The Rainmakers: Meet the top 20 bankers that orchestrated the biggest deals of 2019 and nabbed huge paydays along the way

Advertisement
The Rainmakers: Meet the top 20 bankers that orchestrated the biggest deals of 2019 and nabbed huge paydays along the way
cmos of streaming video 2x1
  • The largest mergers and acquisitions are team efforts, but at the very top, a battled-tested senior banker provides critical advice that can make the difference in a transaction's success or failure.
  • These coveted rainmakers are among the most highly compensated - and fiercely fought over - bankers on Wall Street.
  • Business Insider has partnered with dealmaker financial data and intelligence platform MergerLinks to identify the top 20 bankers of 2019.
  • The ranking is based lead investment bankers who orchestrated the largest M&A deals in North America in 2019.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The largest mergers and acquisitions are team efforts that can take small armies of bankers, lawyers, and staffers to pull off.

Advertisement

But at the very top, there's usually a battled-tested senior banker, a deal marshal providing vision, strategy, and critical advice that can make the difference between a transaction's success or failure.

The best of these bankers are fiercely fought over, with top investment banks angling to get a leg up by poaching their competitors' most successful deal architects. They're often among the most highly compensated people on Wall Street.

"For the senior ranks, the number of bankers that can provide that 'invaluable advice' on every aspect of a client's business - something that can only be gained through decades of experience, including through challenging market cycles - is increasingly rare," Kevin Mahoney, a partner at executive search firm Bay Street Advisors who heads up its investment banking practice, told Business Insider. "In fact, in some sectors we can count on one hand the senior bankers that truly differentiate themselves and their firms with clients."

The M&A market has been hot the past two years - volumes surged to $3.57 trillion globally in 2019, according to Bloomberg data, surpassing a hot 2018 that saw $3.2 trillion worth of deals. That has kept the top M&A chiefs especially busy, and has created lucrative paydays for them and their firms.

Advertisement

Business Insider has partnered with MergerLinks, a financial intelligence platform that tracks deals and individual bankers, to present "The Rainmakers," a league-table ranking of the top-20 M&A bankers based on the size of the deals they orchestrated in North America in 2019.

MergerLinks, based in London, has previously tracked and organized league tables for European bankers and lawyers, but this is the first year it has put together a ranking focused on the US and Canada. To be eligible for the ranking, which is based on the enterprise value of deals, an individual must have been a lead adviser on two or more transactions involving a companies primarily based in North America. IPOs and financings are not considered, nor are deals in other regions.

Here's how the company determines its ranking:

"MergerLinks works with over 60 advisory firms and checks more than 100 sources daily to come up with its rankings, based on transactions over £100m. The league tables include the dealmakers leading the transaction, based on publicly available documents or verified information provided by the advisers. The total value assigned to an individual is based on deals that were announced in 2019."

You can read more about the MergerLinks' methodology and criteria here.

Advertisement

Many of the bankers on the 2019 ranking worked on the same deals - occasionally advising the same client, as well as negotiating from the opposite sides of the table.

The list features some of the biggest names in investment banking, from giants like Morgan Stanley all the way down to boutiques with fewer than 20 employees.

It's also worth pointing out that, while firms of all sizes crack this ranking, the list underscores that the highest echelons of investment banking remain cloistered and lacking in diversity - the list is dominated by white men; not a single woman investment banker cracked the top 20.

Goldman, the world's top M&A bank on industry league tables for 2019, had the strongest showing, with seven bankers in the top-20. Bank of America, whose investment bank had a comeback year after a dreary 2018, had the second-most, with three.

So why doesn't JPMorgan, the second-ranked M&A bank behind Goldman for revenue and third in total deal value, have any bankers in the top-20?

Advertisement

MergerLinks told BI that in some cases, especially with bulge-bracket banks, they're unable to confirm a lead role on the deal, or whether the bank primarily served as a debt provider rather than financial adviser. Additionally, the deal may have been tracked to a different region - JPMorgan's European team, for instance, advised on the $88.2 billion defense of Irish-domiciled Allegran from Abbvie's approach, and Dwayne Lysaght, the bank's M&A head for the region, topped MergerLinks' European league table.

With those caveats in mind -and with bankers of all stripes known to fight fiercely over any and every league table ranking - this list offers a window into the top people driving the industry.

Here is "The Rainmakers," the Business Insider and MergerLinks list of the top North American M&A bankers for 2019.

Note: Deal sizes are sourced to MergerLinks, inclusive of net debt, and converted from British pounds to US dollars at the current exchange rate.

{{}}