I have 20 yrs experience in financial services and have been offered senior consulting roles at Atos, EY and Capgemini. The packages are about the same but which offers the best career prospects and interesting assignments

Atos and Cap are more offshoring / outsourcing focused. EY under the stewardship of Alan Wein has invested significant resources in developing its FS capability and does genuinely go to market via vertical market. Also, EY may offer more opportunity in terms of developing a more business rather than IT aligned course.

Thanks - do you have any feel for which has the best market presence in Life and Pensions and credibility as change agents from a business perspective

E&Y hired in a bunch of IBM / PwC's old L&P pracitce under Andy Baldwin, and I think he's been successful in selling a bucket of work for them, particularly in taking work from IBM. As an outsider, I'd say you should go for E&Y due to their change mgt, rather than IT, focus.

I have been advised that EY have a narrow offering and that Capgemini and Atos are broader. Any thoughts? Also any current Capgemini consultants working in FS around, I heard things are on the up after a sticky patch, is this so

Atos recently won an MCA award for their FS work in Insurance - so they are a good bet

If you want to do IT related consulting then Capgem and ATOS are among the best. The culture is fairly laid back and the people are on the whole capable and decent. If you want to do more strategic work with less IT, then EY is building a good practice with ex IBM, Capgemini leadership backed up with Accenture senior managers and a mix of lower levels.

The work you'll do at Capgemini consulting (currently being rebranded) won;t have anything to do with IT per se. The consulting arm of the firm is purely consulting, the technologists do the stuff. The FS service line has a new sector head and things are looking up. I certainly wouldnlt regard the firm as IT focussed.

Although the work in Capgemini Consulting services isn't centered around pure IT, there is a requirement to understand the fundamentals of IT. It's true that people want be doing traditional IT design-build-test and rollout like the Technology Group or Accenture/IBM etc do. All of the groups within CS require their staff to understand IT. ITAS for example focuses on IT Strategy. People, Change and Transformation often help clients to implement new end-to-end solutions/models that have a significant IT element. Obviously some people are more IT orientated than others.

Sorry, I should clarify. When I said IT focus, I meant that the bulk of consulting work at CG and ATOS is alongside IT. For example, most Change Management work will be alongside IT implementation. If that floats your boat, go for it!

I work at Capgemini Consulting, am not in ITAS (IT advisory services) and don't have a clue about IT, never have had and don't want to. The projects I've worked on that have needed some IT help, suprise suprise we got hold of an ITAS guy.Nothing i have done has had anything to do with IT implementation of any level, it's been pure business consulting as such.

I workied there in Change and did nothing but change work alongside IT implementation. Realistically, this is at least 80% of their work