Investment banks earned a record of nearly $104bn (£76.7bn) in fees globally last year from work advising companies on more than $3.5tn worth of takeovers and mergers.
Globally, banks billed their clients for $103.9bn worth of fees for their work, a 16% increase on 2016 and the highest yearly total since Thomson Reuters began collating data in 2000. The soaring fees came from work on $3.5tn of takeover deals last year, including Rupert Murdoch’s sale of most of his 21st Century Fox empire to Disney in a $66bn deal and Amazon’s $13.7bn acquisition of the organic food chain Whole Foods. It was the fourth consecutive year that global dealmaking has exceeded $3tn, and bankers expect even more deals in 2018 according to the analysis published on Thursday.
Bankers in the UK charged clients $5.8bn, a 17% increase on 2016 as the collapse in the value of the pound following the Brexit vote made British companies cheaper targets for overseas buyers.
The Wall Street giant JP Morgan charged $6.7bn in fees alone last year. The bank, which paid its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $28m last year, was the top charging bank in the US and Europe and collected 16.4% more money than in 2016. JP Morgan is expected to report record profits when it publishes it full-year results next week. Goldman Sachs charged the second highest fees, raking in $5.9bn, a 14% increase on 2016.
The two US banks also revealed to have rewarded their 1,396 UK-based investment bankers with average annual pay of $1.5m (£1.1m) in 2016. JP Morgan paid 672 staff in senior or risk-taking positions a total of $1bn, while 724 Goldman bankers were paid an average of $1.48m. Ten Goldman bankers in the UK earned more than €9m, while 14 JP Morgan executives took home more than €5m – its highest published pay bracket.
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