Wells Fargo & Co. has hired M&A banker Justin Aylward to help build out the bank’s midcap M&A team.
Aylward, 45, joins from JPMorgan Chase & Co., where he was a managing director and led the institution’s middle market M&A efforts between 2019 and 2024 with Eric Anderson.
Anderson, meanwhile, joined Wells Fargo in November. He and Aylward will work alongside Fernando Rivas, who was hired as co-CEO of Wells Fargo’s investment bank last year from JPMorgan. Aylward and Anderson’s exact titles and leadership positions will be determined in early 2025.
The duo will join Christina Bresani, who Wells Fargo hired as a managing director in 2024 from William Blair & Co. LLC to run its midcap M&A group. (Bresani was a guest on the Activist Investing Today podcast in 2023.) Well Fargo wants to rebuild its midcap practice aggressively under Jeff Hogan, global head of M&A and former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, who was hired in 2023.
As for Aylward, at JPMorgan he advised Blackstone Products on its combination with privately owned Weber LLC in a deal announced last month. Blackstone’s outdoor griddles business and the operations of BDT and MSD Partners LLC holding Weber are expected to have a combined value of almost $10 billion, a person familiar with the situation said.
While at JPMorgan, Aylward also advised Saudi Aramco on its $2.65 billion acquisition of Valvoline Inc.’s Products Business and Encore Wire Corp. on its $4.2 billion sale to Prysmian SpA.
At Wells Fargo, Aylward is expected to focus on deals involving publicly traded companies with $250 million to $2 billion market capitalizations, as well as building a dedicated M&A practice advising family-owned, founder-owned and closely held companies. At JPMorgan, in addition to working on publicly traded deals, Aylward created a team dedicated to advising on family-owned and closely held business deals, as well as governance improvements and the liquidation of minority stakes.
Before JPMorgan Chase, Justin Aylward was a senior dealmaker at Blackstone Inc. and Paul Taubman’s PJT Partners Inc. Before that, he worked as an associate at Rothschild & Co in New York and London.
