M&A Doing OK

The M&A insurance market is sharply up from pandemic levels, more than 40 percent from 2020, but the transaction total did decline slightly from 2021 to 2022. Deals in Telecom and other technology and media sectors made the greatest use of M&A, according to the BMS report cited above. Infrastructure/renewables saw the greatest year-to-year increase. Who pays? Buyers paid 40 percent, another 40 percent split payments between both sides of the deal, leaving 20 percent of sellers picking up the tab. The overall drop-off in deals, though smallish, did lead to a decline in rates. Nothing dramatic happened in the way of change in type or size of claim, according to the report, which also said that the biggest claims are driven by “accounting and financial-related issues, with errors in management accounts being an increasingly common problem area.”