The Mid Market Is Where the Deals Are and the Teams Aren't
Global M&A value rose more than 30% in 2025. European deal value grew around 9% to roughly $800 billion, while transaction volumes stayed close to historical lows relative to GDP (Oliver Wyman, Top 10 Big Deal Trends That Will Shape European M&A in 2026, January 2026). Barclays reached the same reading from inside the market, calling 2025 the second strongest year for M&A on record (Barclays Investment Bank, The Profile of M&A in 2026, 2026).
A handful of very large transactions did most of the lifting, while the number of deals barely moved, and that has a direct effect on how banks staff their coverage floors. When fee growth comes from six megadeals, revenue per banker on those teams looks spectacular, everyone else looks pedestrian, and the instinct is to move heads towards the flattering number.
Something else has shifted through 2026. Private equity exits have slowed, with funds holding assets for longer or moving them into continuation vehicles rather than selling, and the large cap focused firms that leaned on sponsor flow have turned back towards corporate clients. We recently spoke with an international bank's team head, who has mandated a search firm to hire a corporate M&A specialist to join their investment banking team in Paris. In London it's there too, though less pronounced. Either way, the big houses now want strategic relationships that mid-market teams used to hold on their own, just as most banks have spent three years thinning those teams.
1. Concentration Flatters the Wrong Numbers
A megadeal is a superb revenue event and a poor basis for organisational design. It takes a long time to arrive, carries a large fee and a small number of decision makers, and comes with no promise of a sequel. Sizing a coverage team around it is a bit like provisioning a kitchen for the one very expensive dinner you served last spring.
The pull towards the top is strong all the same, because that's where fees and league table credit are biggest. The top six US wholesale banks already take 32% of global wholesale banking revenue, and in EMEA they hold 38% against 27% for the European majors (Oliver Wyman, Defying Gravity: Can Non-US Wholesale Banks Win in the New World Order?, June 2025). Competing for the marginal megadeal against that concentration is expensive, and a team that loses one can go most of a year with little else to show.
2. The Sponsor Exit Queue Remains the Same
On paper, 2026 was meant to be a release year. More than 1,500 European private equity-backed assets, representing roughly $760 billion of enterprise value, were identified as potential sales this year, against a historical run rate of 700 to 800 exits (Oliver Wyman, Top 10 Big Deal Trends That Will Shape European M&A in 2026, January 2026). Sponsors went into the year busy, with financial sponsor M&A up 30% through 2025 (Barclays Investment Bank, The Profile of M&A in 2026, 2026).
The exits haven't come through at anything like that pace. Plenty of funds would rather hold an asset for another year than sell it below the mark, and a growing share of the assets that do move are going into continuation vehicles, where the manager shifts the asset from an old fund into a new one backed by secondary investors. Those deals pay advisers, but they're a narrower piece of work, usually run by Prviate Capital Advisory teams, and they don't produce the competitive auctions a sponsor coverage banker at a large-cap firm was hired to win. That leaves a lot of sponsor coverage capacity at the bigger houses with time on its hands, and most of it has gone after corporates.
3. Large Cap Firms Want the Corporate Relationship Back
The corporates have the money. European corporates are holding around €2.6 trillion in cash, and banks are expected to generate more than $500 billion of excess capital over the next three years (Oliver Wyman, Top 10 Big Deal Trends That Will Shape European M&A in 2026, January 2026). A strategic buyer with that kind of balance sheet doesn't wait for a fund's exit window, and large-cap firms have noticed.
France has moved furthest. French M&A still runs heavily through long relationships with listed groups and family-controlled industrials, often held by the same banker for fifteen years. Large-cap-focused firms in Paris have swung hard towards corporate coverage, and the bankers they want are the ones who can bring a strategic relationship with them rather than a sponsor contact list. London has seen the same move in a milder form, partly because a bigger share of the UK mid-market already changes hands through sponsors, so there's less corporate ground to win back. In both cities, the mid-market banker with a strong corporate book is now a target for firms that showed little interest in that profile two years ago.
