 Hi guys, it's Anthony Eddy here and as promised in a recent video yesterday we are going to do some new content and this is looking at M&A transactions and I mentioned this because Eddy did a really great post on LinkedIn earlier today talking about an FT story about Goldman's purchasing a Dutch insurers investment management arm for 1.6 billion euros. So Eddy, what's going on with Goldman's in that deal? Yeah, Goldman's along with all the other investment banks have been really active this year and also last year and they've continued to gobble up different asset management and wealth management firms and arms and this is really in the latest wave of kind of asset management consolidation and kind of financial institution consolidation. So they've basically agreed a deal with to buy NN Group which is a kind of asset management arm of a Dutch insurance company for 1.6 billion and they have 355 billion in assets under management and basically the rationale behind this deal is that it significantly expands Goldman's European asset management presence and what's really interesting about this is if we look at other kind of deals that have taken place let's say Morgan Stanley acquiring Eaton Vance and eTrade last year, JP Morgan have been super active this year, they've acquired firms like Open Invest and Nutmeg as well for about 700 million. So there's a lot of activity right now in the kind of investment banking and asset management space. So what does all that kind of mean going forward? Like say if you're a student perhaps and you've got interviews coming up what's the main things to just keep an eye on as a trend in this space? Yeah definitely so the first thing is being aware of these deals of course taking place and then really asking and looking at those deals and thinking okay why are they making these acquisitions and these transactions? So we can break it down as a kind of more macro trend for all these investment banks that are looking to acquire firms like Open Invest and Nutmeg and Eatrade why are they doing this? Okay so let's take a look at a few of the kind of rationales behind these deals. So for example Goldman and NN Group it's really about scaling their asset management platforms to really diversify away from the more traditional investment banking fees like trading like investment banking in the sense of M&A, ECM and DCM transactions. So like you saw from the recent kind of investment banking results that come out there was a big miss for pretty much all the investment banks in something called FIC trading okay so again it depends on market conditions, depends on the performance of the traders so that can take a big it can provide a big hit to the earnings if they miss on something like this. So acquiring all of these different asset management arms and kind of inherently in the asset management and wealth management space the fees are generally more stable and very very lucrative so they're looking to kind of diversify away from just those particularly could be potentially volatile income streams. Other kind of big macro trends at the moment is ESG so gaining exposure to ESG to satisfy the growing client demand for these kind of environmentally social and government friendly companies so for example JP Morgan acquiring Open Invest this allows customers to customize their portfolios based on ESG metrics so companies that satisfy XYZ in terms of the ESG checklist. Other massive trends as we know FinTechs you know increasingly prevalent if you look at firms like Revolute achieving massive valuations they're really the big disruptors in this kind of banking financial institution space so firms like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are looking to acquire these FinTechs to support their digital transformation in terms of providing kind of things like digital wallets and things like that. It's also quite a nuanced thing in the sense of they're also trying to avoid acquisitions with their bigger kind of banking rivals because of course that would come under a lot of regulatory scrutiny and by acquiring these kind of smaller faster growing FinTechs it can bypass some of the regulatory deposit caps so that's why they're kind of doing that. Again we've over the last kind of 2020 and 2021 that we've covered a lot on this channel the retail trading boom if it's options if it's kind of crypto each trade was a massive winner in that kind of 2020 period and then was acquired by Morgan Stanley so again getting exposure to that boom in retail trading activity that acquisition by Morgan Stanley looks fantastic right now and of course the big elephants in the room your black rocks your vanguards the big passive investment behemoths these investment banks are looking at these guys and thinking wow I want a piece of that action so they're trying to compete with those passive investment streams and that industry is you know it's growing massively you know has been and is continuing to grow the private capital industry as well that we can cover in another video is growing massively so these investment banks are looking to take a get a piece of these really growing kind of areas and again you know in terms of the macro framework interest rates record lows monetary policy is extremely loose so there's immense pressure on the net interest margins of these traditional banks so they're not making a lot of money from borrowing from the central banks and lending out to all these corporations at the moment so they're looking really to get exposure through things like ESG you know retail deposits like Marcus and you know asset asset management flows oh yeah I'll let you take a breath there there's a lot of look a lot of great context there and I think for sure if you're a student watching this that's what will make the difference when you're engaging in interaction with someone in an interview situation applications I know there's a lot of people going through that now so definitely feel free to drop Eddie a comment if there's questions anything he's covered if you need links to any of these deals and things like that I'm sure he could provide color and also we'll drop that registration link again for the new Amplify Me platform launch coming out on the 15th of September and so again we'll be covering tons more stuff like this and another kind of great variety of different content so any suggestions as well let us know and yeah we'll see you for the next video thanks Eddie awesome thanks