The Venture Intelligence Blog

Business Today has a cover story on the phenomenon. Among the "bigger boutiques", Veda Corporate Advisors, set up by C. Venkat Subramanyam and M. Vinod Kumar, who have been together for 20 years, through three jobs and two entrepreneurial ventures, has 20 people. Jacob Mathew, M. Ramprasad and Ajay Garg left DSP Merrill Lynch to start MAPE Advisory, which has 38 people. And Equirus, which came into existence when Garg left MAPE to start his own outfit, has 40, half of them in investment banking and the other half in institutional equity ...In fact, boutiques are the ones really active in the ring right now, feasting on deals of Rs 50 crore to Rs 200 crore, which is the range where the action is. They charge the same percentage as fee that the big ones do, but get by happily in spite of the low absolute amount, a result of the smaller deal sizes, because their expenses are far lower. ...It is not just the lower expenses that make boutiques click with clients. All six that BT ...

From the Economic Times article : These are the ones who left the suffocating process-driven culture at giant firms, such as Morgan, Merrill and Goldman. They build relationships with entrepreneurs for years and get to experiment with ideas. Know them, identify what they want, comfort them and say they could be a lot bigger than they are, with a banker's advice. Boutique banks, such as MAPE, Collins Stewart Inga , Spark Capital and RippleWave Equity are thriving in a market where mergers and acquisitions last year doubled. Some successful boutique firms such as Avendus Capital and Edelweiss are expanding into full-service financial firms taking their expertise to public markets such as initial public offerings. "Our approach is not transaction oriented but relationship oriented," said Jacob Mathew, managing director at MAPE Advisory. "We keep going back to clients with ideas. We compete with top bankers with large balance sheets but we don't want to become large ...