David Eslick is feeling pretty good about today’s M&A environment.
A dealmaker extraordinaire, the CEO at Marsh McLennan Agency (MMA) has closed 131 acquisitions since 2009, six of them since November. Although unsettled by the uncertain impact of President Trump’s sporadic and unfolding tariffs on the economy, he’s hopeful the chaos has calmed. “The tariffs seem to be settling in, seem fairly balanced and less significant. That’s what our middle-market clients have been telling me,” Eslick says.
While high interest rates and concerns over regulatory interference have disrupted the dealmaking of many companies, the provider of insurance solutions has a low debt-to-EBITDA ratio boosting MMA’s borrowing capacity to finance transactions. Eslick has already lined up the next couple candidates and is bullish about what lies ahead. “We recently closed our biggest acquisition with no antitrust issues, no regulatory scrutiny,” he says.
The experiences of five other CEOs we spoke with suggests M&A activity may accelerate through the remainder of 2025 and into 2026—at least for those with financial buying power—ending a dry spell that began after 2021’s record year of deals. In 2022, the volume of M&A transactions declined and then flatlined through the first half of this year. High inflation, elevated interest rates, high regulatory guardrails during the Biden administration and jarring tariffs in Trump 2.0 were among the headwinds negatively impacting dealmaking. On April 2, dubbed “Liberation Day” by Trump, deal volume hit a 20-year low.
The precipitous decline startled many market participants, who generally expected a pro-business president to roll out the red carpet for them his first day in office. Expectations were for Trump to instantly return the market to the “gangbuster M&A days we saw in 2021,” says Adam Reilly, national managing partner of Deloitte’s U.S. mergers, acquisitions and restructuring services practice. “That has not been the case.”
As summer faded into fall, M&A assessments paradoxically brightened. Although many impediments remain solidly in place, CEOs whose companies have strong financial positions are seizing upon the opportunity to acquire struggling businesses, often at reduced prices, gaining market share on top of valuable assets like talent, resources and AI. As Reilly put it, “There are lots of tailwinds for growth-seeking companies with money to spend.”
Opportunities Abound
Despite flat M&A activity in the first half of 2025, the third quarter showed a significant increase in transaction volume and values, primarily for larger deals, according to multiple analyses. Recent acquisitions through September included Union Pacific’s $85 billion cash and stock transaction to acquire Norfolk Southern and create the country’s first transcontinental railroad. Other big ticket deals were Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, Diamondback Energy’s $26 billion purchase of Endeavor Energy Partners, AT&T’s $23 billion acquisition of EchoStar’s wireless spectrum, Constellation Energy’s $16 billion acquisition of Calpine, Sycamore Partners’ $10 billion acquisition of Walgreens Boots Alliance and Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica for $8.1 billion.
As eye-opening as these large transactions are, most acquisitions in 2025 were closed among middle-market companies, reversing recent trends. Among the CEOs inking one deal after another was Richard Kopelman at Aprio, a global provider of CPA-led full service audit, advisory, tax and other services to clients. Kopelman closed a dozen deals across the U.S., compared to just four in 2024. “Our M&A strategy is to build the modern professional services firm of the future, working with clients in large markets to achieve their goals and objectives,” he says.
Roughly 50 percent of Aprio’s acquisitions involved the targets’ audit, advisory and tax services, while the remainder encompassed non-accounting entities with attractive wealth management, outsourcing, technology and legal services. “Earlier this year, we bought a small startup in the AI space and a full-service law firm,” says Kopelman, who says acquisitions are expanding the scope of the company’s business services. “Ten years ago, we offered around 20 and now, we offer nearly 60. We have a growth mindset of abundancy and are relentless about improvement.”
The rapid and sweeping change in regulations, tariffs and tax policies of Trump 2.0 that some see as a deal hurdle are actually an M&A tailwind for Aprio. “Expertise is needed to navigate the increasing complexities, causing middle-market and larger business clients to demand more from their advisors,” Kopelman explains. “If their advisors can’t provide what they need, they’re more likely to access it from a firm with this wide-ranging expertise.”
