Clients View; From the Perspective of Corporate Development/Planning Officer

I saw the league table of investment banks published in Wall Street. Obviously this is based on "best companies to work for" factors (and some of the political nonsenses which i don't really understand personally), but still there is something fundamentally wrong with this list (to me).

From a corporate planning officers perspective, the brand name matters. For example, Baird, quite frankly, we don't even know and we don't want to. Lazard, again quite niche player. We like big traditional Wall Street names; JP Morgan, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs (in no apparent order of importance). We consider these boutiques amateurish. They are not pros and we like to deal with pros.

"Best companies to work for" provides good criteria to assess a company, however, universal banking models are hard to beat especially to clients like ourselves. Evercore calls this "conflict of interest," we call it "universal banking." It depends on the point of view. A multi-billion dollar corporation has a lot of problems not only in corporate finance, but also in account management, payment, currency hedging, also hiding some of corporate (financial) structures from outside (not to profit, but there are certain things we don't want to disclose if we don't have to), existence of numerous child-companies (I am not talking about 10 - 20, a lot more). Quite frankly, we don't think boutiques can handle our needs and we have never used any boutique banks for any of these problems including more traditional services they say they offer such as M&A advisory. And we don't plan to.

What makes these Wall Street banks great is that each individual working at these organization does not matter. It's the organizational structure that makes these banks stand out. Technically, yes, what makes these banks great is what makes you worthless as an individual. You have a job, a tiny tiny portion of what this organization is trying to do, YOU MUST KNOW WHAT IT IS AND EXECUTE IT. I am repeating, but anyone can do it, it doesn't have to be you that does it. Hence these places' recruitment policies are "hire and fire" taking into consideration the "turnover rate."

I can see that it's good if you are happy working for a company with great working environment. but if you really want good exposure, all-round exposure to the world of finance and if you have multiple offers, I would stick to Wall Street banks, more traditional banks. You will learn about organization where you are supposed to make yourself worthless (otherwise you are out). Be a pro.