Westy looks East for his next act

Former Deloitte leader and his team at Japanese investment bank DC Advisory

Hello Rainmakers,

There was a lot of love for Andy Westbrook when he emerged from a period of gardening leave to his new berth at Japanese owned investment bank DC Advisory, with plenty of LinkedIn messages of the ilk of “great move, Westy”.

I met up with him and two colleagues, Richard Darlington and Mark Ward, and found a sophisticated and ambitious operation planning big things.

Andy Westbrook

The team at DC Advisory in Manchester are on a mission. Not only to do deals and earn fees, but to be the best. They say they’ve been quietly rewriting the rules of mid-market investment banking, that their time is now, and there’s a little frustration that they don’t think the credit they believe they deserve.

I’m with a trio of seasoned rainmakers - Andy Westbrook, Mark Ward, and Richard Darlington - the firm powered by their Japanese parent Daiwa, which is positioning itself as a strategic powerhouse that bridges regional expertise with global reach.

The team's narrative is one of deliberate transformation. "We're going to become the best corporate finance team in the region," explains Mark Ward, who joined from Clearwatwer in 2021.

The appointment of Andy Westbrook was a big summer signing. He only recently joined from Deloitte, where he was not only office managing partner in Manchester, but was one of the undisputed big beasts of regional corporate finance over the last two decades.

He stops short of passing judgement on Deloitte’s strategy, and contests my efforts to get him to say his move represents a growing disillusionment with traditional Big Four advisory models, a view often enthusiastically shouted by his one time opposite number at rival KPMG, Jonathan Boyers, now enjoying his new lease of life heading up Alvarez & Marsal’s expanding M&A practice in Europe, and beyond.

“I think I’ve probably got a slightly different view to Jonathan, to be honest about it. I'm not entirely sure that the big four will completely withdraw from the marketplace, not least of all because they've got international networks to service,” he says.

“They make a big play around sector capabilities. If you read any of the strategies of the Big Four, they talk about M&A being one of those big strategies. Therefore not to have some sort of M&A expertise, I think would be a bit of a mess.