Happy Friday, Hubsters. MK Flynn here to close out the week with today’s Wire. Refinitiv is out this morning with a sobering report on Q1. The headline finds both the good and the bad: “Despite falling 17 percent, global M&A hits seventh consecutive US$1 trillion+ quarter.” Filling the gap. Let’s take a look at an interview I did with a prominent investor in the booming fintech sector. Lovell Minnick Partners has invested in the fintech and tech-enabled services markets for over 20 years. Last month, the Radnor, Pennsylvania-based private equity firm made a significant investment in STP Investment Services, a tech-enabled investment operations service provider. I asked LMP managing partner Steven Pierson to share his thoughts on the STP deal in particular and on investing in fintech companies in general. Pierson joined LMP in 2016, chairs the firm’s partner committee and serves as a member of the investment committee. He came to LMP from UBS, where he served as the head of FIG investment banking Americas and global head of financial technology and services. Here are some excerpts from my Q&A with Pierson: What’s driving private equity-backed deals in fintech? If you look at the financial services market 20 years ago, you’ll see that it was centered around and controlled by banks delivering proprietary technology and services to the marketplace. Due to the financial crisis, followed by capital constraints and decreased tech spend, banks have struggled to make notable improvements to their tech and tech-enabled services. This inability to adapt, while other sectors have dramatically raised consumer expectations, has left the door open for innovative software developers and fintech platforms to fill the gap by providing a better solution to the end client, as well as complete internal tasks far more efficiently than in the past. Today, financial services represents just 10 percent of US private equity investments, but players in the space are increasingly seeing this technological transformation occur across the entire fintech value chain and backing businesses sitting in the middle of these trends, while also benefiting from an extremely large total addressable market. Read the full interview here. On the move. Here are a couple of significant people moves we’ve learned about over the last couple of days: Roman Krislav has joined lower middle-market Miami PE firm Boyne Capital as managing director, a spokesperson for the firm told PE Hub. Aaron Wolfe, a senior executive at Arsenal Capital who helped lead the firm’s specialty industrials team, left to start his own shop, two sources told Buyouts. Recommend reading: Be sure to check out our annual package celebrating the best exits of 2021. Buyouts and PE Hub named Deals of the Year winners in six categories: Large Market, Small Market, Turnarounds, Secondaries, International and the overall Deal of the Year (falling under the Mid-Market category this year). Winners include Francisco Partners, EQT and more. Start here to read the full coverage. On that happy note, I’ll sign off. Wishing you a good weekend, MK Read the full wire commentary on PE Hub ... | 