Banks Enjoy Near-Record Fees Amid ‘Infectious’ M&A Environment

Merger and acquisition (M&A) deals are reportedly on track to reach $3.1 trillion this year.

That’s up 35% during the same period in 2024, and puts this in line to be the best year for M&A since 2021, the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (Sept. 29).

As the report notes, the summer saw 14 deals valued at more than $10 billion around the world. This offered hope to dealmakers that an M&A boom under President Donald Trump could be arriving, after some market uncertainty triggered by U.S. tariffs.

With this trend has come what the FT describes as a “near-record” wave of fees for investment banks, to the tune of $95.4 billion in the first nine months of 2025. That’s the second-highest year-to-date total since the London Stock Exchange began keeping records, the FT added.

Bank of America is on track to earn an estimated $130 million fee from advising Norfolk Southern on its railroad merger with Union Pacific, assuming the deal makes it through an antitrust review. That could surpass the record $123 million fee JPMorgan Chase earned from advising Allergan on its $63 billion sale to AbbVie, the report added.

Charles Ruck, chair of the corporate department at Latham & Watkins, told the FT he hasn’t been this busy since the wave of special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deals in 2021.

“It’s been a while since the market has rewarded companies for doing deals and I think we’re there again,” said Ruck. “M&A is infectious: the CEO of company A does a big deal and then the CEO of company B starts thinking maybe I need to do something.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the importance of the role of the chief financial officer (CFO) after an M&A deal concludes, especially when it comes to post-merger integration (PMI) of newly-inherited vendor and supplier relationships.

“One of the trickiest issues CFOs can face is the harmonization of contract terms,” that report said, adding that modern contract intelligence tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing can help CFOs and legal teams comb through thousands of contracts quickly, identify inconsistencies and spot opportunities for renegotiation.

“AI (artificial intelligence) offers a new path forward with its capability to aggregate and structure internal knowledge across silos, without the need for manual data entry. But it’s not as simple as prompting an off-the-shelf LLM (large language model),” Taylor Lowe, CEO and co-founder of Metal, said in an interview with PYMNTS.