Centerview Partners has crushed 2017 - and its investment bankers are going to make a fortune in 2018 as well

Bloomberg

Blair Effron, Centerview Partners co-founder.

• Boutique investment bank Centerview Partners is having a monster year.
• It has advised on some of the biggest deals in 2017, including the $69 billion CVS-Aetna merger and Disney's $66 billion buyout of 21st Century Fox's film and TV assets.
• With just 37 senior bankers on staff, the small firm is projected to pull in as much as $13.5 million per partner.

In the first two weeks of December, two industry-shaking transactions hit the wire: CVS Healthcare announced a deal to acquire Aetna for $69 billion, and then Disney agreed to buy $66 billion worth of 21st Century Fox's assets, including debt.

In a major coup, boutique investment bank Centerview Partners advised on both of the megadeals, setting itself up for a major payday if the combined $135 billion in deals close, and launching the bank into 10th place on Wall Street's mergers-and-acquisitions league tables.

The December deal frenzy caps a stellar year for the firm, which has advised on five announced transactions worth over $10 billion since August. That includes: Gilead's $10.1 billion takeout of Kite Pharma, Vantiv's $11.3 billion buyout of Worldpay, and the $18 billion sale of Toshiba's memory chips unit to a group of buyers led by Bain Capital.

Centerview has now leapfrogged fellow independent Evercore on the M&A league tables, with $213 billion in announced deals to its name and an average deal size of $11.2 billion, according to Bloomberg data.

On a per-banker basis, few banks are having a better year than Centerview, which was founded in 2006 by ex-UBS stalwart Blair Effron and ex-Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein star Robert Pruzan.

The firm has just 37 partners yet routinely battles for high-profile assignments with Wall Street's bulge-bracket banks. By comparison, Citigroup promoted more than 30 new managing directors in its corporate and investment bank this week alone, and in November Goldman Sachs promoted 101 new investment-banking MDs.

Centerview is projected to earn between $400 million and $500 million in 2017 from advising on M&A deals, according to Jeffrey Nassof, director of consulting firm Freeman & Co.

That works out to as much as $13.5 million in revenue per partner.

And that figure doesn't include fees from either of the two mega-transactions from the past two weeks, according to Nassof, as roughly 90% of fees are paid out when a deal closes. The CVS-Aetna and Disney-Fox deals could bring in as much as $70 million in fee revenue to the bank.

Centerview has more than 10 deals valued at over $1 billion that have been announced but not closed heading into 2018, meaning the plucky boutique is tracking to have a very rich 2018 as well.