Cain Brothers Newsletters: Industry Insights
“Industry Insights” is a bi-weekly email newsletter published by Cain Brothers, a division of KeyBanc Capital Markets. The newsletter features innovative and original perspectives about healthcare services, healthcare IT, and life sciences from our team of experienced investment bankers. Read the latest newsletter content below, and subscribe to start receiving the newsletter in your inbox.
A Year in Review and the Year Ahead
2025 saw an improved market for capital raising and strategic transactions. Optimism going into the year was quite high, bolstered by an almost 25% gain in the S&P 500 during 2024 and a stabilized interest rate environment. But a new administration with broad ambitions generated a significant amount of uncertainty, and M&A activity did not materialize as anticipated in the first half of the year. Nevertheless, since the market downturn in April, the S&P was up 36% through the end of 2025, 10-year Treasury yields are down to 4.1%, and M&A activity, particularly for large cap transactions, was up year over year.
As we enter 2026, the markets continue to support investment and transactions, and current consensus is the backlog of long-held PE investments should manifest in more M&A activity, particularly in the middle market as success with larger cap transactions percolates throughout the rest of the market. Despite a fertile environment, buyers have a high hurdle and lower tolerance for risk as compared to the market euphoria of a few years ago. Transactions are getting done but taking more time due to more thorough diligence and negotiation.
Healthcare transacting was particularly impacted by the new administration focused on government efficiency, entitlement spending, healthcare policy, and trade. The uncertainty and rapidity of change created by DOGE, the Big Beautiful Bill, new leadership at HHS, immigration enforcement, and the aggressive use of trade policy as a tool to impact geopolitical priorities impacted healthcare transacting. M&A volumes were down in 2025 and while we are still discovering the impact of the administration’s policies, the pressure to find more efficiency, most likely through investment and scale, continues.
Despite continued uncertainty, healthcare remains an area of opportunity for investment. Recent increases in capital raising for biopharma should translate into more activity for pharma services, and scale and capital continues to drive strategic activity for payers, yet a large customer segment (i.e. employers) looks for alternatives to effectively address unsustainable health benefit costs relative to wages. Technology should generate efficiency and expand capacity, and the large data sets generated by healthcare are ripe for insights for AI to uncover. Provider consolidation has yielded mixed results, yet scale remains a necessary attribute for long-term success, and the challenge of bringing to bear the benefits of scale to an intimate and highly individualized provider/patient encounter is difficult. The issues encountered in provider consolidation do not negate the investment premise – they only underscore the need for time and financial leeway to navigate the unforeseen issues that inevitably arise when taking on challenging endeavors like provider group mergers.
Cain Brothers continues to lean into healthcare and broaden our areas of expertise. We have added new senior bankers to our ranks, including Thad Davis and Rishi Soni on our healthtech team, Mark Webber and Jason Moran to our growing life sciences practice, Jeff Danesis to our provider team, and Mike Tierney joined the health systems practice. We also welcomed the returns of seasoned senior bankers Todd Rudsenske and Zach Kau. Todd continues to focus on behavioral health as well as senior industry relationships, and Zach will co-head healthcare public finance as well as spend more time within our health system M&A practice.
We continue to invest and support innovative opportunities for industry leaders to meet and network. We will see many of you in San Francisco in January, spend time with our life sciences clients in the mountains this Spring, reconvene in June at our Nashville conference with leading health systems and their partners, and continue to support our private company conference in October.
Finally, we are kicking off the new year with the resumption of Cain Brothers’ Industry Insights emails, the leading bi-weekly summary of healthcare commentary and market color. Over the last year, we have continued to publish and post new issues to LinkedIn, but suspended emails while upgrading our infrastructure and updating our mailing list. Access to our library of prior issues is available on our website.
We look forward to working with you in 2026.
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