Bank for Financial Sponsors: Goldman Sachs
GP surgery For its work on most of the biggest M&A deals for financial sponsor clients, helping to reopen a difficult IPO market and advising on a raft of complex deals for alternative asset managers, Goldman Sachs is IFR’s Bank for Financial Sponsors.
Private equity dealmaking didn’t return with a bang in 2024 but there were at least signs of M&A and IPO activity emerging from two years of near hibernation. At the same time the speed of change among alternative asset managers accelerated as firms diversified, bulked up and sought new ways to finance operations.
Goldman Sachs was at the heart of many of those trends. It advised on most of the big financial sponsor M&A deals, including US$10bn-plus deals for Silver Lake on the take private of Endeavor; for Intel on the sale of its manufacturing plant joint venture stake to Apollo Global Management; and on the sale of data centre operator AirTrunk to Blackstone and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
“This year things started to move, but things don't just happen. Every M&A process was very bespoke, very complicated and quite often there weren't many buyers left at the end, and deal structures had to pivot,” said Rob Pulford, co-head of Goldman’s financial and strategic investor group. Pulford was promoted to the global role in January 2025 after previously running the Americas.
“What we've tried to do in an M&A context, and in all the other products, is to try and bring some innovation, because whatever happened in the last cycle, this cycle will be different.”
That was also seen with work on the tentative restarting of sponsor IPOs, a swathe of refinancings, and a lot of work advising private equity GPs – or the general partners who manage firms – such as for the €2.3bn listing of CVC Capital Partners in April or for credit investment firm HPS on its US$12bn sale to BlackRock.
The ecosystem around alternative asset managers changes each year, and banks grapple with the best way to tap the expanse of private equity, family offices, sovereign wealth, pension, infrastructure, real estate and energy funds, and increasingly insurance funds.
Goldman has had a coverage group for financial sponsors for more than 25 years, which evolved into a financial and strategic investor group in 2016. In January 2020 it appointed Pete Lyon as global head of both FSIG and another core business, the financial institutions group. “We put them adjacent to one another purposely under the assumption that the asset management complex would continue to thrive as it relates to GP-related activity, and that has certainly been the case,” Lyon said.
In January 2025 Goldman created a capital solutions group that consolidates financing, origination, structuring and risk management with the aim of growing revenues from private credit and private equity. The FSIG team is central to that and Lyon was named co-head of the capital solutions group, while Pulford and Jonathan Barry were made co-heads of FSIG.
Goldman doesn’t disclose how much FSIG clients contribute to its top line, but it’s a hefty amount and is likely to be a bigger share than for rivals – reflecting how they are at the heart of its client base.
AirTrunk and Intel
But back to the deals. Goldman led on many of the biggest sponsor M&A transactions and has also deepened its advisory offering to cover more mid-sized portfolio firms.
It was sellside adviser to SRS Distribution, a portfolio company of Leonard Green & Partners and Berkshire Partners, on its US$18.25bn sale to US retailer Home Depot; sole financial adviser to a consortium of CVC, Nordic Capital and ADIA on their £5.4bn purchase of UK financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown; and advised Macquarie Asset Management and PSP Investments on their sale of AirTrunk to Blackstone and CPPIB for an implied enterprise valuation of A$24bn (US$16.1bn), the largest ever data centre transaction.
Goldman led advice for Silver Lake on its take-private of sports and entertainment company Endeavor in April, and led the financing. At a US$25bn enterprise value, it was the largest sponsor take-private in a decade and the biggest in media and entertainment. The financing brought in additional capital, including from Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Goldman was lead adviser to Intel on the US$11.23bn sale of 49% of its Fab 34 joint venture in Ireland to Apollo. Fab 34 is a manufacturing facility for chip wafers and the deal was structured so Intel could redeploy capital to support other areas and meet what Apollo wanted.
“If you think about some of the biggest deals that are going to happen in the next 10 years, it will be these kinds of deals where corporates will use private alternative capital to fund some of their most ambitious projects to drive both the digital infrastructure wave and the transition to net zero,” said Anna Skoglund, head of FSIG for EMEA.
Since 2019 Goldman has looked to do more M&A for mid-sized firms – and many are owned by sponsor clients, given buyout firms are estimated to have about 28,000 portfolio companies. Pulford said that is an M&A area “we've really tried to focus on”.
Tough love
The option of an IPO exit for private equity owners remained challenging for much of 2024. That often needed difficult discussions with owners about valuation prospects, and trying to pick good quality firms to brave the market.
“There was a narrative at the beginning of the year that the IPO markets were not working, but maybe it was more that the IPO markets were not approached with the right strategy to get the deals to work,” said Skoglund.
Helping the IPO market find its feet, Goldman led the SFr2.3bn (US$2.5bn) listing in March of Swiss dermatology firm Galderma, the biggest IPO in the first quarter and the biggest in Switzerland since 1998. In July, it was on the US$1.08bn IPO of healthcare payments firm Waystar and in October on the Z6.45bn (US$1.64bn) listing of Zabka Group, the second-largest IPO in Poland in the last decade.
It also worked on hefty follow-on deals for sponsors too, including two for Thoma Bravo in Nasdaq and a pair for Blackstone in LSEG, the parent of IFR.
Alternative options
There was also private equity firm CVC’s own landmark listing in Amsterdam, the largest ever European IPO in that space and the biggest globally since Blackstone’s IPO in 2007. Goldman was joint global coordinator.
CVC had experienced a couple of false IPO dawns, so the pressure was on. It was widely seen as a success: the final book was multiple times subscribed with significant anchor orders, and shares were priced conservatively and performed well in the aftermarket.
Other strategic deals for alternative asset managers included advising Ares Management on its purchase of GCP International for US$3.7bn; Monroe Capital on its strategic alliance with Wendel; and deals for Hayfin and Castlelake. Four months before HPS announced its sale in December, Goldman had advised it on a strategic partnership with Guardian Life Insurance.
GPs were also active with significant capital markets financings, securitisations, NAV loans and subscription lines.
“When it comes to these really important transactions, whether it's taking the company public, whether it's selling a stake in the GP, or doing some M&A that's transformational, then we tend to get very involved in those things,” Pulford said.
On the refinancings for portfolio companies, Goldman was a big player in high-yield bond issues and leveraged loans. The former included working on issuances for Staples, Venture Global LNG, Stonegate and Belron. The latter also included deals for Belron, and for Cloud Software and Medline Industries.
Having its own private credit business in its asset and wealth management division can also offer an edge and complement the leveraged finance franchise, and Goldman’s alternatives business now has more than US$500bn in assets under supervision, including more than US$120bn in private credit.
Goldman ranked second in 2024 for global fees from financial sponsors and second for fees from sponsor exits and portfolio deals, behind JP Morgan, according to LSEG data.
It has also teed up a couple of big hits for 2025 for work done last year that haven’t closed, such as the HPS sale to Blackstone, advising insurance group Enstar on its US$5.1bn sale to Sixth Street and advising GTCR-owned insurance broker AssuredPartners on its US$13.5bn sale to Arthur J Gallagher.
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