Stéphanie Doyle: Forvis Mazars is becoming a Grand Partner of Montréal InVivo today. What made you want to deepen your commitment to our life sciences and health technologies ecosystem?
Brigitte Hervieu: Our decision to become a Grand Partner reflects our desire to further support a sector that plays a vital role in innovation, economic growth, and improving people’s quality of life.
Greater Montréal has an internationally recognized life sciences ecosystem, with innovative companies, leading research centres, and ambitious entrepreneurs. At Forvis Mazars, we already support many organizations at different stages of their development, and we now want to contribute more actively to this ecosystem through our expertise in audit, assurance, tax, financing, governance, and growth and transaction management.
This partnership is also an opportunity for us to better understand the sector’s specific challenges and take part in the discussions that will shape its future. It’s truly a great partnership for us.
Stéphanie Doyle: Through this partnership, what message do you want to send to life sciences companies and stakeholders across Greater Montréal? What role do you hope to play alongside them in the coming years?
Brigitte Hervieu: Elsewhere in the world, Forvis Mazars is part of the “Big Four.” Here, however, we are structured more like an SME: we serve both large and small businesses, with a great deal of agility. We are a smaller firm, but we have big ambitions.
What’s certain is that we want to be long-term partners for companies in the sector—not just when they are starting out, but throughout their growth and even during more challenging times. Financing, for example, is a major and critical issue for these companies. We can support them with financial projections, banking applications, fundraising, as well as the regulatory requirements, which are particularly demanding in this sector.
We often say that the CPA is the rational person alongside the scientist. Having the right people around you is essential to having the right numbers at the right time. Coming in after the fact always makes things more difficult.
But our ultimate message is that we don’t want to be just a professional services firm. We want to be a true advisor, going beyond the traditional role of an accountant to fully address companies’ needs. That’s how we contribute to strengthening and showcasing the ecosystem.
Stéphanie Doyle: Life sciences companies go through very different stages: start-up, financing, growth, internationalization, and commercialization. In your view, what are the main challenges they are facing today, and where can Forvis Mazars genuinely support them?
Brigitte Hervieu: The life sciences sector encompasses several subsectors, with significant fundraising activity, ranging from large publicly traded companies to small and medium-sized businesses. In Québec, the economic fabric is predominantly made up of SMEs, particularly in MedTech. These companies therefore have a strong need for financial visibility.
There’s the science, the researchers, and the innovation, but behind all of that, you need strong operations to support long-term objectives. Developing a drug takes time; running a manufacturing facility requires a solid financial foundation. Strong financial partners aren’t just an asset—they’re essential.
Through our group, we have the ability to serve both very large public companies and smaller businesses, with a dedicated SME tax department. It’s all the agility of a full-service accounting firm, combined with a human scale.
We support each company according to its stage of maturity and its specific needs. And with everything that is changing right now—from tariffs to legislation around financial incentives, which is constantly evolving—it can be complex to keep up. Our role is precisely to stay up to date, translate these issues into clear and accessible information for business owners, and work proactively with them. We’re ready for this challenge, and we’re very excited about it.
Stéphanie Doyle: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Is there a key message you’d like to share?
Brigitte Hervieu: What I particularly love is the focus on innovation. We have established an innovation committee within our office, notably to guide the use of AI in our profession and stay at the forefront of what’s happening.
The life sciences sector itself is driven by innovation. It’s fantastic to be able to connect that with this entire cluster, right here in Québec. We have the talent and the innovation, but our biggest challenge is successfully commercializing these innovations, securing the necessary financing, and, above all, keeping our intellectual property here. The goal is to create true anchor companies—companies that generate jobs, revenue, and wealth that remain here in Québec.