How strong is HSBC in London and Europe are they MM (from people who actually work in Banking)

A few thoughts:

• the key asset of HSBC is their lending. Starts at commercial lending, up to the biggest companies. Basically every company is a client, which opens doors.

• levfin is good in Europe, consistently takes lead left on deals

• solid sponsor coverage due to B/S, which some teams leverage into real M&A roles. Think co-advisory on multi-bn sell sides

• the weakness is the corporate m&a: the franchise is super geared towards sponsors

• in ECM, they’ve hired a bunch of people (from DB notably) with aim to get gloco roles, and it has worked on sizeable deals.

• one of the downsides is that corporate banking doesn’t seem to be fully separated, so the eector teams end up managing a lot of the CB process (including internal credit memos for low profile things). Not the best part of the job, but still a few things worth learning.

• they have been hiring a lot out of DB in last few years, and that’s not to do “trash tier” deals….

As an analyst, is it the sexyest place? Maybe not, but there are some good quality people around, both in product and sector teams. (For example One of the sector team heads is a former GS partner, highly effective even if the team works hard). You’ll do good levfin deals, and most likely sponsor M&a on buy and sell side.

Exits? Probably not tier 1 funds, but I have seen good people get really good PE jobs. Also, good options to lateral after some time.

If you have choice between JPM and HBSC, I wouldn’t go for HSBC, but it is a solid place to start a career, learn, build a deal sheet, and have some optionality.