Help Choosing Between offers!

I'd say it's between JPM and BNP.

Project Finance is kind of a niche area. BNP (and French and Japanese banks in general) are very active in that space. Chances are you won't look at a single 10-k over the course of the summer...it's really a different beast. Involves TONS of reading (engineering reports, construction agreements, financing agreements, permits, PPA's for power deals) since everything really depends on the strength of the contracts. It also involves a lot of modeling, which can get complicated, but the sponsor will create a SPE for the asset so you're really just modeling cash flows up to the point where it services the debt - very little in the way of accounting conventions or 3-statement modeling. Depending on the group, you might spend a lot of time writing credit memos for internal approval. It can still be a great gig, especially if you're interested in infrastructure/utilities/energy. The pay and bonus is probably more in line with IBD than credit, it's still a FO role, and the hours are more manageable than an M&A role. These are just things to be aware of...I'm sure you could spin it easily in FT interviews but the skill set isn't 1:1 since you're not working at the corporate level. I pretty much guarantee that there won't be any sort of formal training since each deal can be very different and there's no standard modeling framework.

Also, MUFG's FO flagship group is Project Finance. I don't know if they're big into traditional IBD. The Japanese banks have been building out structured finance teams because they have a ton of Japanese deposits that they need to park somewhere. If you look on their site, the categories under IBD are things like PF, PFI, Real Estate, Shipping and Syndicated Loans. Kind of a weird place...the FO teams are increasingly Western and plucked from other groups after the crisis, but at the end of the day it's still a Japanese bank so lots of bureaucracy, conservative at the upper levels, and lots of Japanese employees. I wouldn't take the chance on a rotational when you already have effectively the same FO offer at BNP.

I know a few people who work in credit risk at JPM but don't know much about the program. It's probably most similar to IB, greater likelihood of getting a FT offer, decent lifestyle (?) and brand name. You might get stuck though...but I don't really know enough to say.