How does Big 4 M&A advisory differ from the same job at an IB? Exit ops, culture, comp etc..
I was wondering if there was any significant differences in peoples experience working in M&A at a big 4 compared to working at an IB?This very well may be a stupid question but from what I've seen and heard there are some reasonably big differences. E.g. comp looks a fair bit lower at the big 4 (at least for grad and analyst roles) and there must be a reason for this.Exit opps look reasonable though, I'm uk and have looked at PE teams and have noticed a lot of ex-KPMG deals advisory staff among the ranks.
Similar in terms of day to day. Comp significantly lower for similar/marginally less hours. Much smaller deals but are able to get high deal volume as banks wouldn't even look at half of them. Exit ops are decent and can always lateral to a BB/EB/MM for better exit ops
Bottom of the Tombstone.
People in finance can be pretentious and think Big-4 folks are “lower”, regardless of title/function. Echoing someone above - lateral when you get the enough experience n the market improves
So do you think it would be better to take a big4 CF offer or work at a boutique if you wanted to lateral to a BB in the future?
Yeah that’s interesting because surely there’s more of a variety of deals at big4 but just smaller and less prestige.
kids are short-sighted. in IB they will be abused for several years and kicked out with medical conditions due to long hours and stress. in big4, they could coast and make great money as long as they want.
In the UK it's decent I think and should be able to lateral but as you said a lot of LMM PE funds hire people out of big 4 M&A
Similar work but lower pay and clients / deals tend to be smaller as the big elephant in the room is always that you can’t advise anyone who is an audit/tax client of the firm, which takes precedent over advisory in Big 4
Big 4 advisory are much better in Europe and comparable to MM banks with good deal volume. In the U.S. however they have struggled to gain traction and are very LMM focused, but they are growing and doing better than before (at least from my experience with KPMG)
people at US big4 make like 3x of what big4 people in Europe make, so I'd say it's much better in US
I’m not talking about the salary difference. I’m talking about the difference in reputation and how they are seen by the market. I.e. in europe big 4 are solid and respect MM banks, whereas in the U.S. most people dont even know they do IB. I also think they pay way less compared to their bank counterparts
Differences are significant. As you've mentioned, exit opps will obviously be worse - especially considering that IB is the exit opp for most big 4 M&A people. It's obviously not impossible to move to PE if you really want to, but the process will be more difficult and you're going to be more limited in your choices. Deal exposure would still be there but most of the time you would be working with smaller, less established companies and the process might be a lot less structured (talking about like double / low triple digit mm EV).
Comp is obviously the biggest differentiator - in the UK IB is already not as highly paid versus other regions and big 4 comp is significantly lower even versus that. Probably looking at a >50% discount on an all-in basis.
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