Centerview Partners Considers a Deal of Its Own After Record Year

Lauren Thomas

Sun, Jan 5, 2025, 3:30 AM 4 min read

Centerview co-founders Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan. - Rachel Mendelson/WSJ, iStock (2), Bennett Raglin/Getty Images, Noam Galai/Getty Images

Centerview Partners has long been seen as a holdout on Wall Street as one of the only boutique banks that hasn’t gone public or taken outside money.

That could finally change.

Most Read from The Wall Street Journal

The firm is becoming more open to exploring its options, Centerview co-founder Blair Effron suggested in a recent interview. Those could include selling a stake in the firm to an outside investor or going public.

Centerview has recently received interest from big investors, people familiar with the matter said.

This comes after Centerview booked record revenue in 2024. The stocks of its publicly traded rivals including Evercore and PJT have surged in the past few years and jumped further on the expectation dealmaking will rebound under President-elect Donald Trump.

A transaction could also assuage Centerview’s roughly 80 partners, including a handful who are near or past the age of 60 and would likely welcome an opportunity to sell shares.

Centerview booked roughly $1.9 billion of revenue in 2024, up from $1.5 billion the prior year. The company’s revenue has increased every year except one since its 2006 founding.

Centerview is best known for its dominant healthcare deals franchise and its founders’ long track records advising clients in the consumer-goods sector. The firm also punches above its weight in other areas, such as industrials and media and entertainment. Close to 30% of the firm’s revenue today comes from general advisory, rather than deals.

“I never wanted to think about anything around monetization until the firm was broad enough to be stable enough, irrespective of the environment,” Effron said from the firm’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters. “I feel comfortable that that is no longer a concern.”

Still, Effron and his co-founder, Robert Pruzan, cautioned that the newfound stance doesn’t guarantee the firm will do a deal soon, especially given that the firm is doing well as is.

“It’s going to be a high bar,” Pruzan said.

Effron, 62, and Pruzan, 61, jointly control the firm. In spring 2023, Centerview elevated Eric Tokat, a rainmaker in biotech dealmaking, and Tony Kim, who has advised on many of the firm’s biggest deals, as co-presidents. The move clarified the firm’s succession plans and laid the groundwork for changes ahead.

Boutiques on the rise

Centerview’s boutique-bank peers were handsomely rewarded in the public market last year, partly because their focus on advisory work makes them a straightforward way to invest in an anticipated dealmaking uptick.

Shares of Perella rallied over 90% in 2024, Evercore shares rose more than 60% and PJT shares rose about 55%. (The run-up in PJT’s shares made its founder, Paul Taubman, a billionaire, the Financial Times reported.) Shares of Lazard, Houlihan Lokey and Moelis also surged.

If Centerview traded at a multiple similar to that of its rivals, it could command a valuation of as much as $10 billion.

Boutiques have been taking a bigger slice of Wall Street’s fee pool, too, raking in the second-highest share of M&A advisory fees in the U.S. in 2024 after 2020, according to data from LSEG. As a group, they took 38% of M&A advisory fees in 2024. And Centerview had the largest share of the U.S. boutiques, with 5.35% of M&A advisory fees.

Centerview ranked fourth among all the banks for U.S. M&A revenue in 2024, trailing JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to Dealogic.

The bank also says it is the most productive, with the highest revenue per employee of its peer set.

One criticism of the firm—and a factor that could complicate any plan to go public—has been its heavy reliance on healthcare, which accounts for a disproportionate share of the firm’s revenue. Centerview’s healthcare team, spearheaded by Alan Hartman, Mark Robinson and Tokat, rarely misses a major deal in the sector.

The firm also has some notable areas for improvement, including the all-important tech sector.

Pruzan said the business isn’t overly reliant on any one industry. He emphasized its work on corporate restructurings, counseling special committees, as well as a recent string of media-and-telecom deals, which included advising Paramount Global’s special committee on its merger with David Ellison’s production company Skydance.

Centerview also advised Capital One on its more than $35 billion acquisition of Discover Financial Services, 2024’s largest deal, and worked on some of the biggest activist situations, including at Disney, Starbucks and Honeywell.

Both Effron and Pruzan are expecting another banner year for the business in 2025. “There’s a level of optimism that I see everywhere and I really think it’s justified,” Effron said.

Write to Lauren Thomas at lauren.thomas@wsj.com