GE Commercial Finance, a unit of General Electric Company in the US, has negotiated a $5.4bn (€4.8bn) acquisition without external financial advisers at a time when banks are scraping around for mandates.

The US group is set to buy most of the commercial finance business of Transamerica, a division of Aegon, the Dutch insurer. Although GE has a team of internal dealmakers that do most of its M&A deals, forgoing financial advisers on such a large transaction is unusual. Other corporates to have leaned more heavily on their internal corporate finance teams of late include Vivendi, which said in January it would not hire banks to help it sell Vivendi Games, and Arcelor.