William Buck boosts corporate finance team in South Australia with three hires
Accounting and consulting firm William Buck has boosted its corporate finance team in South Australia through the recruitment of partner and principal duo John Marsden and Matt Darling.
Marsden joins after previously spending more than a decade and a half between KPMG, Ferrier Hodgson, and Ernst & Young, while Marsden crosses from local boutique Equity & Advisory with an earlier five years spent at KPMG.
Meanwhile, Samantha Nicholls, who joined William Buck in Adelaide as a graduate in 2007 and was made partner in 2021, has been tapped to lead the local corporate finance team, which with its latest inclusions has grown to ten-strong.
Now one of three local corporate finance partners alongside Nicholls and South Australia managing partner Adrian Chugg, Marsden brings more than two decades worth of in-house and external corporate advisory experience in Australia and abroad, including over one half of that time as a director at KPMG and its specialist restructuring & turnaround acquisition Ferrier Hodgson.
Joining fellow corporate finance principals Chris Rosser and Amelia Barbara, Darling meanwhile crosses to William Buck after the past four years working both sell-side and buy-side across a range of sectors at Equity & Advisory, a specialist M&A and commercial advisory firm based in Adelaide, before which he spent five years in the corporate tax and finance teams at KPMG.
“John and Matt are valuable additions and their expertise and leadership will be instrumental as we continue to pave a strong growth path in the years ahead,” Nicholls said, noting that her own professional milestone comes during “a period of incredible momentum” for the local practice with a near doubling in the value of completed transactions over the past financial year.
M&A outlook
In concrete terms, that figure was over $200 million across ten deals. Nicholls continued; “In the past few months, we have received a strong amount of inquiries from buyers and sellers. On the buy side, there’s a lot of dry powder in the SA market right now, particularly from private equity funds, while on the sell-side there’s a large number of local baby boomers preparing to exit or retire.”
William Buck noted that the recent rise in demand brings the total value of the transactions its local team had advised on since its 2013 formation to around $620 million, with half of that number achieved in just the past two years and Nicholls confident that, with interest rates still relatively low, the short-to-medium term outlook for the local M&A market remains positive.
