Is IB Glorified Sales?

Seems like in almost every M&A Transaction, banks are so incentivized to close the deal that they will do anything (juice the valuation, say any deal is good on their fairness opinion, etc.) in order to land deal fees. What is the value add?

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IB is 100% a sales role once you're a VP and above. That's all IB really is. The value-add that IB provides in M&A and capital markets is giving back time to the people paying you for your services. Every business owner could spend countless hours putting together marketing materials and emailing PE firms and strategics the decks themselves and choose whoever's bid they want to go with. However, business owners have way too much to do to keep their businesses running, so they outsource that work to bankers/brokers. The bankers then do all the work to make a transaction happen that their clients want and take a fee for doing it. 

If you take a step back and remove the "prestige" people associate with IB, it's no different than a real estate agent who doesn't "add value" outside of doing the work that you don't want to do to make a transaction happen for you. If you're working on the "sell-side" of transactions, your job is literally just to do whatever you can to make the sale. 

 

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