Mergers & Acquisitions

M&A advisory is the flagship investment banking product. Banks advise on roughly four to five trillion dollars of deals globally each year, earning fifty million to five hundred million per lead mandate. The work splits across six roles: sell-side (1-3% of EV, high fee certainty), buy-side (0.5-1.5%, reactive), defence (retainer plus success fee, often twenty to thirty percent of price uplift), fairness opinions (200K to 500K dollars of independent valuation work), independent board advisory, and restructuring. Mandates are won through beauty parades - companies invite three to five banks to pitch, selecting one or two. Pitches run sixty to one hundred twenty minutes covering market overview, process recommendations, track record, team structure, valuation framework, and fees. A sell-side mandate runs over roughly four to six months in phases. Weeks one to four: seller diligence, quality of earnings review, vendor concentration mapping, management presentation rehearsal, and data room setup. Weeks four to eight: broad buyer outreach using teasers and NDAs, yielding five to ten indicative bids. Weeks eight to fourteen: narrow to two to four bidders with full data room access. Weeks fourteen to eighteen: best-and-final bids, SPA negotiation, and signing. Weeks eighteen to twenty-six plus: regulatory clearance and closing. Core deliverables are the Confidential Information Memorandum (forty to one hundred pages), management presentations, the data room, and fairness opinions. Average fees run five to thirty million dollars on transactions of five hundred million to one billion; EBITDA margins hit forty to seventy percent. League table position drives credibility and future mandates. Conflicts are managed through firewalling, written consent, and disclosed fee structures.

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