UBS Investment Bank’s Katie Klosterman: Offshore transactions generate interest

From the perspective of her role as CoHead of UBS’s Financial Institutions Team, UBS Investment Bank Managing Director, Katie Klosterman says she’s more bullish this year than she has been about the local deal market.

In this excerpt from our 2025 ANZ Women In Dealmaking M&A Outlook Report, which features insights from 12 of Australia’s leading female dealmakers, Katie shares her optimistic outlook on the Australian deal market in 2025, key trends she is observing within the financial services sector, and her perspectives on cross-border M&A and fostering diversity within investment banking.

“We’ve had much more momentum of deal activity coming into this year. There was a fair amount of asset management activity in the back half of last year and I expect that will continue. There’s significant interest in alternative asset managers and private credit. At the same time, you’ve seen some traditional asset managers struggling with outflows and fee compression. Those two things make it ripe for M&A to diversify business models and provide continued growth in the alternative space,” says Katie.

“On the wealth side, we’re seeing growth particularly in the high-net-worth segment, along with large amounts of superannuation assets flipping from accumulation into retirement phase. In the advisory space, you have this hole left by the Royal Commission. So again, a demand and supply imbalance. My hope is companies look to M&A to address those needs.”

Public to private activity is another theme to watch, with a long list of companies on private equity watch lists.

“I’m hoping we get some momentum in this area, driven by deal sentiment rather than change in any hard external factors. It’s about getting strategic or the private equity acquirers to have enough risk appetite to lean in on those deals. There are a lot of companies on the watch list, because in financial services, scale is extremely important,” she says.

Katie notes in financial services, there is a number of potential targets going through transitions, or that need to go through transformation programs, which are vulnerable to being taken over from a share price perspective. “For these businesses, there’s better value from a private perspective versus public market perspective, which tends to be very shortterm focused. The public markets don’t value longer-term transformation in the same way a private acquirer would.”

Cross border M&A will also be in the spotlight. Offshore divestments have historically been part of the local financial services sector, a theme that continued last year and that will continue into 2025.

“I’m intrigued at the possibility of outbound M&A, particularly for companies that are very well set up in Australia, but that are looking for growth. There is a history of Australian financial institutions going offshore and then divesting their offshore operations, so companies need to be prudent. But that doesn’t mean you should never go offshore and only focus on Australia. If you have a robust Australian business well-suited to multiple jurisdictions, and you approach offshore markets in a prudent way, it can be a way for companies to continue to grow and diversify,” she explains.

Turning to her own career, Katie says she fell into investment banking almost by accident. “I studied financial engineering at university in the US, which was naturally interesting to me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the course was a feeder into investment banking.”

She says the people she works with every day have kept her in the role. “I get to work with a lot of very talented, driven people and I enjoy coming to work every day to spend time with them. It’s also very intellectually challenging and stimulating."

Katie says there’s an opportunity to better market a career in investment banking to females. “Most of our interns and grads come from the same majors at the same unis. But that doesn’t do us any favours from a diversity perspective and that’s diversity in gender but also in experiences and outlooks.”

She says we need to set up better infrastructure to train people from different backgrounds to work in investment banking. “We need to have much more focus on providing everyone with the right infrastructure on day one to put everyone on a level playing field ASAP.”