Corporate Finance & Advisory

Corporate finance and advisory is the engine room of an accounting firm's fee growth, and in 2025 it ran hot. Asia-Pacific M&A value surged 39.3% to just under US$1.2 trillion on essentially flat volume (11,208 deals), lifted by 35 megadeals worth a combined US$416 billion [1]. Against a worldwide M&A total of roughly US$3 trillion [2], APAC is no longer a follower market — it is where a disproportionate share of the incremental fee pool is being created, and where firms are most aggressively building advisory benches.

The hiring market in this discipline is unlike audit or tax. Revenue follows individuals and the relationships they carry, so firms compete for partners with live mandates, originated pipeline and a portable deal record. Team lift-outs — a partner arriving with two or three directors and a vintage of managers who already work as a unit — are the dominant move at the senior end, because an intact team de-risks the integration and shortens time-to-first-fee. Deal-credit portability (who can credibly claim the lead role on a named transaction) is the single most scrutinised, and most negotiated, element of any partner hire.

Demand is cyclical but the cycle is layered. M&A lead advisory and transaction services track the deal tape closely; valuations and modelling are more counter-cyclical, fed by financial-reporting (PPA, impairment), disputes and the relentless mark-to-market needs of private capital; and capital advisory has structurally re-rated upward in a higher-for-longer rate environment as refinancing, recapitalisation and private-credit-adjacent mandates multiply. A well-built advisory practice now hedges its own headcount across these four sub-disciplines.

Across our coverage — Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Dubai and London — the binding constraint is senior talent, not junior. The post-2021 boom over-hired at the analyst and associate grades, then the 2022-23 slowdown thinned the director pipeline that should now be feeding partner promotions. The result is a structural shortage of M&A-ready directors and newly-minted partners with both origination and execution credibility, and that scarcity is what drives the premiums, counter-offers and multi-year guarantees we see in live searches.