Research · Living data · Updated 2026-07-17
The banks advising on public-company mergers, ranked — by deal count across the M&A market.
Behind every public-company merger is at least one investment bank advising the buyer or the seller, and the same names recur deal after deal. NextTrack ranks 61 M&A advisors in a league table built from its merger dataset — by the number of public-company deals each has advised on. The count refreshes on every rebuild.
| Metric | Live figure |
|---|---|
| NextTrack tracks | 61 ranked M&A advisors |
| Last updated | 2026-07-17 |
An M&A advisor — the investment bank retained by the target or the acquirer — runs the sale process, advises on price and structure, and often delivers the fairness opinion that the board leans on. The advisor named in the merger proxy is a matter of public record, which is what makes a league table possible. Ranking 61 advisors by deal count shows who the market repeatedly trusts with its largest transactions.
Deal count is the cleanest, most comparable metric: it counts how many public-company mergers each bank actually advised on, without depending on deal-value figures that are missing or estimated in many filings. A high deal count signals a bank that wins mandates consistently across the market. The obvious caveat, which NextTrack keeps honest: volume isn't the same as deal size or outcome — a boutique with a few very large mandates can matter more in dollar terms than the raw count suggests. Read the table as a map of who is active and dominant in advisory, then drill into the specific deals.
With 61 advisors ranked, the league table shows the concentration typical of M&A — a core group of bulge-bracket and elite-boutique banks advising a large share of deals — plus the specialists that own particular sectors. This is the newest of NextTrack's league tables, built directly from the merger dataset. The full table, with every deal each advisor worked, is in the app.
The M&A advisor league table is aggregated from NextTrack's merger dataset — built from SEC merger filings (8-K, DEFM14A, S-4) — by extracting the named financial advisors on each deal and rolling them up by deal count. For the underlying deals, see the [2026 public mergers & M&A tracker](/research/public-mergers-2026).
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