US still offering that gateway to opportunity, power and influence

WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROADMartyn Curragh, Leader of US transaction services, PwC

“IF YOU’RE good enough, you’re old enough.” That’s how Belfast native Martyn Curragh sums up the attitude to career progression in his adopted country.

With PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in New York since 1998, the accountant has just been promoted to leader of the firm’s US transaction services practice, where he will head a team of 160 partners and 800 accountants.

The Ulsterman appears to have proved himself good enough.

After an economics degree at Queen’s University in Belfast, Curragh joined accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand, where he took his professional exams.

Not content to be a lifer in the Belfast office, he left to join Northern Ireland’s Industrial Development Board (IDB), meeting potential inward investors in the US and Asia at a time when peace had just started to break out in his home town.

After a brief stint in corporate banking with Northern Bank, Curragh moved back to Coopers & Lybrand with the ambition of making partner.

One of his seniors suggested he try the US for a few years. His appetite for travel already whetted with IDB, Curragh moved within the firm to the company’s New York office.

That year, 1998, was also the year Coopers & Lybrand joined Price Waterhouse to become PwC and, in two years, Curragh was made partner at PwC’s New York office. He feels that being Irish in America has been an asset. “It’s a tremendous door-opener,” he says. “When people hear your accent, it creates an opportunity to have a conversation.

“If you could take everyone from the island of Ireland and drop them into the US for a week, they’d all realise just how proud everyone is to have any kind of association with Ireland.”

A “couple of years” in the US has turned into 12 that have seen him become a seasoned mergers and acquisitions specialist. Serving both private equity and corporate clients, his bread and butter has been buy-side due diligence, accounting and tax structuring and post-merger integration – involving him in transactions which his CV says have aggregated over $30 billion in sectors such as aerospace, media and publishing.

Recent years have been leaner, and Curragh says he noticed the dip about two years ago. “In the US market, private equity investors pretty much disappeared from the market for a time because of the lack of available capital. Activity fell sharply, and the only deals getting done were by corporates that had strong balance sheets with cash on them,” he says.

His PwC appointment seems to have coincided with a return to form, with the mergers and acquisitions business starting to recover its mojo.

“Deal sizes remain smaller than what they were two years ago, but the leverage that’s now available in the market is quite surprising,” he says. “We’ve seen a pick-up again in the last three to four months – some say that’s being stimulated by uncertainty around changes in US tax rules, but I think so long as the economic fundamentals continue to show signs of improvement, the market will continue to be pretty vibrant.”

With more of a culture of caveat emptor in the air now, has his role changed? “Buyers are asking for more access and information today than perhaps they were two years ago,” he says.

With regard to company valuations, he says there has been little depression. “Valuations have not adjusted downwards significantly. The banks are now willing again to allow private equity firms to use pretty reasonable levels of leverage.”

With fewer deals around, he describes competition for deals as “pretty intense”.

While Curragh’s migration from Ireland in the late 1990s was a career choice, it is becoming a necessity for many of his profession. With the ESRI predicting 120,000 people will emigrate next year, does he have any advice for young Irish accountants following him?

“They should feel very confident in the quality of their qualification,” he says. “I recently hired five people from the South of Ireland into our transaction services practice, and those people settle in very quickly and they do very well.”

For those making the move there are upsides, he says: “Working in the US, people get given opportunity and responsibility more rapidly than I was used to in Ireland.”

Describing the private equity industry in the US he says, “You’ve got people in their late 20s and early 30s having positions of real responsibility and influence. They are given the opportunity to stretch themselves and to see how far they can go. If you’re good enough, you’re old enough – that’s my sense here.”