There is a certain stubbornness to starting a business in a market that just lost ninety percent of its demand. Most people would call that bad timing. The co-founders of Verda Assurance call it an opportunity. We sat down with Wim Nienhuis, one of three co-founders, to hear the story behind Verda’s founding. It is a story about a regulatory wave, a market that shifted faster than anyone expected, and three people who decided to move forward anyway.
A wave that came and went
The CSRD arrived with momentum. A wave of European regulation that was going to make ESG reporting and assurance mandatory for thousands of companies. Hundreds of accountants were trained, mid-sized firms built entire teams around it, and the market felt enormous. And then, almost as quickly as it had built up, it changed.
“The Omnibus legislation pulled back a significant part of the obligation,” Wim explains. “The companies that were supposed to be required to report were no longer in scope. And the accountants who had trained for it? They went back to financial auditing. One firm announced it was sending a hundred professionals back to their regular work. A hundred.”
The gap no one wanted to fill
What looked like a collapsing market, the Verda founders saw differently. The number of potential clients had shrunk dramatically, but the number of firms willing to provide ESG assurance had dropped even further. The big four were still doing it at the top end of the market, but in the middle market, almost no one was left. That is when the conversations between Wim Nienhuis, Jessica Boekhoudt and Stephan Mourits started getting serious.
All three had been moving in the same direction independently. Jessica had been running her own consultancy focused on making sustainability data reliable and decision ready. Stephan had been building ESG assurance capabilities within a larger accountancy firm, but his ambitions had outgrown the context he was in. Wim had been working at the intersection of sustainability and accountancy for years, always with the conviction that independent verification adds something real to the process. “We found each other because we needed each other,” Wim says. “And we realised that together we were stronger than if we each tried to do this separately.”
Not just a market opportunity
But the Verda story is not just about market timing. At a certain point in the conversations between the three of them, the question shifted from whether there was a market to whether they actually wanted to do this. The answer was yes. Not because of the opportunity, but because of the work itself.
“We were not people who spent their careers doing financial audits and then decided to pivot,” Wim says. “We had all been moving in this direction already, out of personal conviction. The market timing just made the decision clearer.” Verda was founded as a focused, independent assurance firm built specifically for the organisations the big four do not typically serve. A boutique that does the same rigorous work, but with more attention and more intent.
The response from the market was warmer than expected. Peers who had wanted to build something similar sent their encouragement, and partner firms that had considered setting up their own assurance capability decided to work with Verda instead. It turns out that when almost everyone stops, the few who continue tend to get noticed.
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