Houlihan Lokey, Inc., an investment banking company, provides merger and acquisition (M&A), capital market, financial restructuring and liability management, and financial and valuation advisory services worldwide. The
Through its offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East, the company serves a diverse set of clients worldwide, including corporations, financial sponsors and government agencies. The company provides its financial professionals with an integrated platfo...
Houlihan Lokey, Inc., an investment banking company, provides merger and acquisition (M&A), capital market, financial restructuring and liability management, and financial and valuation advisory services worldwide. The
Through its offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East, the company serves a diverse set of clients worldwide, including corporations, financial sponsors and government agencies. The company provides its financial professionals with an integrated platform that enables them to deliver meaningful and differentiated advice to its clients. The company advises its clients on critical strategic and financial decisions, employing a rigorous analytical approach coupled with deep product and industry expertise. The company markets its services through its product areas, its industry groups and its Financial Sponsors group, serving its clients in three primary business practices: Corporate Finance (CF), encompassing M&A and capital markets advisory, Financial Restructuring (FR) including restructurings both out-of-court and in formal bankruptcy or insolvency proceedings, and Financial and Valuation Advisory (FVA), including financial opinions and a variety of valuation and financial consulting services.
The company is committed to a set of principles that serve as the backbone of its success. Independent advice and intellectual rigor, combined with consistent senior-level involvement, are hallmarks of the company's commitment to client service. The company's entrepreneurial culture engenders its flexibility to collaborate across its business practices to provide world-class solutions for its clients. The company's broad-based employee ownership serves to align the interests of employees and shareholders and further encourages a collaborative environment where its CF, FR, and FVA professionals work together productively and creatively to solve its clients' most critical financial issues.
As of March 31, 2025, the company had a team of 1,893 financial professionals across offices globally, serving more than 2,000 clients annually over the past several years, ranging from closely held companies to Fortune Global 500 corporations.
Advisory Services
The company provides its financial professionals with an integrated platform that enables them to deliver meaningful and differentiated advice to its clients. The company markets its services through its three business practices, its industry groups and its Financial Sponsors group, who work collaboratively to deliver comprehensive solutions and seamless execution for its clients. This marketing effort is combined with an extensive network of referral relationships with law firms, consulting firms, accounting firms and other professional services firms that have been developed by the company's financial professionals who maintain those relationships as potential referral sources and direct clients across all of its business practices.
Corporate Finance
As of March 31, 2025, the company had 240 CF Managing Directors utilizing a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to provide its clients with extensive industry and product expertise and global reach in a wide variety of M&A and capital markets transactions. The company competes with boutique firms focused on particular industries or geographies as well as other global independent investment banks and bulge-bracket firms.
The company continues to expand and deepen its specialized industry capabilities through a combination of internal promotion, external hires and acquisitions. While the majority of the company's engagements are in the United States, it continues to enhance its presence in other geographies, including Europe, Asia, South America, Australia and the Middle East.
The company’s CF activities comprises two significant categories:
Mergers and Acquisitions: The company has extensive expertise in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and other related advisory services for a broad range of United States and international clients. The company's CF professionals have relationships with thousands of companies and financial sponsors, providing it with valuable insights into a wide variety of relevant markets.
The company's M&A business consists primarily of sell-side and buy-side engagements. The company provides advice and services to a diverse set of parties, including public and private company executives, boards of directors, special committees and financial sponsors.
The company's global industry group model with embedded M&A capabilities brings sector-specific knowledge, experience and relationships to its clients, allowing it to provide differentiated expert advice and connect buyers and sellers on a global basis.
Capital Solutions: The company provides global financing solutions and capital-raising advisory services for a broad range of corporate and private equity clients across most industry sectors, from large, publicly-held, multinational corporations to financial sponsors to privately-held companies founded and run by entrepreneurs.
The company's capital Solutions professionals leverage a wide array of longstanding, senior-level lender and investor relationships, including with traditional and non-traditional direct capital providers (such as institutional credit funds, commercial finance companies, business development companies, insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, global asset managers, special situations investors and structured equity providers). As the traditional syndicated capital markets have become increasingly complex and more regulated, the private capital markets have developed to provide an alternative source of flexible capital that can be tailored to meet clients’ needs.
The company's objective is to help clients create a capital structure that enables them to achieve their strategic priorities on the best terms available in the market, which often involves raising more than one type of capital.
