Goldman Sachs CFO expects M&A momentum to continue into 2026

A trader works in the Goldman Sachs booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (Richard Drew/AP)

NEW YORK — Goldman Sachs says this year is on track to become the second-biggest in history for announced mergers and acquisitions industrywide, an encouraging sign for 2026, according to its finance chief Denis Coleman.

His comments echo optimism, including at rival Morgan Stanley, across Wall Street that the outlook for M&A is improving. Dealmaking has gathered pace in the U.S. as a resilient economy, lower financing costs and renewed corporate confidence drive more activity.

“Our outlook and visibility on M&A is ... very encouraging for aggregate overall levels of activity heading into 2026,” Coleman told an investor conference on Tuesday hosted by Goldman.

Shares of the Wall Street bank were last up 1.7 per cent. The stock has surged nearly 54 per cent so far this year, outperforming the banking index and the broader market.

Deals resurgence

A wave of large IPOs in 2025 has also fueled renewed investor optimism as companies seize improving market conditions to go public and attract capital.

“The overall outlook and expectation for the equity underwriting calendar remains very positive and we should continue to see good levels of activity in 2026,” Coleman said.

Meanwhile, the volume of deals led by financial sponsors has also surged, Coleman said, citing a roughly 40% jump industrywide.

Goldman, which has consistently ranked as the top M&A adviser, has benefited this year from working on large deals.

It beat Wall Street expectations for third-quarter profit, as its investment bankers earned higher advisory fees and rallying markets boosted revenue from managing client assets.

Goldman earned a record US$110 million advisory fee for advising Electronic Arts EA.O on its $55 billion take-private acquisition by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Silver Lake.

A total 63 deals worth $10 billion or more have been announced during 2025 until late November, exceeding the previous annual high set in 2015 to set a new all-time megadeal record, LSEG data shows.

Appetite for acquisitions

Goldman’s bar for “transformative acquisitions” remains very high, Coleman said.

“Given our leading M&A market share position, the opportunity to deploy sizable capital into acquisition financing is a very attractive activity for Goldman Sachs and the market environment is conducive to that type of deployment,” he added.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street bank said it will buy active exchange-traded fund sponsor Innovator Capital Management in a cash-and-stock deal worth about $2 billion.

It also struck a deal for Industry Ventures, a venture capital firm that manages $7 billion of assets, in October.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar and Lananh Nguyen in New York and Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Nick Zieminski)