JPMorgan Chase & Co. said April presented notable headwinds for corporate deal activity as clients paused planned transactions amid geopolitical uncertainty related to the Iran war, according to Anu Aiyengar, the bank’s global head of advisory and mergers and acquisitions.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in a Bloomberg Television interview, Aiyengar described how some potential buyers and sellers elected to wait rather than press ahead. "When you see that it’s about to get solved you may say, ’You know what? Let me just wait for a few weeks,’" she said. "So there’s been a bit of stop and start that has happened in April."
The pause translated into a choppy month for deal flow, with timing decisions by clients disrupting planned transactions. The bank highlighted that market participants are increasingly valuing scale, a dynamic that is shifting attention toward larger transactions and away from smaller deals.
Aiyengar emphasized that this premium on scale has altered deal size composition. "Everybody is like: ’Let’s go big, let’s go big, let’s do 10-plus-billion-dollar deals,’ which is what we call mega-deals," she said. As a result, deals valued below $2 billion have declined in prevalence, while the universe of very large transactions has expanded.
She provided concrete counts to illustrate that shift: there were 71 mega-deals in 2025, and 30 such deals were already completed in the first four months of 2026, according to her remarks.
Context and implications
The bank’s assessment points to two contemporaneous trends: a short-term interruption of deal activity linked to geopolitical uncertainty, and a parallel structural tilt toward larger transactions as market participants place a premium on scale. Both trends were described directly by Aiyengar in her on-the-record remarks.
- Deal timing - Client decisions to pause amid uncertainty produced a stop-and-start pattern in April.
- Deal size - A market emphasis on scale has reduced the share of transactions below $2 billion and elevated demand for 10-plus-billion-dollar deals.
- Recent volume - The count of mega-deals stood at 71 in 2025, with 30 completed in the first four months of 2026.
The comments provided by JPMorgan’s advisory chief outline the immediate challenges in deal execution while documenting the rising prominence of mega-deals in the current market.