Aalap B. Merchant

Aalap B. Merchant is a Managing Director and Co-Head of Technology Investment Banking at D.A. Davidson & Co., where he leads the firm's FinTech and financial institutions advisory practice. He brings nearly 20 years of experience in investment banking, having spent over 14 years providing strategic, M&A, and capital-raising advice to clients across the FinTech and financial services sectors. Over the course of his career, he has successfully advised on more than 60 strategic and financing transactions, ranging from $20 million to over $10 billion in size, totaling approximately $100 billion in cumulative transaction value.

Prior to D.A. Davidson, Merchant served as Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at Marlin & Associates, a boutique advisory firm focused on FinTech and Data & Analytics companies. When Marlin & Associates was acquired by D.A. Davidson in September 2021, Merchant transitioned into his current leadership role, helping build one of the fastest-growing mid-market technology investment banking groups in the United States, with more than 60 professionals across North America. Before Marlin, he served as Managing Director at Bruderman Brothers in New York, where he was responsible for originating, structuring, and executing investment banking transactions across multiple industries. Earlier in his career, he was the Head of FinTech coverage at Nomura Securities International, where he helped establish the Specialty Finance practice in the Americas before building the FinTech practice. He began his career at J.P. Morgan Securities, covering multiple sub-sectors across Financial Services.

Merchant holds an MBA from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, an undergraduate degree in Accounting from the University of Mumbai, and a master's degree in Finance from the University of Mumbai. He holds Series 79 and 63 licenses. In addition to his investment banking career, he is active as an angel investor, participating in seed-stage deals.

Merchant's professional focus and investment thesis center on FinTech and financial services technology. His deep domain expertise spans payments infrastructure, lending technology, wealth management technology, real estate technology, digital banking, and increasingly, stablecoin and crypto payment rails. He has described the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized infrastructure as "transformational," particularly in the stablecoin payments ecosystem. His advisory and personal investment activity reflect a conviction that technology-enabled financial services companies -- especially those building regulated payment infrastructure, marketplace-based ecosystems, and digital operations platforms -- represent the most compelling opportunities in the sector. As an angel investor, he focuses on seed-stage companies, likely within the FinTech and financial services verticals where he has the deepest expertise and network.