the name was reduced again to KPMG.

Other names came and went around it. In October 1997 KPMG and Ernst & Young announced they would merge, but the tie-up was later abandoned. In 2001 KPMG spun off its US consulting firm through a public offering as KPMG Consulting, which was rebranded BearingPoint; the UK and Dutch consulting arms were sold to Atos in 2002, Wikipedia says.

In September 2010, when PwC changed its identity, Going Concern reported that KPMG was updating its own look at the same time but had kept its existing colours rather than following PwC into a new palette.

Later visual work kept the logo itself. In November 2022 the brand agency Siegel+Gale published a conversation about its work with KPMG on a brand refresh, featuring Sam Burns, KPMG’s global chief marketing officer. Burns said the firm’s look and feel had become a little old-fashioned for the digital era, and that with many member firms operating under one brand, fragmentation had started to creep in. Rafael Medina, the agency’s creative director, said the team retained the logo and the “world of blue” around it, which he described as deeply embedded in the identity, and used them as the starting point.

Medina also described the logo: it is made of four rectangular forms, he said, and those forms became the building blocks of the refreshed system. From them the agency derived an “insights window”, a graphic element used to highlight information within an image, as the brand moved from a mainly print-driven experience to a digital one, according to Siegel+Gale.

Professional-services names and their marks.

Professional-services identities tend to be built from a short list of raw materials. The earliest is the partner’s surname: many advisory and accounting firms began as the name of one or two founders on a brass plate, and that surname often survives long after the founders have left, because clients and regulators already know it. When firms combine, the name usually grows by addition, with surnames joined by ampersands, and then shrinks again as the string becomes unwieldy. Initialisms are the common end point, turning a row of names into two, three or four letters that fit a business card, a building sign and a browser tab.

Mergers and separations also force renames. A firm that splits from a former parent, or that must stop using a name it no longer owns, sometimes coins a new word instead of reusing a surname, and that coined word then has to earn meaning through use. The visual side is usually restrained: a wordmark set in a sober serif or sans, one corporate colour used consistently, and a small graphic accent such as a dot, a bar or a typographic mark that stands in for a symbol. Redesigns in this field often adjust spacing, weight and colour rather than replacing the name, so continuity is part of the message.

A network that has changed its legal form.

KPMG is a network of member firms, each an independent legal entity, linked to KPMG International Limited, a private English company limited by guarantee, Wikipedia says. The coordinating body has changed its own form more than once: it was a Swiss Verein, became a co-operative under Swiss law in 2003 and became a limited company in 2020. The 2022 EBSCO Research Starter describes KPMG International as a coordinating entity that does not itself offer services to clients, and says its main role is to set the quality standards and rules that keep the brand consistent although the member firms are not a single company.

That arrangement allows some local variety under the four letters. In the Netherlands, Wikipedia says, the network has two member firms, KPMG Audit for accountancy and Meijburg & Co for tax advice, the latter founded in 1939 by Willem Meijburg. In October 2007 the member firms of the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein merged to form KPMG Europe LLP, and in 2024 the UK and Swiss partnerships voted to merge, according to both Wikipedia and EBSCO.

The logo has also appeared in sport. From 2008, Wikipedia says, the golfer Phil Mickelson wore the KPMG logo on his headwear under a sponsorship that ended in February 2022, and from 2014 the logo appeared at the engine air intake of McLaren’s Formula 1 cars under an alliance that KPMG ended in 2017.

The name itself is a record of mergers. A Dutch firm of 1917, a London practice traced to 1816, a New York partnership of 1897 and a German trust company each gave a surname, and the 1987 merger turned those surnames into four letters that have stood alone since 1999.

For a design guide, KPMG shows how a colour and a set of plain blocks can hold an identity steady while the names around it change. Compare EY, another firm known by founders’ initials, and The Economist, a London name with a long-kept colour of its own. For this guide we use blue, cobalt, navy and ice with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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