Finance

Meet the upstart bank that just took a piece of the biggest deal this year

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Score one for the little guys.

Ducera Partners, the recently formed investment bank led by an ex-Perella Weinberg restructuring banker, will take home a monster payday on the biggest mergers and acquisition deal of 2016. And the boutique bank is barely a year old.

The New York-based bank will bring in about $50 million for its work advising Monsanto, according to Freeman & Co.'s Jeffrey Nassof, who tracks M&A fees for big banks. The payday will happen as long as the St. Louis-based conglomerate sells itself to Germany's Bayer, which offered $122 a share, or $62 billion, to acquire the company early Monday.

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Ducera and Morgan Stanley, listed at Monsanto's website as the lead bank on the transaction, stand to take in up to $110 million for their work selling the company. On the other side of the deal, Credit Suisse and Bank of America Merrill Lynch will represent Bayer — work that will earn them $70 million to $80 million, according to Nassof. Boutique firm Rothschild also has a smaller role on the seller's side, according to statements from Bayer.

It's still been a tough year for Wall Street, with deals down more than 15 percent versus 2015. While boutique banks once represented less than 10 percent of M&A deals before the global financial crisis, that percentage has steadily risen as boutiques like Ducera and Guggenheim Partners are horning in on megadeals after picking seasoned bankers from larger Wall Street firms, according to data from Dealogic.

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It's been a turbulent year for founder Michael Kramer; earlier this year Connecticut police said a woman was believed to have killed herself on his property.

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Kramer's LinkedIn page says he has been a partner with Ducera since June 2015. In fact, so have the rest of the partners at the bank, meaning that Ducera has scored a monster coup within a year of being founded — and not the bank's first. Ducera was chosen to represent a group of Puerto Rico bondholders last year, as part of the nation's debt renegotiations.

In 2015, Kramer was fired and later sued by Joe Perella, who said his former employee "decided to steal," or hire, fellow staffers in a plot that would amount to a Wall Street coup. Kramer countersued.

A voicemail left for Kramer was not returned.