Two years ago we wrote that dealmakers were “opportunistically positioned,” waiting on the cost of capital. In 2025 they stopped waiting. As rate cuts arrived and confidence returned, M&A came back at scale — and the center of gravity moved decisively toward private markets.

01The headline: value came back faster than volume

Global financial-services M&A value rose 49% year-on-year in 2025, to roughly $419 billion in disclosed value, even as deal count barely moved (2,236 vs. 2,219 in 2024). The story is concentration: 93 deals topped $1 billion, up from 54 a year earlier, and those mega-deals accounted for about 81% of all disclosed value. The return of conviction — not a flood of small deals — defined the year.

02Wealth management: a record year, again

Consolidation in wealth didn't slow — it broke records. By Echelon's count there were roughly 466 RIA transactions in 2025, up more than 27% over 2024's prior record, with every quarter clearing 100 deals. Deals involving RIAs with $1B+ in assets hit an all-time high of 185 (up from 140). Private-equity-backed acquirers accounted for the overwhelming majority of strategic activity.

The driver underneath the numbers is demographic, not cyclical: advisors aged 55+ now represent about 42% of the industry but oversee close to 60% of client assets. Succession — not opportunism — is pushing firms to sell, and a buyer market flush with private capital keeps rewarding scale. Bain Capital's move into Lincoln Financial's wealth unit, Corient's acquisition of Stonehage Fleming, and Creative Planning's purchase of SageView all underscored the same logic.

More deals, smaller average size, deeper pockets behind the buyers. The wealth roll-up is now a structural feature of the market, not a phase.

03Alternatives & private credit: the new center of gravity

If 2023 hinted at the shift, 2025 confirmed it. BlackRock completed its acquisition of HPS Investment Partners ($12B) in July, folding it together with the October-2024 close of Global Infrastructure Partners and the Preqin data deal to stand up a new Private Financing Solutions unit — an integrated private-credit franchise of roughly $220B. The largest manager in the world reorganizing around private markets is the clearest signal in the sector.

The asset class beneath the deals kept compounding. Global private credit sits near $1.7–2.0 trillion today and is widely forecast to reach $3 trillion or more by 2028–29; capital deployment grew to roughly $593B in 2024, up about 78% year-on-year. A growing share of it is being pulled toward AI infrastructure — Morgan Stanley estimates private credit could fund more than half of the $1.5T global data-center buildout through 2028.

04Asset management: scale, or be scaled

Traditional asset management remained the squeezed middle. Fee compression, the long shift to passive, and the convergence of “public” and “private” mandates kept pressure on standalone managers. The deal rationale is consistent: acquire capability, acquire distribution, or acquire permanent capital. Vertical integration — pairing asset-management product with wealth or insurance distribution — was again the through-line, and insurers' balance sheets became one of the most contested prizes in credit.

05Outlook 2026: the floodgates, and a new tool

With the cost of capital easing and a still-enormous inventory of sponsor-owned assets waiting to be monetized, the conditions that finally unlocked 2025 should persist. Expect continued mega-deal concentration in private markets, an unbroken wealth roll-up, and creative structures — minority stakes, continuation vehicles, GP-led secondaries — moving from exception to default.

The genuinely new variable is AI as a deal driver and a deal tool. It is creating targets (data-center credit, AI-native platforms) and compressing the work itself — diligence, synergy modeling, and integration planning that used to take weeks now take days. The constraint moves downstream, to execution. Which is exactly where value has always actually been realized.