Spotlight on Bansal & Co.
How a 50-year-old Indian firm became a cross-border partner of choice
Bansal & Co. LLP has built its reputation on technical depth, and over five decades that focus has made it one of the Alliance's most useful points of contact for engagements where Indian operations have to withstand the scrutiny of an overseas reporting or audit regime.
Established in 1973, the firm has a pan-India presence, 16 partners and more than 225 people, with over half a century of experience across assurance, tax, consultancy, outsourcing and advisory work. It is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), empanelled with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), and registered with the PCAOB, CPAB and the FRC in the UK as third country auditors. Its clients range from public sector undertakings and listed groups to private enterprises and charitable trusts, across sectors as varied as infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, FMCG, healthcare, hospitality, agriculture, telecom, renewable energy, BFSI and technology.
That breadth of clientele sits on top of a deliberately narrow way of organising the work.
Partner-led dedicated service verticals
The firm is organised into dedicated service verticals (domestic & international assurance, taxation outsourcing and advisory), each led by partners who specialise in that area rather than spreading themselves thinly across everything. For a client, that means the person directing the work has genuine depth in the relevant standard or statute.
It is a model the firm believes explains its trajectory. Much of its growth comes from referrals within its existing client base: people pass on a firm they trust to get the technical answer right, and to stand behind it.
Nowhere is that depth more visible than in international assurance. Running PCAOB and CPAB audits out of India means working fluently across IFRS and US GAAP within a single engagement, and meeting the inspection-ready documentation standards those regimes demand. The firm is equally at home issuing formal technical opinions on contentious accounting questions, which is often where the real value lies for a client facing a regulator or a transaction deadline.
An engagement that captured how they work
Ask Bansal & Co. for an example of the firm at its best and the answer is a recent one: the 2025 audit of a Nasdaq-listed client that completed 21 acquisitions in a single year, each arriving with its own systems and finance team.
Consolidating all of that into one auditable set of financial statements inside a fixed filing window was a substantial undertaking. The team worked around the clock, coordinating directly with the finance staff of the acquired entities to reconcile and test information across multiple locations and time zones. The company reported on time, without any compromise on audit quality under deadline pressure. For a listed group in the middle of rapid expansion, meeting that obligation cleanly matters a great deal, to its regulators, its audit committee, board and its investors. The value the firm adds is the ability to bring order to a complex, fast-moving situation and carry it to a reliable conclusion.
"The value we add is the ability to bring order to a complex, fast-moving situation and carry it to a reliable conclusion."
S.K. Bansal, Managing Partner at Bansal & Co.
Built for cross-border work
Bansal & Co. treats alliance partners as long-term collaborators, aiming to function as an extension of their team so that a partner's clients receive seamless support in India while the overseas firm's own service standards are preserved. In practice that spans the whole lifecycle of a client's India operations, from setting up the entity and securing RBI and MCA approvals through to ongoing audit, GST, transfer pricing, payroll and global mobility support, reconciled where needed to IFRS or US GAAP.
Geography helps. Working primarily with partners in the United States, Singapore and the UAE, the firm finds India's position genuinely useful: its day overlaps with the close of business in the Gulf and the start of the day in North America, so work can move forward overnight for a US-based partner. Just as important, communication stays direct: the person a partner deals with is the person making the decisions, and queries do not get lost in layers.
An open-door culture
That directness starts inside the firm. Bansal & Co. describes itself as an open-door practice where juniors are encouraged to raise questions early and difficult technical points are debated openly rather than pushed down the line. A steady investment in training and up-to-date software reflects a simple view: the standards the firm works to do not stand still, and neither can it.
The pay-off is continuity. Because people tend to stay, clients deal with familiar faces year on year, an institutional memory that shows in how quickly the team can get to the heart of a problem. The firm would rather raise an issue early and talk it through than present a surprise at the end of an engagement.
What clients are asking for
Increasingly, the questions coming in are about complexity in reporting and regulation: the convergence of Ind AS with IFRS, and the accounting consequences of cross-border transactions and group structures, all against a noticeably higher level of regulatory scrutiny in India. Readiness for overseas listings and related-party matters is rising too. In each case, the firm argues, the underlying need is the same: a clear, defensible technical position the client can rely on. For international businesses eyeing the Indian market, the firm's headline advice is blunt and well-earned: India rewards preparation.
With regulation spread across the Companies Act, FEMA, RBI rules, direct tax, GST and labour law (frameworks that do not always align), the entry structure chosen at the outset carries long-term consequences for tax, compliance, flexibility and the ability to repatriate profits. Getting the foundations and compliance calendar right before operations begin, the firm stresses, is far cheaper than fixing them afterwards.
Looking ahead
Bansal & Co. is investing in its outsourcing and managed-services capability, covering bookkeeping and audit-support work delivered from India for firms and businesses abroad. A pool of skilled Chartered Accountants and a favourable time-zone overlap make it a natural area to grow, and one that takes real cost and capacity pressure off an overseas partner.
More broadly, the firm would welcome more component- and group-audit work referred by Praxity member firms, and more technical-opinion work on Ind AS and IFRS questions. It is also keen on advisory engagements supporting international clients setting up or expanding in India, and on US and Canadian tax filing work. Anything that plays to the combination of technical depth and cross-border discipline the firm has built is work it wants more of.