Financial Restructuring
The company's FR group has earned a reputation for being the advisor of choice for many of the largest and most complex restructuring and liability management transactions, offering knowledge, experience, and creativity to address challenging situations. The company operates in all major worldwide markets as debt issuances have increased around the world. The company's FR professionals bring to bear deep expertise and experience in restructurings in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Given the depth and breadth of the team’s expertise and the high barriers to entry for this expertise and experience, international and multi-jurisdictional restructurings represent an attractive opportunity for the company's FR group.
The group employs an interdisciplinary approach to engagements, calling upon the expertise of the company's industry groups, Capital Solutions group, and Financial Sponsors group, and drawing on the worldwide resources of the FR team as each situation may require. The FR group has deep experience evaluating complex, highly leveraged situations. In addition to comprehensive financial restructuring and liability management transactions, the company works with distressed companies on changes of control, asset sales, and other M&A and capital markets activities, many times involving the sale of a company or its assets quickly, and in contested or litigious settings on expedited timeframes. The company advises companies and creditor constituencies at all levels of the capital structure, in both out-of-court negotiations and in formal bankruptcy or insolvency proceedings. The company's experience, geographic diversity, and size allow it to provide the immediate attention and staffing required for time-sensitive and mission-critical restructuring and liability management assignments, making it a valued partner for its clients.
The company's dedicated team is active throughout business cycles. The company's FR practice serves as a countercyclical hedge across macroeconomic cycles, with increasing levels of restructuring opportunities often occurring during periods when demand for M&A and capital markets advisory services may be reduced. In robust macroeconomic environments, demand for the services of the company's FR team generally continues due to opportunities arising from secular and cyclical disruptions in certain industries. The company's geographic diversity and global market leadership allow its FR group to maintain significant levels of activity even when the U.S. capital markets are vibrant.
The company's broad base of clients and its extensive experience allow it to understand the dynamics of each restructuring situation and strengthen its negotiating strategies by providing it insight into the needs, attitudes and positions of all parties-in-interest. The company's clients include companies, bondholder groups, financial institutions, banks and other secured creditor groups, trade creditors, official Chapter 11 creditors' committees, equity holders, acquirers, equity sponsors, and other parties-in-interest involved with financially challenged companies.
The company’s FR professionals work closely with its CF and FVA professionals to provide holistic advice and services.
Financial and Valuation Advisory
The company has developed a reputation as a thought-leader in the field of valuation, and its professionals produce influential studies and publications, which are recognized and valued throughout the financial industry.
The company's core competencies in its FVA practice are based in its deep technical financial, accounting and tax skills. These capabilities include the company's ability to analyze and value companies, security interests, and different types of assets, including complex illiquid investments, as well as its ability to analyze, diligence and structure the financial and tax aspects of public and private transactions. The company is organized around different service lines as each line has different regulatory or compliance specializations, as well as different marketing channels.
Regulation
Houlihan Lokey Capital, Inc. (Houlihan Lokey Capital), one of the company's wholly-owned subsidiaries, through which it conducts its CF, FR, and transaction opinion businesses in the United States, is registered as a broker-dealer with the SEC and is subject to regulation and oversight by the SEC. In addition, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA), a self-regulatory organization that is subject to oversight by the SEC, adopts and enforces rules governing the conduct and examines the activities of its broker-dealer member firms, including Houlihan Lokey Capital. State securities regulators also have regulatory or oversight authority over Houlihan Lokey Capital in those states in which it does business.
Broker-dealers are subject to regulations that cover all aspects of the securities business, including sales methods, trade practices, the financing of customers' purchases, capital structure, record-keeping and the conduct and qualifications of directors, officers and employees. In particular, as a registered broker-dealer and member of a self-regulatory organization, the company is subject to the SEC's uniform net capital rule, Rule 15c3-1. Rule 15c3-1 specifies the minimum level of net capital a broker-dealer must maintain and also requires that a significant part of a broker-dealer's assets be kept in relatively liquid form.
Houlihan Lokey Financial Advisors, Inc. (HLFA), the company's wholly owned subsidiary, provides valuation services and related financial analyses of various businesses and types of assets which are used by clients in connection with mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, recapitalizations, dispute analysis, and estate, gift, and income tax support.
