Gary Parr’s job hasn’t changed much in the five years since Dodd-Frank passed.

He’s still working on merger and acquisition deals in the financial services industry. It’s just where he’s doing it that is different.

The vice chairman of financial advisory firm Lazard is spending significant time advising projects in Spain, Austria, Japan and China.

“Global is very exciting,” he says. “In the U.S., it’s rearranging bank portfolios because they have to meet their capital require-ments. They have to be conservative.”

He worked on a flurry of U.S. acquisitions in the heyday of the banking crisis, including the sale of Bear Stearns Companies Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co., the sale of certain Lehman Brothers’ assets to Barclays and Fannie Mae’s restructuring.

Parr has been advising on deals for roughly 30 years, starting out at First Boston Corp. Then he helped form the advisory firm Wasserstein Perella & Co., co-founded by Joseph Perella and Bruce Wasserstein (who went on to become Lazard’s chairman and CEO before he passed away in 2009).

Parr went on to Morgan Stanley in 1993, working in the firm’s global mergers and acquisitions and global financial institutions units. He ultimately went on to run the M&A division at Morgan Stanley before Wasserstein recruited him to Lazard in 2003. In announcing the hire, Wasserstein called Parr “one of the world’s outstanding investment bankers, with a wealth of experience and strong client relationships.”

Since joining Lazard, the world’s largest independent advisory firm, Parr has continued to advise on large mergers, including Kuwait’s investment in Citigroup, the merger of Bank of New York and Mellon and the New York Stock Exchange becoming public. But now, thanks to Dodd-Frank and its requirements on how much capital banks must carry, the U.S. industry is downsizing, allowing Parr to take his 30 years of M&A experience to primarily do deals overseas.

“CEOs [of U.S. banks] are spending a lot more time on regulation,” he says.

He has mixed views on the changes required by Dodd-Frank, which sought to prevent another widespread banking crisis by reining in risk in the financial industry.

“There’s a lot of positive things, such as [how to regulate]risk management and capital,” Parr says. “But some rules are off the mark. A lot of the rules in Dodd-Frank have little to do with the financial crisis.” Capping how much banks can charge retailers when customers use their debit cards to pay for goods is one example.

Parr says he sees the U.S. financial industry moving back to mergers and acquisitions, but it will likely be among banks smaller than the giants of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.

“There’s a whole other tier that will, in time, do mergers,” he says.

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