Replacing per-client man-month pricing with a single role-based rate card (2026)

What a decision to level prices will be tested on

Being able to set the rate client by client was a practical advantage this firm held over the foreign majors. Levelling it onto a uniform table by rank amounts to choosing to raise the level of the rate even at the cost of reducing room to negotiate. Less a single act of price-raising, it can be read as a change in how prices are decided at all — from individual negotiation to one common table. The intention to pull the target year of the medium-term plan forward by a year reads the same way, as an admission that scale is out of reach unless rates move.

What will be tested is whether the substance can be shown to match the rate. At a moment when clients are said to be tiring of an approach that throws large numbers of people at a problem, and when generative AI has begun taking over parts of analysis and design, raising only the price of the man-month invites the buyer to re-examine the grounds for paying it. The policy of going deep with large accounts is a stance that tries to answer that question with accumulated understanding. That the shares fell 30% in a year of record profit shows the market has not yet accepted the answer. The merits of the pricing policy are undecided as of this writing.