A chance meeting 17 years ago between Lazard Inc. CEO Peter Orszag and Hungary's then-Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai is spinning into the investment bank's first major acquisition: a $575 million purchase of Campbell Lutyens, the largest independent private capital adviser.
The deal combining Campbell Lutyens, now run by Bajnai, and Lazard's comparable advisory team led by Holcombe Green III will create a third division named Lazard CL inside the 177-year-old New York-based firm. The takeover aims to turn Lazard into a global powerhouse for one of the hottest areas of Wall Street dealmaking, advising on private market transactions.
The unit — to be co-led Bajnai and Green — is expected to generate about $500 million of revenue in 2027, Orszag said in an interview.
“The pieces just fit together very naturally,” the chief executive officer said at his firm's headquarters at Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. “This provides a source of revenue that is both rapidly growing and diversified.”
Helping shepherd private markets transactions is one of the fastest-growing frontiers for Wall Street shops that have long focused on mergers and acquisitions. It can involve raising money for private equity, credit and infrastructure funds, arranging secondary deals that sell portions of funds before their underlying assets are liquidated, or creating new funds to extend investment horizons.
The field has expanded and adapted as the private equity industry has come under pressure in recent years.
Buyout fundraising and deals surged in 2021, fueled by the pandemic-era market turbulence and stimulus efforts. But that flurry subsided as interest rates started climbing in 2022, making financing costlier and leaving managers unable to exit their bets, return cash and set up new investment vehicles. By 2025, fundraising slumped to $395 billion on four straight years of declines, according to a report from Bain & Co.
That's driven more fund managers and their clients to the secondary market, which reached record volumes last year.
Lazard CL will include more than 280 professionals in 18 offices, aiming to challenge the dominance of teams at Evercore Inc. and Jefferies Financial Group Inc.
Combined, the two franchises poised to comprise Lazard CL are big enough that they would rank No. 1 by transaction volume in every part of the sector except limited-partner secondaries and general-partner capital advisory, Green said.
The merger is expected to bolster the combined company in different parts of the rates cycle. Lazard's M&A and restructuring practice will help bankers in the private capital business, and vice-versa, deepening relationships with financial sponsors and investors, the executives said.
The combined firm may also offer employees room to grow. “There is a hot competition for talent, but with this very big team, we can offer such career opportunities,” said Bajnai.
Gordon Bajnai in 2013.
Photo Credit: Bloomberg
Orszag traces his relationship with his new business partner to 2009, when he was working as a senior official in President Barack Obama's government. When Bajnai visited the White House that year, it was Orszag who greeted him.
The pair met again last year at a pre-Davos gathering at a castle in Liechtenstein, after Bajnai became CEO of Campbell Lutyens. Orszag, two years into leading Lazard, told Bajnai they should meet next time Orszag was in London. That turned into a year of transatlantic flights and discreet meetings.
The all-stock deal they hashed out, expected to close this year, includes an earn-out provision that means Lazard could pay an additional $85 million, depending on how fast the new business grows.
During the talks, Orszag said he asked a fire-walled artificial intelligence tool what the best company for Lazard to acquire would be. It said Campbell Lutyens. Some people were pushing the same idea.
“We have a few investors that keep saying the best thing you can do is buy Campbell Lutyens,” said Orszag. With the firms already deep in confidential discussions, he said he played dumb. “I've had to say, ‘What is that?'”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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