Summit Financial CEO Stan Gregor is also racking up acquisitions at a fast clip. From May through September 2025, Summit purchased six investment advisory firms in six states with a combined $1.76 billion in managed assets. Post-transaction, the firm brings the acquired companies into the fold as partners on an independent partnership basis. “We look at accretive attributes like culture, tools, people and processes as well as their voids—the things we do well, and they don’t,” says Gregor. “The biggest piece is culture; if it doesn’t fit, we don’t care what the numbers are. It’s not going to work.”
While his M&A decision-making accounts for unfavorable economic and regulatory conditions, Gregor feels the tide is shifting. “In the early days of the Trump administration, there were a lot of shakeups and shock factors making us question if we should stick our toe in the water and commit or wait,” he says. “There’s still a lot of unknowns and uncertainties, with things changing from month to month and quarter to quarter, but as time progressed, our optimism increased.”
Blue Yonder, a supply chain management company operating as an independent subsidiary of publicly traded Panasonic, tallied four strategic acquisitions this year. Two of the acquired companies, Optoro and Inmar Post-Purchase Solutions, provide technology to manage the process of handling returned consumer goods. The third, Pledge Earth Technologies, provides emissions measurement and reporting solutions for the logistics industry, and the fourth, One Network Enterprises, is a cloud-based supply chain management platform acquired for approximately $839 million. “We just haven’t seen the regulatory scrutiny in the tech space that other sectors have experienced,” says CEO Duncan Angove.
Unlike other sectors of the global M&A market that experienced decreases in the number of deals during the first half of 2025, the technology sector showed strong resilience. Corum’s M&A Index cited 3,113 M&A deals in the sector, a 36 percent increase from the same period the prior year. Approximately three-quarters of M&A deals were related to buying AI tools, solutions and talent, as Google’s acquisition of Wiz and Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica attest. “The irony is we’re more of a build than buy company, but when we see something involving unique talent or compelling IP, something that might take us a decade to build, our eyes open,” Angove says.
A more expansive pool of candidates is another inducement. “A lot of money was raised by startups during the zero-interest rate era. Many of them have gone to the wall and are unable to raise new funding at the rates we’ve seen,” Angove says. “Those assets are attractive and have since come to market.”
Other CEOs also cite timing as the impetus to buy right now. In June, Doug Leeby, CEO of Beeline, a privately owned provider of solutions for sourcing and managing contingent labor, pulled off the company’s biggest acquisition to date, buying MBO Partners for an undisclosed sum. Leeby says the move cements Beeline’s position as a purpose-built platform managing every type of external talent, from gig workers and payrolled professionals to contingent workers and independent contractors.
“We came close to pulling the trigger on MBO [in 2024], but trepidation over interest rates, debt and regulatory scrutiny made it harder to buy into the numbers,” he says. “Even though we knew MBO well and had identified a material amount of synergies, especially culture, we decided to get through the year and see what happened.”
What didn’t happen turned out to be more important. “After three years of waiting for a recession, there was a fair amount of pent-up demand for our services,” he says. “As clients geared up new projects, they recognized there’s a lot of really good contingent talent out there to help them.” Leeby cited figures compiled by MBO Partners indicating that the number of independent contractors skyrocketed 42.3 percent to 73 million from the prior year’s period. “We’ve been winning deals without delay.”
Rick Wright, CEO at CoreX, shares this opinion, commenting that the “macro environment, whether it’s higher interest rates, tariff uncertainty or just business uncertainty actually accelerated the number of [acquisition] targets for us.” Wright orchestrated two acquisitions in 2025 that added to the services portfolio of CoreX, a consultancy that provides client companies with AI-driven and other technology solutions built on the ServiceNow cloud-based digital workflow platform.
