Every autumn, somewhere between the third-quarter earnings calls and the first bonus conversations, Wall Street’s independent advisory firms go shopping. This year they have been unusually busy, and unusually choosy, and the names on the receipts say a good deal about where the fees are expected to go next.
The headline acquisition is Thomas Sheehan. The Bank of America senior banker, who was most recently a chair of global corporate and investment banking, according to his LinkedIn profile as cited by Bloomberg, is leaving to join PJT Partners as a partner in its strategic advisory group, based in New York, according to a person familiar with the matter quoted by Bloomberg News on October 19. He will start after a standard period of leave. Representatives for Bank of America and PJT declined to comment, Bloomberg reported.
Senior bank chairmen do not usually change jerseys. The title at a universal bank is both a reward and an anchor: it comes with the balance sheet, the lending relationships and the comfortable knowledge that a client’s treasurer will always take the call. That someone at that altitude would trade it for a partnership at a firm headquartered at 280 Park Avenue, without a loan book of its own, is an argument the independents have been making for fifteen years, now made in person.
Evercore buys a chemicals franchise
Evercore made its own statement the same day. The firm announced that John Vaske has joined as a senior managing director in its chemicals practice, based in New York. Vaske comes from Ducera Partners, where he was a partner, vice chairman and co-head of M&A. He is a Columbia College graduate, which is the sort of detail this publication notices.
Chemicals is not a glamorous coverage area, which is precisely why it pays. The sector is consolidating under pressure from Chinese overcapacity, energy costs and the restructuring of European producers, and those conditions produce carve-outs, spinoffs and distressed sales that require exactly the mix of strategic and balance-sheet advice the independents sell. Lazard’s own third-quarter release, for instance, highlighted its role in Corteva’s $50 billion spinoff of its seed business, Vylor. Evercore wants a bigger seat at those tables, and it has bought one.
Centerview hires from the buy side
The more unusual hire came a few weeks earlier. On September 28, Centerview Partners named Bennett Schachter a partner to lead its capital advisory business, based in New York. Schachter arrives from Elliott Management, where, according to the announcement, he was responsible for the investment firm’s capital markets and financing solutions activities. Before that he was global head of Morgan Stanley’s alternative and capital solutions businesses, and earlier ran equity syndicate and global alternative capital solutions at Goldman Sachs.
“As capital flows across the globe become more strategic in nature, our full suite of unconflicted capital solutions is an increasingly important pillar of Centerview’s differentiated offering,” said Blair Effron, a Centerview co-founder. Schachter, for his part, said he had “seen first-hand how talented its teams are and how deep its relationships run.”
Centerview built its reputation on boardroom M&A advice, the kind that comes with no financing attached. Capital advisory is a different instinct: helping companies decide how to raise, refinance and restructure debt and equity, increasingly from private lenders rather than from the syndicated market. Hiring someone who sat on the investor’s side of those negotiations, at one of the most demanding funds in the business, is a bet that the independents can compete for capital-structure work that once required a bank’s distribution desk. The word “unconflicted” in Effron’s statement is the whole sales pitch.
PJT’s second purchase
PJT, meanwhile, was not finished. According to Private Equity News, the firm has also hired Riccardo Villa, co-head of capital solutions at Rede Partners, the private-markets placement adviser, as a managing director. Villa spent nearly two decades at Lazard working on private-markets financing and continuation vehicles before joining Rede in 2024, according to trade coverage of the move. PJT’s Park Hill unit is already one of the largest fund-placement and secondaries advisers in the market; adding a capital-solutions specialist reflects the same trend driving every other hire on this list. When private-equity firms cannot sell companies at the prices they want, they sell stakes in funds, extend holding periods through continuation vehicles and borrow against portfolios. Each of those transactions needs an adviser, and each generates fees whether the M&A market is hot or cold.
Why now
The economic logic is not subtle. The independents’ fee pools are heavily weighted to advisory and restructuring, and both have been strong. Lazard reported record third-quarter advisory revenue of $470 million on October 22. Evercore ranked fifth by value in GlobalData’s nine-month advisory league table, ahead of every bank outside the top four.
The banks have their own counterarguments, and they are good ones. A universal bank can lend into an acquisition the same afternoon it advises on it; it can underwrite the bonds; it can introduce a client to a sovereign fund through its markets desk. Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley together advised on well over three trillion dollars of announced deals in the first nine months of the year. The independents are not displacing them so much as specializing around them.
What the autumn’s hiring does show is that the specialist model has crossed a threshold. Fifteen years ago, independents recruited bankers who had stalled at the big firms. This year they are recruiting the people who ran the big firms’ franchises and, in Schachter’s case, the people who used to sit across the table from them. For anyone who covers this industry, that is the shift worth watching: not who is on top of the league tables, but who decides to leave them.
Featured image: 280 Park Avenue, home of PJT Partners’ headquarters. Photo by Kidfly182 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Leave a Reply