Bank M&A Fees Have Skyrocketed in the Past Decade

Cashing out is costing more these days.

As banks consider their odds of survival in the weak economy and tough regulatory environment, more are calling on investment bankers to help them expand their balance sheet or exit the business.

Those advisors, however, are taking a larger bite out of the wallets of buyers and sellers than they did a decade ago.

Buyers who disclosed their fees paid their advisors on average 0.49% of the deal value in 2003, while sellers paid 0.84%. In 2012 buyer rates had risen to 0.85%, and sellers' fees to 1.57%, according to data from SNL Financial, with some additional analysis by the Kafafian Group, a New Jersey bank advisor.

No, the investment bankers have not anointed Gordon Gekko, the villain in "Wall Street," as their patron saint. Instead, the fee increases reflect a new M&A environment where pairing banks involves a lot more work.

Deals have been smaller and are harder to strike since the financial meltdown. Additionally, advisors are confronting the same economic pressures as their customers face and are consolidating, too.

Several investment bankers who declined to comment on the record for this story contended that fees only appear higher, because buyers are reluctant to pay top dollar anymore and thus the basis for the fees is smaller.

In the run-up to the crisis, two times tangible book value was common, if not low in certain parts of the country. But median price to tangible book value for deals valued at more than $50 million was 1.4% in 2012, according to data from KBW.

It is the denominator that has changed, the investment bankers say, not necessarily the numerator.

That is an incomplete argument, says Jeff Marsico, executive vice president of the Kafafian Group. The average fee as a percentage of deal values is up, so it means the advisors are trying to maintain their income.

"The transactions are smaller, so there is an upward pressure on fees," Marsico says. "When you consider the amount of work to get a deal from start to finish, an $80,000 fee is not a profitable endeavor for most advisors."

Marsico's firm is not a broker/dealer, but it provide M&A advice. His firm's fees have increased in the last decade, mostly because it has one team dedicated to doing fairness opinions for the board and another team involved making the deal happen, he said.

In a rosier economy, bank M&A was a much easier endeavor as culture and price were the two largest components of making good matches.

Now, advisors have to reconcile wide bid/ask spreads to ink deals. Then, they have to worry about either party's ability to close a transaction, regulators' willingness to bless a deal and the economy's expected performance between announcement and closing.

For example, the fees advisors charged sellers jumped to 2.55% in 2009, when M&A was dominated by attempts to save good franchises from failure and a few healthy deals. A lot of that work was wasted; a third of the deals announced that year were terminated, according to data from ParaCap Group, a Cleveland-based boutique investment bank.

"Five to ten years ago, we could be nearly sure the deal would get done," said Charles R. Crowley, a longtime community bank dealmaker who recently joined Boenning & Scattergood in Cleveland as a managing director. "But now there is a tremendous amount of work, and there are some deals that are deemed to be a little bit more difficult to do."