“We buy competing consultancies looking to consolidate into larger partners in the ServiceNow ecosystem to deliver digital transformation services,” he says. “As businesses seek out services and solutions from ever-larger consultancies, valuations are coming down to more reasonable figures, making these firms more attractive acquisition targets.” At press time, CoreX neared closing a third acquisition, a consulting firm owned by private equity firm NewSpring Capital.
A Note of Caution
While these positive M&A experiences suggest that tailwinds top headwinds for many dealmakers, some CEOs are hedging their bets, says Dean Bell, lead director on KPMG’s board and head of markets for deal advisory and strategy.
“Our M&A survey suggests that this will be a strong year, but the uncertainties out there keep pushing the timeframe out,” he says. “Three-quarters of the respondents expected to do a deal in Q3, but that now looks like it will be Q4.”
Kevin Desai, U.S. deals platform leader at PwC, agrees. “We polled 670 executives on what’s making M&A difficult for them, and the No. 1 response was U.S. economic policy, followed by AI and data regulations,” he says. “The third was U.S. trade policy.”
Deloitte’s Reilly also sees the uncertain impact of tariff-fueled trade troubles as a deal dampener. “Sectors reliant on international supply chains are reticent to take on the M&A risk of tariffs,” he says. “While sellers tend to have a positive view this will all go away sooner than later, buyers have a negative view, resulting in deal valuation gaps that are hard to bridge.”
Desai agrees. “I’m not seeing a slowdown in antitrust challenges,” he says. “Regulators are still scrutinizing deals, putting the onus on management and the board to be thoughtful about diligence. It’s still a very active SEC.”
Trump’s antitrust regulatory oversight is another question mark. In a June report by WilmerHale titled “Meet the New Boss, Not So Different from the Old Boss,” the large international law firm wrote that the new leaders of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission “are acting and talking in ways that differ in most respects only modestly from antitrust leadership in the Biden era.”
For many dealmakers, speculative economic conditions, trade conditions and government oversight are countered by promising news elsewhere. At press time, consumer and business spending was growing; the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P 500 indexes were hovering at record highs; and GDP in the second quarter was up 3.0 percent.
The business-friendly tax policies in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was another harbinger of an M&A revival. “At a minimum, the legislation allows for steadier corporate tax rates and the deductibility of expensive carry-forward interest—fuel for the M&A fire,” Desai says.
An aggressive deregulation agenda in Trump 2.0 and prospects for Federal Reserve rate cuts are expected to boost dealmaker confidence as they play out the remainder of the year and into 2026. “I’m still a bit wary due to all the uncertainties, but I definitely see interesting opportunities arising,” Reilly says.
On the Prowl for AI
Many deals are said to be quietly in the works, a good number of them related to AI. “Lots of companies are… looking to do deals to acquire AI products and talent,” says Reilly.
“As the U.S. moves even more to a service-based economy, businesses looking for opportunities to innovate and grow are eyeing AI as the means,” agrees Javier Saade, founder and managing partner at Impact Master Holdings, which partners with companies to build and grow innovative businesses.
Wright and Gregor agree. “Every single CEO I talk to is interested in rolling into a ServiceNow consultancy to deepen their AI and other technical capabilities and offerings,” says Wright, while Gregor comments that “AI continues to be at the top of our M&A discussions. The speed and accuracy of AI is a game changer when it comes to personnel.”
One hurdle is the difficulty of arriving at a precise valuation, a complex undertaking since AI-heavy companies are valued for intellectual property like algorithms, which are inherently problematic to gauge. Companies with AI talent, tools and solutions are in the M&A crosshairs, but today’s sky-high valuations for the entities are driven more by optimistic growth projections than the underlying financials, says Angove.
“The [AI] valuations are frothy. There’s a lot of hype and market speculation like in the early days of the internet,” he says. “What if the [company’s] AI becomes irrelevant in a couple years? We’re still in the early days.”
His advice to fellow dealmakers: “be very disciplined, stick to strategy, study the headwinds and tailwinds—and learn.”