The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the Treasury Department's implementing federal regulations require the company, as a financial institution, to establish and maintain an anti-money-laundering program. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a part of the United States Department of the Treasury, is charged with protecting the financial system from illicit use, combating money laundering, and promoting national security through financial intelligence. FinCEN's customer due diligence rule requires certain financial institutions, including broker-dealers, to obtain, verify, and record certain client information, including, in some cases, beneficial ownership, as well as to maintain adequate internal controls to prevent and detect possible violations of anti-money laundering rules. In addition, in connection with its administration and enforcement of economic and trade sanctions based on United States foreign policy and national security goals, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) publishes a list of individuals and companies owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries. It also lists individuals, groups, and entities, such as terrorists and narcotics traffickers, designated under programs that are not country-specific. Collectively, such individuals and companies are called Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs). Assets of SDNs are blocked, and the company is generally prohibited from dealing with them. In addition, OFAC administers a number of comprehensive sanctions and embargoes that target certain countries, governments and geographic regions. The company is generally prohibited from engaging in transactions involving any country, government, entity, or person that is subject to such comprehensive sanctions.
The company's European advisory business is conducted primarily through its subsidiaries and or one of their branches, namely, as regards the provision of regulated investment services:
in the United Kingdom, Houlihan Lokey UK Limited (HL UK), which is organized under the laws of England and Wales; and
in Germany, Houlihan Lokey (Europe) GmbH (HLE GmbH) a private limited company organized under the laws of such jurisdiction with branches in England, France, and Spain in addition to its main office in Germany.
The company provides unregulated corporate finance advisory services through other subsidiaries in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain.
HL UK is authorized and regulated by the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The current U.K. regulatory regime is based upon the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA), together with secondary legislation and other rules made under FSMA and other relevant legislation. These rules govern the company’s financial advisory business in the United Kingdom, including regulated activities, record keeping, approval standards for individuals, anti-money laundering and periodic reporting.
HLE GmbH, through which the company now conducts its regulated business in the EU, was established in order to mitigate the effects of the United Kingdom ceasing to be a member of the EU (Brexit) on the company's European business, further to the end of the Brexit transitional period and the withdrawal of passport rights in favor of other HL entities. HLE GmbH is approved to conduct regulated investment services by the German regulatory authority, Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht.
HLE GmbH has exercised the appropriate European financial services passport rights to provide cross-border services into all other members of the EEA from Germany and to establish branches in France and Spain. These passport rights derive from the pan-European regime established by the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which regulates the provision of investment services and ancillary activities throughout the EEA.
Houlihan Lokey (MEA Financial Advisory) Ltd. is licensed under Article 48 of the Regulatory Law 2004 by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) to provide certain regulated financial services from its office in the Dubai International Financial Centre. Such entity is subject to DFSA administered law and regulation (most notably certain applicable modules of the DFSA Rulebook), and individuals within it carrying out licensed functions (essentially senior management roles) are required to be approved by DFSA to so act.
Houlihan Lokey (Australia) Pty Limited is licensed and subject to regulation by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission and must also comply with applicable provisions of the Corporations Act 2001 and other Australian legal and regulatory requirements, including capital adequacy rules, customer protection rules, and compliance with other applicable trading and investment banking regulations.
In Hong Kong, the Securities and Futures Commission (the SFC) regulates the company's subsidiary, Houlihan Lokey (China) Limited. The compliance requirements of the SFC include, among other things, various codes of conduct and certain capital requirements. The SFC licenses the activities of the officers, directors, and employees of Houlihan Lokey (China) Limited, and requires the registration of such individuals as licensed representatives.
Houlihan Lokey’s Indian corporate finance and financial and valuation advisory businesses are conducted through Houlihan Lokey Advisory (India) Private Limited, which is licensed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
In Japan, financial advisory services are provided by Houlihan Lokey Corporation, HL Succession Corporation, and BIZIT Inc., none of which conducts regulated activities in Japan.
In Singapore, Houlihan Lokey conducts its business through Houlihan Lokey (Singapore) Private Limited, which is registered with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) as an exempt corporate finance advisor and is therefore able to provide exempt corporate finance advisory services to accredited investors only, subject to compliance with regulation governing such status as applicable from time to time in Singapore.
In Brazil, Houlihan Lokey operates principally a financial restructuring business, which provides unregulated financial advisory services through Houlihan Lokey Assessoria Financeira Ltda.
The company is also subject to laws and regulations prohibiting corrupt or illegal payments to government officials and other persons, including the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the UK Bribery Act. The company maintains policies, procedures and internal controls intended to comply with those regulations.
History
Houlihan Lokey, Inc. was founded in 1972. The company was incorporated in 1972.
