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Following.
Sounds like a group that one of my former roommates was in. He networked a bit and lateraled to an m&a team and was ranked in the top bucket after his first year in his new group. You have a lot of relevant skill sets that can translate well into a new role
How did your roommate get the modeling skills necessary for an M&A group? Did he learn it all after lateraling or did he study himself while in his role?
He learned from a modeling course online
Modeling is a small and overemphasized part of the job
I've seen people lateral from that type of role to top M&A groups. Definitely not cooked
Not at all. Just have a plan to get out and start building the relationships now so it’s easy to lateral.
Easy lateral, you just need to wait long enough for people to take you seriously. Kill it the first 8-10 months, do extra great work for anyone in IB if you want to move internally, and then lateral around the 1 year mark. The industry experience is very useful even if you don't model right now
I just accepted a FT offer in CIB was wondering the same thing. My mentor told me that you can get exposed to client facing roles early onto my program. Would it really be hard to transition to a IB role after 2 years?
If it’s Smbc you’re cooked
This thread really captures what I love about this forum. For all of our faults, this is a community that encourages each other and pushes each other to achieve our goals, and to find solutions. There is almost always a path to be found, and when there isn’t, there’s always a path to be created.
I echo what the comments above say. It just sounds like you’re in a not very good investment banking group; which is most groups. As long as you absorb and learn as much as you can from a technical, industry, and professional skills perspective, package your experience and story VERY tightly, build the modeling skills in your own time, and network and practice thoroughly so you’re primed when it’s time to strike, I think this is an easy move.
Only exceptional people can make it out of the role you speak of — you have to do a lot of self studying since you are pretty much doing what your IB-adjacent analysts are doing with no valuation or deep modeling and financial analysis. Company info, peer sets, capital structure analysis, debt maturity profiles — all of these are what both IB and CB and whatever your role is all do. So you need to either hope that you can find an IB mentor at your bank to help you learn or learn by yourself because when you are trying to lateral, that will be your weakness.
Are you in CB or IB? You can’t just be like, “I am an An1 in CIB” because there is no such thing as a blended team. It’s either CB or IB, period. Also give us an idea of where this back falls? Is it Japanese or Canadian or American, etc.
I know some banks that are very disorganized so the coverage side is called CIB but is largely CB, but there aren’t IB coverage teams so they do a little bit more than your normal corporate banker, but let the product groups deal with any type of modeling and such. I’m assuming a Japanese bank from how op described their role.
Which banks do this?
following
In a similar CIB group where it’s basically all CB work and hope to lateral in 2025. How difficult is it to move from a CIB CB position to DCM or IB coverage?
CIB CB to DCM or the industry you cover on the CB side will be the easiest moves unless you have a good story/reason for switching industry exposure.
First of all, yes. Now give me a sec and let me read your question
Great thread. I was in this position and it worked out but definitely took a good amount of self study, dedication, and willingness to keep going even if rejected in an interview. I worked at Truist in their TMT group which was pretty heavy corporate banking work and any IB stuff was really just right lead financing. Pitched some more IB stuff though so pitches were an opportunity to learn. Theres tons and tons of resources out there to get stronger as an IB analyst even if you haven’t done the job yet, believe it or not. If you can emphasize the parts of your job that are closest to pure IB and fill the gaps with outside info you should be okay. May take some persistence.
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