World's best independent investment bank 2016: Lazard

Also shortlisted:

Evercore

Rothschild

View full 2016 results

Lazard remains the world’s pre-eminent independent investment bank, marrying a focus on strategic advisory services – spanning M&A, corporate restructuring, capital markets, capital structure advisory and sovereign advisory – to global scale, with bankers in 43 cities in 27 countries.

In the year to the end of March 2016 it ranked sixth in the league tables for completed M&A advisory; the only firms above it were US bulge-brackets Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citi. It now ranks above all the European universal banks. Its market share in that 12 month period grew to 14% of completed M&A advisory, up from 9% in the year before.

It is noteworthy how often the firm acts as sole adviser and how often on the buy side in big transformational deals. M&A bankers at the biggest firms often privately express a preference for working on the sell side, given the greater certainty of picking up a fee and the comparative difficulty of choosing a winning horse to back among the consolidators in any sector.