With NYSE Euronext and in advanced merger discussions, many have speculated that NYSE could get upwards of $40 a share, but one former CFO of NYSE says the company could get an even higher price.
"On average deals like these, you get about 10 percent, in terms of cost synergies. Look, I think it's low—this thing could go above $40 dollars pretty easily. But everybody's going to have to see how they feel about the certainty of the deal getting done, and the regulators are going to play into it," Amy Butte, founder and CEO of TILE Financial and former CFO of the New York Stock Exchange, told CNBC's "The Strategy Session" on Friday.
"It's a cost saving deal, it's actually 300 million euros, so a little over 400 million U.S. dollars," Butte added.
"At the end of the day ...there's a lot of pride that goes with it and we've seen that play out in the press," she said, "so even though intellectually this might make sense, emotionally this is a hard deal to swallow."
"Back in 2005, we sat in the board room and we did game theory. We said, 'how big do we have to be so we're the buyer, not the buyee.' And we looked at all the different players that are out there and said what are the potential combinations," Butte said.
"At that time, we said we need to buy more, so that we're not being bought by Deutsche—part of that concern was how the regulators would respond, how the American public would respond," she added.
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