Corporate Finance & Advisory

Corporate finance and advisory is the engine room of an accounting firm's fee growth, and in 2025 Singapore and Hong Kong were where it ran hottest. Hong Kong staged a decisive rebound: HKEX raised roughly HK$280 billion (about US$36 billion) from over 110 new listings - up around 218% year-on-year - reclaiming the world's number-one IPO ranking and reigniting an M&A and equity-capital pipeline that had been dormant for three years ^[2]. Singapore, the hub of the Singapore-Malaysia-Hong Kong middle-market corridor, saw M&A transactions involving Singapore reach roughly US$70.4 billion in 2025 on LSEG investment-banking data, underpinned by cross-border Southeast Asia flow and an MAS-regulated funds-and-family-office base ^[3]. These twin hubs sit inside an Asia-Pacific M&A market that surged 39.3% to just under US$1.2 trillion ^[1]; the worldwide total of roughly US$4.8 trillion is the secondary backdrop, not the story ^[4].

The hiring market in this discipline is unlike audit or tax. Revenue follows individuals and the relationships they carry, so firms compete for partners with live mandates, originated pipeline and a portable deal record. Team lift-outs - a partner arriving with two or three directors and a vintage of managers who already work as a unit - are the dominant move at the senior end, because an intact team de-risks the integration and shortens time-to-first-fee. Deal-credit portability (who can credibly claim the lead role on a named transaction) is the single most scrutinised, and most negotiated, element of any partner hire.

Demand is cyclical but the cycle is layered. M&A lead advisory and transaction services track the deal tape closely; valuations and modelling are more counter-cyclical, fed by financial-reporting (PPA, impairment), disputes and the relentless mark-to-market needs of private capital; and capital advisory has structurally re-rated upward in a higher-for-longer rate environment as refinancing, recapitalisation and private-credit-adjacent mandates multiply. A well-built advisory practice now hedges its own headcount across these four sub-disciplines.

Across our coverage - led by Singapore and Hong Kong, then Sydney, Dubai and London - the binding constraint is senior talent, not junior. The post-2021 boom over-hired at the analyst and associate grades, then the 2022-23 slowdown thinned the director pipeline that should now be feeding partner promotions. With Hong Kong dealmaking back and Singapore origination running hot, the result is an acute shortage of M&A-ready directors and newly-minted partners with both origination and execution credibility, and that scarcity is what drives the premiums, counter-offers and multi-year guarantees we see in live searches across the two hubs.