There is a peculiar kind of writing that begins only after everyone in the room has agreed that every word matters. A merger is about to be announced. An activist has arrived. A company is preparing to list its shares, restructure its obligations, or explain a crisis that has already escaped the conference room. The lawyers have language. The bankers have numbers. The executives have conviction, and sometimes nerves. Andrew Cole’s work is to make those elements intelligible to people who were not in the room.
Cole is deputy global CEO of FGS Global and co-head of its Global Transaction & Financial Communications practice. The title is large; the craft underneath it is precise. His assignments range from long-term positioning to mergers and acquisitions, activist defense, IPOs, restructurings, and crises. These are moments when a company cannot merely publish information. It has to make a case, often to several audiences at once, while the clock is running and rival interpretations are already forming.
His route into that work was not a dramatic leap. It was a long education in the same demanding corner of communications. Cole earned a B.A. in English from Connecticut College in 1997, began his career at Gavin Anderson & Co., then joined Sard Verbinnen & Co. as a junior associate in 1998. He stayed for 23 years. By the time SVC combined with Finsbury Glover Hering in 2021, he was co-president and a member of the firm’s board. The new enterprise named him deputy global CEO.
A career built in one long sentence
The progression matters because financial communications rewards accumulated judgment. A proxy contest teaches what happens when two sides argue over the same facts. A transaction teaches that employees and shareholders can read the same announcement with entirely different anxieties. An IPO turns anticipation into a public asset. A restructuring removes the luxury of vague reassurance. Every assignment adds another clause to the sentence.
Graduates from Connecticut College with a B.A. in English and begins in communications at Gavin Anderson.
Joins Sard Verbinnen & Co. as a junior associate.
Serves as SVC co-president and a member of its board.
Is named deputy global CEO in the combination with Finsbury Glover Hering.
Co-leads FGS Global’s transaction and financial communications practice from New York.
The public traces of that apprenticeship are easy to overlook. In 2006, Cole’s name appeared in proxy materials during a Lionsgate board fight. It surfaced on announcements involving an unsolicited proposal for Emulex in 2009, the completion of CPEX Pharmaceuticals’ sale in 2011, and the $17 billion acquisition of athenahealth announced in 2021. He is rarely the subject of those documents. He sits where the communication adviser often sits: in the contact line at the bottom, available when the headline produces questions.
That position is less glamorous than the boardroom mythology of deals, and more revealing. A contact line is a promise that somebody will pick up. It places a human being at the point where a polished announcement meets an unscripted inquiry.
One announcement, six different questions
Cole’s public comments return to a theme: a deal no longer belongs only to investors. In his assessment of M&A activity during the first half of 2024, he pointed to cross-border transactions, transformational deals, and more private-equity activity. Then he moved to the harder part. Effective communication, he said, had to work “in concert with all key stakeholders” - investors, employees, regulators, and customers.
“In every deal, the importance of communicating effectively in concert with all key stakeholders - from investors to employees, regulators and customers - has been essential to success.”Andrew Cole on M&A, 2024
By 2026, his list had widened again to include media and government leadership. This is not stakeholder theory as decoration. Each audience can alter the outcome. Shareholders can reject the economics. Employees can make a strategic rationale feel hollow if they learn about it badly. Customers can leave. Regulators can slow or stop a transaction. Political leaders can redefine it in public. Reporters can discover the phrase that management hoped would remain a footnote.
The practical problem is that these groups do not share a clock. Markets react in seconds. Employees remember how they first heard for years. Regulatory processes can last months. A useful message therefore has to survive different time horizons without changing its essential meaning. It must be brief enough for the first alert, sturdy enough for scrutiny, and human enough not to sound as though a committee sanded away every verb.
When the adviser became part of the deal
The 2021 combination of SVC and Finsbury Glover Hering gave Cole an unusual professional vantage point. A firm known for advising companies through mergers was itself merging. SVC brought deep roots in corporate and financial special situations. Finsbury Glover Hering brought a wider international platform spanning financial communications, public affairs, reputation, and government relations. The announcement placed Cole among the senior leaders of the combined company, as deputy global CEO and, initially, one of its North America co-CEOs.
For an adviser, becoming part of the transaction is clarifying. The abstract stakeholder map suddenly has names you know. The question of culture stops being a paragraph in a plan and becomes the experience of colleagues deciding where they fit. The promises made at announcement have to survive integration. Cole’s own career bridged the predecessor and the successor: he did not discard the apprenticeship; he carried it into a larger room.
The recognition that followed is specific to the sort of work he does. Lawdragon listed Cole among its Global 100 Leaders in Legal Strategy & Consulting in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, identifying crisis communications as his discipline. His FGS biography also notes recognition from Business Insider and MergerLinks. Meanwhile, the transaction practice he co-leads has occupied the top of recent Mergermarket tables by deal count and value. Those rankings belong to a global team; Cole’s role is to help that team operate as one.
The market returns, with new tools attached
Cole’s 2025 video briefings offer a glimpse of his working vocabulary. He described a global resurgence in IPOs led by the United States and Asia, with industrial, energy, AI-related technology, and fintech companies helping drive activity. He noted the renewed presence of SPACs and more sponsor-backed businesses coming to market. The examples ranged from Swiss Marketplace Group in Europe to FWD Group in Hong Kong, Chime in the United States, and an Indonesian confectionery company.
The geography is important. A global transaction is not a domestic announcement with translated punctuation. Markets have different histories, regulations, media habits, and tolerances for risk. The same company may need to explain itself in financial, political, and cultural terms at once. FGS’s scale gives Cole colleagues in those markets; his job is to connect local fluency to one coherent case.
One briefing addressed AI directly. The technology can help assemble information and test approaches, but high-stakes communication still turns on judgment: what matters, what is premature, what is legally possible, and what a person will believe. Speed is useful. Sequence remains decisive.
Maine, Manhattan, and the off-hours track
Cole’s official biography loosens its tie when it reaches life beyond work. He grew up in Maine. He is a husband and father of two. He travels, hikes, and fishes, but adds that he loves city time too. He supports cultural, educational, and environmental organizations; his pro bono work has included Education Through Music and Year Up.
Then comes the detail an editor circles: he writes, records, and occasionally performs music. It is tempting to turn that into a tidy metaphor, so let us resist tidiness and keep only what fits. Songs care about cadence. They are changed by the order in which information arrives. They leave room for an audience to complete the meaning. All of that is true of an announcement, though few announcements improve with a guitar solo.
The outdoors offers its own less theatrical connection. Fishing and hiking reward preparation, attention to conditions, and an honest reading of terrain. They punish the belief that a plan can compel the environment. So do markets. So do reporters. So do employees who have just been told that everything is changing and nothing will change.
Cole’s career is distinctive not because he repeatedly reinvented himself, but because he stayed close to one difficult problem as it grew. The media fragmented. Stakeholders gained more channels and more leverage. Deals crossed more borders. Political and regulatory scrutiny moved nearer to the center of corporate strategy. A junior associate’s job became an executive’s map of interlocking audiences.
The announcement is still only the visible part. Behind it is the choice of who hears first, which claim can bear weight, and whether the language will remain credible after the first day’s enthusiasm has passed. Nearly three decades in, Andrew Cole is still working in that narrow interval between a decision and the world’s response. It is quiet there for about a minute.