Big4 M&A vs. Investment Banking
Hi all,
Curious as to what the daily responsibility difference is between Big4 M&A advisory vs. Investment Banking. Is the Big4 M&A work more consulting-styled? Or is there still a good amount of modelling and valuations like IB? Also would going for an internship in M&A advisory with a Big4 for sophomore be a good segue into my junior year recruiting for IB or is wealth management/corporate development better?
Appreciate any insight. Thanks.
Big 4 M&A advisory is similar in service offerings to EB advisory but deals with smaller EV’s.
I’m not sure what you mean by consulting style ? - M&A advisory teams at the big 4 consulting firms operate as M&A advisers and carry out the usual roles and responsibilities.
In Australia, they are a very common path to EB and BB IB. In fact, BAML recently gutted half of a Big 4’s M&A team to build out headcount
That’s different in the U.S.
Big 4 Corporate Finance is similar to IB but targets LMM ($100-$500m EBITDA). Skill set is transferable.
M&A advisory is about financial due diligence; goodwill assessment, purchase price allocation that sort of M&A related services that lead to the closure of the transaction.
This is accurate - the corporate finance groups are middle market investment banks whereas the M&A advisory groups are typically transaction services / financial due diligence.
Your EBITDA range is high though, unless you meant EV.
With regards to the work itself, there’s less valuation work but a lot of experience with operating models, building CIMs, deal process etc.
In the US, the EV is generally under $100M
I've interviewed with a few big 4 M&A and FDD divisions in the Nordics. From my understanding, big 4 M&A is very similar to IB with the exception that they do more, but smaller deals. Interviewers have argued that as the deals are smaller, the timeline is shorter and you usually get to see a few deals completed during your internship. Compare that to IB, where you might not even be on a live deal, and even if you are it's unlikely that you will be there long enough to see it completed (assuming 10-12 week internship). They also argued that client exposure and hours are better than IB.
I also interviewed for FDD, which is pretty much 100% modeling. 50-60 hour weeks according to the interviewer. They told me that while they mostly do FDD for PE firms and IBs, they also help the M&A team. I was told that much of their work is to dig into the details, such as:
what will the financials look like under a different accounting standard?
what has historical growth been adjusted for currency fluctuations?
I have several friends who have started out in big 4 M&A/FDD, moved on to small/regional IB, and then to BB.
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