“It clearly won’t be a long Christmas break for M&A bankers,” Dirk Albersmeier, co-head of M&A, J.P. Morgan Chase, told Bloomberg TV on Thursday (Dec. 3). “There are absolutely no signs of this pace slowing down.”
Since July, global transactions hit valuations of $1.8 trillion, up more than one-third. Albersmeier said new buyers emerged from special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), which have also been the source of record funding.
While most deals have been negotiated in the U.S., Albersmeier said that in 2021, he expects the M&A trend to cross the pond.
“There’s clearly the risk of a certain imbalance between supply and demand, and that’s why we are now seeing SPACs looking outside of the U.S. for targets,” he said.
Global deal advice this year was led by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, with J.P. Morgan coming in third, Bloomberg data showed.
Jim McCarthy, president at i2c, said in an October PYMNTS interview that the shift to digital spurred by the pandemic will drive M&A activity. Payments executives have said they are on an M&A “hunt,” he added.
Recent deals included the Equifax purchase of Ansonia Credit Data; Corsair Capital’s purchase of MSTS; the Paya merger with FinTech Acquisition Corp. to go public; and many others.
Joe Simons, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), said last month that “roadblocks” could be instituted to prevent dominant companies from buying emerging startups. In a PYMNTS Roundtable discussion on M&A, the consensus was that the pandemic was a tailwind that included a shift to digital payments and services handled across mobile devices. Proposed freezes on M&A activity during the pandemic came from U.S. and global antitrust authorities.
