How does Centerview win every biotech sell-side?
In the question. They’ve been on almost everything as of late
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Eric Fucking Tokat
tokat
His name was Eric Tokat…
Genuine question, even if he’s making millions upon millions at CVP, what’s stopping him from opening his own shop and making more? Biotech companies go to him directly anyway.
The guy just loves his job, don’t think he particularly cares about the money given that he’s already making an unbelievable amount
He makes 9 figures a year and is president of the best bank. What else does he need
9 figures? you mean 8? Not saying he can’t earn more than jamie, dsol, but would be surprised if he earned 3x+ more than them
Lmao
he's next in line for CEO
what does tokat/cvp do thats so special compared to other strong platforms
Bump that what makes Erik so good ?
bump pls I have superday soon
This made me lol. Wisdom from Tokat isnt going to help you clear an analyst super day bro.
Eric Tokat. He has a big personality, and he got his start building long term relationships with smaller biotechs over a decade ago that the BB’s weren’t wasting their time on.
At this point, CVP and Tokat are the de facto sellside advisor to biotech, and ride on the “no board has ever regretted hiring CVP” reputation. They’ve lost a few mandates in 2025 though so we’ll see
Alright I’m going to give a quick history lesson / fun fact because a lot of people don’t realize how close knit biotech banking is.
A big chunk of what people think of as the modern "Centerview Biotech" lineage basically traces back to the old Merrill Lynch Healthcare platform. After the BofA acquired Merrill Lynch, the whole Merrill healthcare team split into multiple different branches: a third of the team followed Alan Hartman/Mark Robinson lead in exiting to Centerview to start up their healthcare practice (Tokat was a VP at the time), another third of the team exited to Leerink Partners to supercharge their Biotech practice, and then the remaining third of the team followed Tom Davidson to go over to Credit Suisse (he would later found PJT's healthcare group and is now heading up Leerink's biotech M&A team). Looking back the Merrill healthcare team was legit goated.
Similar story with Jefferies. The Jefferies biotech team everyone talks about today has real roots at UBS. Ben Lorello was one of the top biotech bankers on the street and his group at UBS was the most profitable group, but then overnight Jefferies poached him and 30 members of his team ranging from MDs to Analysts to start up their healthcare group (I've linked an interesting article about this below). Also Sage Kelley was a part of the UBS crew who followed Lorello over to Jefferies and he now heads up Cantor's investment banking team (for all of you who aren't familiar with Sage Kelley should search him up, very interesting story). Long story short, after these departures both the BAML and UBS teams were decimated, since in biotech, "platforms" are mostly just senior coverage + relationships migrating over time.
Now to the actual question: why does CVP win every sell-side?
It’s not magic. The simplest answer is boards are terrified of getting sued / second-guessed. In public M&A, you’re basically assuming some form of shareholder litigation and scrutiny is coming no matter what. So boards care a ton about process defensibility and optics. The last thing you want is some plaintiff lawyer arguing "you picked your buddy’s bank" or "you didn’t run a serious process." Hiring Centerview is like buying reputational insurance: if you’re ever asked "why them," the answer is easy, they’re the most established sell-side advisor in biotech and no one gets criticized for picking the default "best" option.
That’s the whole "no IT manager gets fired for choosing Microsoft" thing. Same concept. Even if there are other great banks, CVP is the safest to defend in hindsight.
Also, they’ve built a flywheel. Once you’re known as the default sell-side shop, inbound mandates keep coming, which reinforces the perception, which brings more inbound mandates. It compounds.
The trade-off though (and this is where I think the tide has started to shift a bit) is bandwidth. Eric Tokat can only personally give real attention to so many processes. At some point you’re not getting Tokat running your deal every day, you’re getting a junior MD or director running the process and Tokat is tangentially involved and acting more as a figurehead. That’s not a knock, it’s just how scale works. And buyers definitely notice when a process feels more templated or when senior time is limited.
So yeah - CVP dominance is mostly (1) board defensibility / lawsuit fear, (2) brand + flywheel, and (3) the sell-side-only positioning being easy to explain as "aligned." And if you’ve noticed them losing a few here and there recently, that’s probably the natural consequence of being on everything: eventually some companies want more senior attention, or just want to avoid being one of many. That said, their near lock on being the lead on >$1B sellside mandates has started to loosen a bit in 2H25 with GS, Evercore, Jefferies, Leerink, and MS stepping up.
links to interesting articles (team that went over from UBS to jefferies is on page 14 of the scribd link)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109079240004773207?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DLB-10843?mod=article_inline
https://www.scribd.com/document/16799396/UBS-Complaint-Against-Jeffries…
Goat 🐐
Great insights - I'm an incoming analyst at Leerink and super curious about the broader industry dynamics that you mentioned at the end.
-Looks like GS has been on a tear recently and was on Metsera, Avidity, Cidara, etc. Do you know how GS were able to win those mandates/what has changed in the past few months?
-How does the street currently view Leerink's M&A team? There's a lot of excitement at the firm internally but would love to get some outside perspective.
^i'd argue that Goldman is able to win a lot of deals based on their brand name. Regardless of the senior banker or leadership team they have running the ship, everyone knows who Goldman Sachs is and sometimes companies go with them for this very reason. While I personally wasn't on any of the deals you mentioned above, my group was on one of them and part of the reason I've heard for Centerview not being on these deals is exactly because boards and management teams are growing a bit wary of one firm having a hold on every single biotech sell side, hence why they went with choosing two or more firms as sell side advisors.
As for Leerink's M&A team, I think there's a lot of potential there both from a buyside and sell side M&A perspective once they get the flywheel up and running as they've only been in place for a year now, and new M&A buildouts take time to fully get into gear but they've had some successes in the past year most notably being the solo sell side advisor to Tourmaline. I share more of my thoughts in this thread here about some of the new M&A team buildouts going on at both Leerink and Jefferies: [Early 2026] The Definitive and Data-Driven Healthcare IB Group Rankings (Biopharma + Broader HC) | Wall Street Oasis
Jeez, Merrill HC was loaded with talent.
The real reason is because all these biotechs heard I’m an incoming SA and they want my expertise.
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