Awards for Excellence 2020
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The North American mergers and acquisitions advisory business has one obvious volume leader most years. This year is no different, but that doesn’t mean nothing else changes.
In the awards period under review, a different firm made a striking rise in the rankings to a close second place for completed M&A in the region, the culmination of years of progress and success in securing roles on some the very biggest transactions. JPMorgan is Euromoney’s choice as North America’s best bank for advisory.
“Ours is a very broad M&A franchise – there is a tendency to think only about the $10 billion-plus deals, but we work across the spectrum,” says Anu Aiyengar, co-head of global M&A at JPMorgan.
In the period under review, the bank completed 16 deals that were over $10 billion, but also 30 deals under $250 million, 50 under $500 million and 70 under $1 billion.
The biggest transactions included advising Celgene on its $74 billion merger with Bristol Myers Squibb. It was also adviser to Anadarko Petroleum in its $55 billion acquisition by Occidental Petroleum.
On the buy side, it was sole adviser to Fiserv in its $48 billion acquisition of First Data and advised IBM on its $37 billion acquisition of Red Hat.
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Anu Aiyengar, |
“What we also do well is to harness the power of our commercial bank and private bank, as well as taking advantage of our cross-border network,” adds Aiyengar. “This organization has deep roots everywhere in the world.”
She also argues that JPMorgan’s cross-sector approach is a differentiator from more siloed peers, particularly in a world that will be increasingly characterized by horizontal consolidation, as industrials buy technology companies and tech firms buy into consumer retail.
The sale of Entertainment One to Hasbro for $4.2 billion used the bank’s long relationship with Canadian-incorporated and London-listed Entertainment One, and was an example of the cross-sector and cross-border themes coming together. The deal brought TV and film to Hasbro and involved multiple jurisdictions.
The bank also leveraged long-standing relationships in its work as adviser to the targets of the biggest healthcare M&A deals during the awards period – the sale of Bristol-Myers Squibb to Celgene, which formally closed in November 2019, and the sale of Allergan to AbbVie for $63 billion, which closed in May 2020.
The private bank connection played out in the acquisition of US-headquartered Paul Gauguin Cruises by Ponant, owned by Artemis, the investment company of the Pinault family office. JPMorgan worked on the sale of Ponant to Artemis back in 2015 and was ideally placed to work on the deal.
The bank has about 120 M&A professionals in North America and tenure is long. More than 80% of the senior bankers have more than a decade with the firm. But Aiyengar argues that while long-standing personal relationships obviously matter in the M&A business, they are not the whole story.
“Trust comes not just from the relationship but also from competence,” she says. “And that competence is powered by information.”
Nowhere is this better illustrated than the bank’s proprietary information product launched in 2019 aimed at activist situations, called Activism Insights.
When an activist takes a position, the bank analyses how that activist has behaved in every situation in the past and looks at how other shareholders have behaved in response to that activist.
JPMorgan’s success also reflects another basic truth, which is that its investment bank brand is completely different to what it was even 20 years ago. Put simply, it is now credible in areas where it would not have been before.
“If you are a family-owned company that is thinking about doing a deal, now it’s not a case of wondering whether you should call JPMorgan or not, but more that JPMorgan is the first name that comes into your head,” says Aiyengar.
