BNP Paribas has quietly strengthened its mergers and acquisitions credentials in the UK. In the first quarter of this year, the bank was ranked seventh in UK mergers and acquisitions volumes, up from 15th in the same period last year. Nuveen’s £9.9bn acquisition of Schroders was one of the deals that helped to secure that slot.

Paris-based BNP Paribas is no laggard when it comes to competing. In Dealogic’s rankings for the first half of 2026, it had the fourth-highest investment banking revenues for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the highest of any non-US bank. It led the rankings for Emea debt capital markets and syndicated loan volumes, and had the third-highest Emea M&A volumes, again the highest of any non-US bank.

While BNP Paribas is committed to expanding its investment banking business in general, it points out that the UK represents the largest investment banking fee pool in Europe. Given that a significant volume of M&A is cross-border, it believes that any bank seeking relevance in M&A needs a credible UK franchise.

UK growth 

Becoming more relevant in the UK is part of the bank’s 2030 strategic plan. It has been building up its UK advisory team, which now has 20 senior bankers devoted to M&A. The growth in advisory business has been spearheaded by Kirshlen Moodley, BNP Paribas head of advisory UK, who was recruited from JPMorgan in 2021 with this in mind.

Last year, BNP Paribas was ranked 16th in UK M&A. “We want to be in the top 10,” Moodley says. “So we are investing across industry group verticals, including healthcare, business services, retail and consumer goods.”

One speciality is products for financial institutions group and, more specifically, asset management. BNP Paribas was recently financial adviser to Standard Life in its £2bn cash and shares acquisition of Aegon UK. The business, founded in 1831 as Scottish Equitable, was sold by its Dutch parent, which wants to focus on the US. The result is a UK pensions and savings group with 16mn customers and £480bn in assets under administration.

Earlier this year, the bank was, unusually, sole adviser and sole financier of the Nuveen acquisition of Schroders. “We achieved that because, very early on, our senior management undertook to underwrite the whole deal,” explains Jolyon Luke, the bank’s head of FIG coverage UK and global head of asset management advisory.

“If a bank is prepared to do that, why go shopping elsewhere?” Luke asks. “The fewer people who know about the deal, the better.”

Best-kept secrets 

The need for secrecy explains why a number of small but strong boutique investment banks have done very well in FIG recently, Luke says. “FIG clients like boutiques because big banks are perceived to be leaky,” he insists. “But we are nimble — mobilising the required level of support in three days — and the deal didn’t leak. That gives the lie to the idea that a large bank can’t keep a secret.”

US asset manager Nuveen manages $1.4tn in assets globally and for its parent company, the non-profit Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America. TIAA was founded by Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1918 to provide pensions for university professors. It is now a Fortune 500 company. Nuveen is even older, having been set up in 1898 in Chicago as an investment bank selling municipal bonds. 

BNP Paribas got to know Nuveen better after it was hired to advise on the latter’s acquisition of Glennmont, a European renewable energy investor, in 2020.

Schroders, one of the City of London’s most evocative names, was founded in 1804 as a family-owned merchant bank. After a long history of success, it found itself unable to compete with US bulge-bracket rivals. It sold its investment banking business to Citigroup in 2000, in order to focus on asset management. Just before the Nuveen deal, Schroders managed assets worth $1.1tn, with the family still owning 44 per cent of the business.

Schroders’ core activity is long-only asset management, which has become subject to the same pressures as the merchant bank suffered a quarter of a century earlier. 

“Long-only is under constant margin pressure from exchange traded funds, and that pressure is never going away,” Luke reckons. Asset managers like Schroders need to diversify or achieve real scale through acquisition or partnership. The family faced the same dilemma it had with the merchant bank: the latter.

Scale is just as important to Nuveen, which judges the two businesses to be complementary. Nuveen is US-focused with a meaningful private markets business, while Schroders has global distribution channels and a presence across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

The family signed irrevocable undertakings to sell their shares to Nuveen, and the deal was announced alongside Schroders’ results in February. Nuveen made an all-cash offer worth £9.9bn to acquire 100 per cent of Schroders. In a statement of its intentions, Nuveen promised that the non-US headquarters of the group would remain in London and that London would be considered for any possible future listing. “The board cared about the language,” Luke says.

The combined group will be among the world’s top 10 investment managers, with $2.5tn in assets under management. It will operate in more than 40 global markets. Nuveen believes it will be better positioned to serve both wealth and institutional clients, and that it will benefit from a more differentiated platform.

BNP Paribas provided process support and advice on UK Takeover Code requirements. It was sole underwriter and syndicate lead, advising on capital structure and permanent financing solutions.

“The Schroders deal involved multiple BNP Paribas teams, including advisory, FIG, security services, corporate broking, DCM and hedging,” Luke says. It was also a boost for BNP Paribas’ commercial and investment bank in the US, not least because there was no US bank involved.

Utilities adviser

Another big first-quarter transaction that helped to lift BNP Paribas in the UK M&A rankings was Engie’s £10.5bn acquisition of UK Power Networks. Engie is a French multinational energy utility, created by the 2008 merger of Gaz de France and Suez. It supplies some 20mn consumers in dozens of countries with around 500 terawatt-hours of energy. 

UKPN operates three of the 14 UK-regulated electricity distribution networks. It has around 8.5mn customers, making it the largest such network operator in the UK. BNP Paribas was financial adviser to Engie, alongside Rothschild and Bank of America.

Engie saw this as a unique opportunity to rebalance its portfolio towards power networks, while increasing regulated, predictable cash flows. It pointed out that the acquisition would be earnings-accretive from the first full year, with its dividend policy and investment-grade rating remaining unchanged.

The deal, which had to be approved by the UK government, implied an enterprise value of £15.8bn. This was Engie’s largest acquisition to date, as well as being the largest in the regulated UK utilities sector.

Last year, BNP Paribas was lead financial adviser to Spain’s Iberdrola, Europe’s largest electricity company, when it bought 88 per cent of the UK’s North West Electricity Networks. The deal implied an enterprise value of €5bn.

“Clients are recognising our expertise and we are seeing a lot more who want to work with us,” Moodley says. “That’s both because we are competent professionals, and because we are Europe’s largest investment bank. Complex cross-border deals require advisory, financing, hedging and many other products. If you can get all that within one bank, that makes it easier for the client.”

Luke is optimistic about the future. “We enjoy the benefit of very stable senior management, which allows for very long-term strategic thinking,” he says. “The plan for 2030 anticipates growth across all BNP Paribas products, but a key element of it is to grow the investment banking business.”