Hello, readers! Big mergers and acquisitions are team efforts. But at the very top, a battled-tested senior banker provides critical advice and connections that can determine a transaction's success or failure. Alex Morrell worked with financial data firm MergerLinks to publish our first-ever rainmakers list this week. You can see rankings for the top 20 M&A bankers for North American deals here. Casey Sullivan wrote about how private-equity firms, long reliant on human judgment to pick investments and figure out how to generate the best returns, are finally starting to add formalized data-crunching to the mix.