Piers Johansen

Piers Johansen

London, England, United Kingdom
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About

Piers is global co-head of professional adviser coverage for Aon’s M&A…

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Volunteer Experience

  • Citizenship Foundation Graphic

    Volunteer

    Citizenship Foundation

    - 5 years

    Education

    Volunteer for the Lawyers in Schools initiative, designed to increase young people’s awareness and understanding of the law, involved in class room discussions on the practical relevance and application of the law in every day life.

Publications

  • Minecraft: Tapping the Insurance Market to Enhance Deal-Making

    Lexology’s Getting the Deal Through, Private M&A 2024 (Law Business Research)

    Insights on the M&A insurance market - the emerging, the new & the topical.

    We consider the use of W&I insurance on private equity secondaries, ‘synthetic’ W&I insurance structures and minority stake & phased acquisitions. We also explore recent market innovations designed to improve pricing, cover & deal efficiency and comment on recent case law relating to W&I insurance.

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  • Caveat vendor: M&A insurance in a buyer's market

    Lexology's Getting The Deal Through, Private M&A 2023

    Reflecting on the implications for structuring and arranging M&A insurance in a market shifting from a sellers' to a buyers' market - what clients & advisers should contemplate for their next deal.

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  • Riders on a storm: signs of a hardening M&A insurance market?

    Lexology: Getting The Deal Through, Private M&A 2022

    Blink and you missed it: the snap-back moment in M&A activity from the darkest days of lockdown as deal value across all sectors in EMEA almost doubled on catapulted deal volumes. A similar trajectory in the global M&A market continued through the summer, as the Financial Times reported in early September 2021 that global deal-making reached almost US$4 trillion since the start of the year, approaching the pre-financial crisis record of US$4.3 trillion set in 2007.

    In one sense, it’s a…

    Blink and you missed it: the snap-back moment in M&A activity from the darkest days of lockdown as deal value across all sectors in EMEA almost doubled on catapulted deal volumes. A similar trajectory in the global M&A market continued through the summer, as the Financial Times reported in early September 2021 that global deal-making reached almost US$4 trillion since the start of the year, approaching the pre-financial crisis record of US$4.3 trillion set in 2007.

    In one sense, it’s a familiar scene: a benign macroeconomic environment, buoyant capital markets and heaps of private equity ‘dry powder’ seeking yield. Add a game-changing global pandemic into the mix – surfacing opportunities, catalysing upswings in investment appetite and emboldening corporate strategy (not to mention a deal community mostly cooped up at home!) – and a benevolent M&A deal-making storm brews.

    The flow of insurance capital to meet this demand has continued at an unrelenting pace, with the pool of warranty and indemnity insurance, tax insurance and contingent risk insurance broadening and deepening through the pandemic as new providers of capital –seeking their own yield – entered the market.

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  • M&A insurance: boring uncle or cool cousin? Creating value and inspiring other key deal insights to success

    Lexology: Getting The Deal Through, Private M&A 2021

    The Spectator, a weekly British magazine on politics, culture and current affairs, once mused that ‘[t]he insurance industry is the boring uncle of the financial services family’. And one might, at first, be tempted to conclude that insurance in its classic sense – offering peace of mind, with any financial benefit accruing to the insured only in the event of a successful claim – has no obvious place in the M&A playbook.

    However, transposing insurance and related instruments into an M&A…

    The Spectator, a weekly British magazine on politics, culture and current affairs, once mused that ‘[t]he insurance industry is the boring uncle of the financial services family’. And one might, at first, be tempted to conclude that insurance in its classic sense – offering peace of mind, with any financial benefit accruing to the insured only in the event of a successful claim – has no obvious place in the M&A playbook.

    However, transposing insurance and related instruments into an M&A context can not only support corporate restructurings, clinch transactions that would otherwise falter and unlock distressed deals: it can also create shareholder value. It’s for these reasons, which we expand on further below, that deal-makers and their advisers now routinely include insurance on their agenda, just as much as operational risk managers, albeit for quite different reasons.

    Ironically, the successful application in M&A of warranty & indemnity, tax and related insurance solutions has also illuminated areas where risk transfer and similar innovations can help drive shareholder value on a standalone (ie, non-deal) basis, for private equity, fund portfolio companies and corporates alike, potentially providing much-needed support where liquidity constraints can otherwise create cash flow pressures on a business, as recently seen at the height of the covid-19 pandemic.

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  • Reflected in the afterglow: M&A insurance and related solutions

    Lexology / Getting The Deal Through, Private M&A 2020

    The application of insurance solutions in M&A finds firmer footing in EMEA in 2019. W&I insurance continues to blaze a trail, heightening awareness of the value arbitrage offered through a relatively cheap cost of insurance capital and prompting more transaction principals to consider risk transfer when looking for their edge in a deal. Corporate insureds continue to convert to M&A insurance and traditional infrastructure investors become more risk transfer focused as they compete for ‘core…

    The application of insurance solutions in M&A finds firmer footing in EMEA in 2019. W&I insurance continues to blaze a trail, heightening awareness of the value arbitrage offered through a relatively cheap cost of insurance capital and prompting more transaction principals to consider risk transfer when looking for their edge in a deal. Corporate insureds continue to convert to M&A insurance and traditional infrastructure investors become more risk transfer focused as they compete for ‘core plus’ assets. Given the disruptive impact of technological change, the need to evaluate cyber and data protection risks is hard to dispute for many transactions and, properly approached, can actively protect deal value.

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  • Creative dealmaking: the rise and continued relevance of M&A insurance

    Getting The Deal Through, Private M&A 2019

    M&A insurance - principally, Warranty & Indemnity (W&I) insurance and tax insurance - continues to thrive in a commercial environment which has been particularly conducive to M&A of late. Relatively benign market conditions favour the former while the increase in complexity of tax rules and a more interventionist approach from tax authorities drives the latter. In the current seller’s market, deal parties are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they use M&A insurance as they vie with…

    M&A insurance - principally, Warranty & Indemnity (W&I) insurance and tax insurance - continues to thrive in a commercial environment which has been particularly conducive to M&A of late. Relatively benign market conditions favour the former while the increase in complexity of tax rules and a more interventionist approach from tax authorities drives the latter. In the current seller’s market, deal parties are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they use M&A insurance as they vie with each other to secure their investments on the buy-side and enhance their returns on exit. This article also examines how a deeper, more mature M&A insurance market is responding to some of the challenges which cross-border M&A presents and offers insight into the key issues when placing W&I insurance in technology deals, recognised by analysts as a current hot sector for EMEA M&A, as well as the top 5 W&I points for buy-side counsel to consider from the outset of any deal.

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Organizations

  • Law Society

    Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales

    - Present

    (Non-practising, with effect from August 2015)

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