Five predictions for 2025, revisited

Thought-leadership is the bread and butter of the consulting industry, with professionals deploying their knowledge to give business leaders insight into the future trends their sector will face – as well as to give them reasons to contact external experts for help with adapting to those challenges. As 2025 comes to a close, Consultancy.uk looks back at five predictions from the sector, which may or may not have panned out as expected.

Inflation

A relatively recent set of predictions came in relation to the inflationary crisis which gripped the global economy in 2022 and 2023. With the rate of inflation finally falling in the latter months of 2023, CIL Management Consultants found that UK dealmakers were increasingly unhappy with the Bank of England over its monetary policy.

Lending rates had spiked, as the institution looked for ways to reduce inflation – and as it dropped, 32% of dealmakers called on Threadneedle Street to lower interest rates. Explaining why, 95% of UK dealmakers said they expected inflation to hit the 2% target set by the BoE soon – with 10% predicting it would happen in 2024, and 55% believing it would occur by 2026.

In the period since, dealmakers got their way – with six rates cuts since August 2024 helping bring rates down from 5.25% to 3.75%. However, the predictions that inflation would continue to fall have conspicuously faded from the conversation – as while prices in Britain rose by 3.2% in the year to November – down from 3.6% in October – they are still well above the 2% targeted by the BoE, and forecast by more than nine-in-ten experts in the M&A space.

That’s not a prediction that CIL got wrong, of course. The analysts were only quoting what their research pool told them. But those sources weren’t exactly on the money in this case.

Sharing economy

Back in 2014, Big four firm PwC’s ‘mega-trends’ programme examined the ‘collision’ between traditional and innovative business models. One such area of collision was said to be arising from the fact that consumers “increasingly value access over ownership” – a trend which the firm anticipated would lead to major growth in the ‘sharing economy’.

With constricted wage growth and a generational down-shift in public service spending, life was – and still is –  increasingly becoming for rent. Cashing in on this, peer-to-peer accommodation (those who can afford to own a home, renting it out for vacationers via platforms like AirBnB); music and video streaming; and peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding were some of the ways PwC predicted the UK’s sharing sector would reach revenues of around £9 billion by 2025.

While official figures for the sector are tough to pin down, 2024 saw PwC revise this prediction. With the sharing economy for the UK then estimated at £7 billion – still £2 billion shy of its initial prediction – PwC shifted the goalposts by instead suggesting the sharing economy would likely amount to £140 billion per annum within the next nine years (or by 2033).

Media growth

Despite persistent negative headlines and suggestions technological or demographic change would disrupt the sector, the world’s entertainment and media sector has continued to thrive in terms of revenues for the last decade.

In 2021, PwC (more successfully) predicted the sector would grow to more than $2.5 trillion by 2025. Meanwhile, the UK was expected to become one of the world’s largest national markets, with CAGR of 5% over the coming four years to hit a value of £88 billion.

After faster-than-expected expansion, PwC also revised these predictions. Earlier in 2025, PwC contended that it expects the trend to continue, with the UK entertainment and media market is forecast to reach £97 billion by 2029, with a growth rate of 5% per annum, outpacing all other major European markets.

Similarly, the Big Four firm predicts the global market will also continue its current train of growth, to $3.5 trillion by 2029. Stay tuned for the article in which Consultancy.uk reviews that at the end of the decade!

Internet of Things

In 2023, a headline-grabbing report from McKinsey & Company suggested artificial intelligence could boost global productivity to the tune of $4.4 trillion every year. But those getting excited by that potential promise might want to look into the firm’s predictions for an earlier era of innovation. In 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute published a research report trying to estimate the economic impact that the Internet of Things (IoT) might have.

IoT aims to create a vast network of physical objects: from smart home devices and wearables to industrial machines; embedded with sensors, software, and connectivity to collect and exchange data over the internet. Ironically named “The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype”, researchers sought to put a number on the economic potential that the IoT could unleash, through consideration of the alleged hundreds of use cases in the physical settings in which it could be deployed – leading to a big, big estimation of between $3.9 and $11.1 trillion.

In 2021, however, following some underwhelming data in the years since, the firm revisited this estimate. In 2020, it found the total value captured by IoT was $1.6 trillion – which researchers admitted was on “the lower end of the range of the scenarios mapped out in 2015”. Due to this, McKinsey also used the opportunity to shift both its low and high-end scenarios: forecasting IoT’s economic potential at between $2.8 trillion and $6.3 trillion in 2025.

McKinsey is yet to revisit this revised prediction, and there are no officially accepted measurements of how much the IoT market actually contributes to the global economy. However, this has not stopped a number of reports from 2025 citing McKinsey’s “$3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion” prediction from 2015 as a current and accurate assessment, rather than a distant approximation since modified.

Banking payments

Banks have been on the constant search for ways to boost revenues, on top of reducing costs, in the last decade. The payment segment has traditionally been especially lucrative in these terms, and the market had increased from $860 billion in 2010 to around $1.2 trillion in 2016. With this in mind, Boston Consulting Group set out a forecast for major expansion in the coming ten years.

Anticipating growth to continue, it projected CAGR of around 6% to 2026. In the same year, the researchers said it would see total revenues for the segment hit $2.1 trillion – growth of nearly $1 trillion.

In 2024, BCG revisited the research to find something uncommon for consulting research: it had actually underestimated the strength of growth. By that year, CAGR had hit 8.8%, leading transaction revenues to sit at $1.9 trillion. But while BCG remained confident its initial forecast would be surpassed by 2026, it downplayed the market’s prospects for the coming period.

Pointing ahead to 2029, the researchers noted that CAGR expansion would drop to 4%, with global transaction revenues sitting at $2.3 trillion at the end of the decade – as interest rate tailwinds fade. Within that, transaction-related revenues will remain resilient, however. Buoyed by rising card use, instant payment adoption, and new ecosystems, these flows should see double-digit growth in Latin America, with solid gains also expected in Eastern Europe, and nearly 9% growth in the Middle East and Africa.