Ranking the different Corporate Finance roles??
I know it’s kinda silly, but just for sake of someone looking to switch over to the Corporate side can we rank the different roles within Corp Fin…
Roles would include Corp Dev, Strategy, FP&A, IR, Treasury, Capital Markets, etc
Thinking factors to take into consideration for ranking could be comp, exits, career progression, etc
If helpful to get the ball rolling, I’ll start with my guess (this is probably wrong):
- Strategy
- Corp Dev
- IR
- Treasury/Cap Markets
- FP&A
Trying to rank them in absolute terms misses the distinction that the top performers in many of these are different.
You know its kinda silly yet still do so
Fair enough I just don't know which to target! Everyone tells me corp dev given my background, but I rather not do more M&A
I think treasury should be last.
I'd have 1. Strat (interesting + good exits) 2. Corp Dev (important function + good exits but boring) 3. IR (fun + decent exits) 4. FP&A (lots of exits but not necessarily good exits) 5. Cap Markets (just stay in IB/PE at this point) 6. Treasury (unless you have a CPA, what really are your exits here?)
Thank you!! I frankly have no desire to continue transaction related work (burnt out from M&A) so it seems like strategy is the way to go…although many strategy teams seem to get grouped within corp dev so maybe IR is a better fit. It’s tough to know
What do you enjoy? It sounds like you don’t want to work on deals so corp dev is out. If you want to spend more time developing your company’s public narrative,interfacing between finance and buy side firms to ensure model alignment, and work IB hours for every earnings, then do IR. If you want to focus on the long game, capital allocation, and interface with ops, finance, and leadership to figure out what leadership wants to do, what operations thinks they can do, and what you can fund to optimize your path forward, then go strategy. If you want to be in a more analytic, accounting heavy role with direct interface with ops and stressing about budget variances every quarter, then do FP&A. If you hate yourself and want to move around cash, go treasury. If you want to still interface with the markets and help issue new equities and debts, go capital markets.
At the end of the day, id say go with what peaks your interest and you can lateral between groups later. At least that’s been my experience.
It matters where you’re at 100%. The lines between Corp dev and strategy can sometimes be blurred. And/or if you’re in Corp dev there can be other things than just M&A. Such as regular business development/origination activities, venture investments, creating strategic partnerships/JV’s, and assisting treasury/cap markets with financing a major project or something.
There’s some places that are basically just bankers who do M&A work all the time, but there are spots out there where the lines get blurred and you can work on some pretty cool things. I also think job-search wise you can look for “business development” type roles. Make sure you really read them though because some are just account management/sales, but others really are Corp dev/cool stuff just called a different title.
Agree with this. In my company strategy and corp dev just reports into the same VP and we sometimes do the same stuff.
Assignments depend on background (others have a generalist background whereas I'm an infra guy so technical/structuring-heavy stuff goes to me)
Thanks for this appreciate it! If you can say, which roles do you think provide the most upside/comp acceleration similar to the sell side? If helpful, not really interested in an MBA and would like to be promoted relatively young if possible
The pay at my firm is the same across all corp fin functions. Maybe not treasury since it’s operational.
Cap markets, IR, and corp Strat/dev have the quickest promotions.
Again, this is anecdotal
Is it worth pursuing cpa, cfa , ms/mba to try to transition to fpa from an opps role?
bump
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