World's best independent investment bank 2019: Rothschild & Co

Advisory league tables typically rank investment banks either by dollar volume of transactions worked on or by fee revenues.

What if they ranked advisers by number of deals instead? 

Rothschild & Co would shoot up the tables. In the 12 months prior to Euromoney’s submission deadline for this year’s awards for excellence, Rothschild ranked third by number of M&A transactions behind global leaders Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. 

It advised on 336 deals, far ahead of its great rivals among the independent investment banks, Lazard and Evercore.

Partly that’s a late-cycle phenomenon: there have been more small and medium-sized M&A deals than really big transactions over our awards period. And that helps Rothschild to shine. 

In past years, Euromoney has hesitated to name it the world’s best independent investment bank because Rothschild is much more of a European business than Evercore and Lazard, which have always been much stronger in the US. 

But Rothschild has been building up there too.

“We now have approximately 40 managing directors in North America, based in six offices.