The M&A market has transformed over the past 30 years. Before the market as we now know it began to take shape, deals were largely domestic, typically between trade buyers, with transaction sizes small and the use of debt largely absent.

Today’s deals could not be more different, with global, cross-border mega deals often involving financial buyers and large amounts of debt, which helped to take the value of global M&A deals in the first quarter of 2018 to over $1tn. Trends are already emerging that will accelerate the further development of the M&A market and will also help shape the type of corporate finance advisers that will flourish in the years to come.