RBC Capital Markets, the corporate and investment-banking arm of the Royal Bank of Canada, said Tuesday that it reached an agreement to acquire Denver-based cable investment banker Daniels & Associates for an undisclosed sum.
The deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of next year, will make Daniels -- the oldest cable investment banker in the country -- a unit of RBC Capital.
Daniels, which will change its name to RBC Daniels after the deal closes, will continue to be based in Denver and New York. All of its employees, including chairman and CEO Brian Deevy, will remain with the company. Deevy will become CEO of RBC Daniels and current Daniels president and chief operating officer Brad Busse will remain in those posts in the new entity.
In an interview, Deevy said he has had conversations over the past five years with RBC, and they heated up at the beginning of this year.
Daniels, founded by cable legend Bill Daniels in 1958, had been at the forefront of some of the larger cable deals in the heyday of the consolidation craze of the late 1990s, representing Bresnan Communications in the sale of its 690,000 subscribers to Charter Communications in 2000 for $3.1 billion in stock and assumed debt; Peak Cable’s sale of 319,000 subscribers in Las Vegas to Cox Communications that year; and Cox’s $2.7 billion purchase of Multimedia Cablevision’s 525,000 customers in Kansas, Oklahoma and North Carolina, also in 2000.
Lately, while cable deals have been fewer, Daniels has focused on smaller system sales and deals involving wireless, Internet and the like.
The combination with RBC Capital will allow Daniels to provide a package of debt financing and other products to clients. “This gives us a lot of new tools,” Deevy said. “We think we’ll be able to chase a number of new opportunities.”