4. Deal Count and Deal Value Pay Bankers Differently
A megadeal team can post a very high revenue per banker one year and close to nothing the next. A mid-market team posts a lower figure that repeats, because it rests on a wider client base and shorter cycles, and that difference rarely survives the trip into a headcount meeting.
Barclays expects deal volumes to rise by up to 15% year on year, with corporate buyers among the main drivers (Barclays Investment Bank, M&A Extends Its Reach in 2025, 2025). Growth of that kind shows up as more processes and more first round conversations, most of them well below the megadeal line, and what limits a bank's share of it is senior coverage time. A managing director can run a certain number of live processes at once, and that number doesn't stretch. Add 15% more volume to a floor held flat for three years, and the smaller mandate gets dropped first, which is usually the one that would have turned into a ten-year relationship.
Put two numbers in front of every coverage head this week: live processes per managing director and mandates turned away last quarter because nobody had the hours. If the second number is above zero, next year's headcount plan is already out of date.
5. Coverage Teams Are Sized for the Last Cycle
Most European coverage structures took shape when volume was low and concentration high, and protecting a few large relationships while letting the long tail go was a reasonable answer to the market of 2023. It's a poor one now that large-cap firms are coming back down the market for corporate clients themselves.
Inside a European bank facing the US concentration described above, the pressure is to defend flagship relationships rather than build breadth, so each new head goes to whichever sector or product touched the last billion dollar deal. The mid-cap seats either stay open or go to someone junior carrying three times the client load they can service properly. In London and Paris, the brief we've taken most often this year is to rebuild a mid-cap coverage bench that was taken apart two cycles ago, usually by someone who has since left the bank.
6. The Bankers Everyone Wants Aren't on the Lists
Mid-market coverage is hard to hire into, and ability isn't what's in short supply. The visible candidate pool skews towards large caps, where tombstones circulate and transactions are searchable. A director who has run eleven deals between €150 million and €600 million for family-owned French industrials leaves a far fainter trace, even though that director is now the person a large cap firm chasing French corporates most wants to meet.
They're rarely looking, either. Most have never applied for a job in their careers, and they tend to have deep local relationships, decent economics and no reason to answer an inbound message from a recruiter. They'll take a call from someone who knows their clients and can explain why a platform would serve them better. None of what's needed for that call is written down; it comes from the deal record, the client list and a fair amount of time on the phone to Lyon and Lille.
A Note of Balance
The mid-market isn't automatically the better place to invest. Fee margins are thinner, processes compete harder on price, and a mid cap franchise takes years to pay for itself. A bank with a dominant large cap position may be right to double down on it.
The private equity picture could also turn quickly. If financing eases and valuation gaps close, a good part of that 1,500 asset backlog comes to market at once, and some of the large cap firms now courting corporates will swing back to sponsors. A bank hiring for corporate coverage this year should be clear about whether it wants that franchise for the long run or as a bridge until sponsor flow returns, because the bankers you're hiring will ask.
Conclusion
Value concentrating at the top while count holds steady below it is the shape of this cycle, and the stall in sponsor exits has added large-cap competition for corporate relationships that mid-market teams used to have largely to themselves. For most banks, the revenue per banker sum behind the coverage model is running on the wrong denominator in at least one segment.
Fixing that is a hiring problem before it's a strategy problem. The bankers who can build or defend a mid-cap corporate franchise are dispersed, regional, relationship-led and largely invisible to a standard search. They won't appear on a shortlist built from applicants, and nobody will find them without first working out where the corporate fee pool sits and who holds each relationship.
Mapping starts from the mandate and works outward through the market until the names come through, most of them belonging to people who have no idea they're on a list. A firm that maps the €200 million to €600 million bracket in French industrials now will be in conversations before Christmas that its competitors can't start yet, because they don't know whose names to ask for.
Sources: Oliver Wyman, Top 10 Big Deal Trends That Will Shape European M&A in 2026, January 2026; Oliver Wyman, Defying Gravity: Can Non-US Wholesale Banks Win in the New World Order?, June 2025; Barclays Investment Bank, The Profile of M&A in 2026, 2026; Barclays Investment Bank, M&A Extends Its Reach in 2025, 2025.
