JPM M&A is Gone??? Purely Coverage Banking???

Incoming Summer Associate for the M&A group. Just got an email from JPM saying:

"We are excited to welcome you to the firm next week! As you may have heard, there have been recent organizational updates within our Mergers & Acquisitions division, and as a result, there will be adjustments to your internship group assignment. We’d like to understand your preferences and keep you involved in the process.
 
Action Required: Please complete this brief survey to rank your group preferences"

Does this mean that they are placing all the M&A bankers into coverage groups or just asking about industry preferences for deals that we might want to work on during the summer? 

If it is the former how would you folks think through this? I'm not passionate about any particular industry. I chose JPM over GS because I wanted to be in the M&A group wtf. 

20 Comments
 

? can we get a confirmation from Analysts here?

the WSO thread a few weeks ago said nothing of the sort was happening and that only Anu was being moved up rather than the M&A team being folded

 

No more M&A group, but TBD how things work going forward. Has been very little communication to current JPM employees and have yet to see M&A folks get staffed on coverage client meetings / pitches and visa versa.

 

So it seems like M&A bankers are doing modeling on the industry they want to be involved in, while the coverage folks are doing pitching. That sounds like a great structure.

 

Brother, taking JPM over GS was a really dumb move, irrespective of what they did to the M&A group

 

I’m past my banking years at this point, but think it makes sense to merge M&A with coverage. I was MS and we obviously had our separate M&A group but realistically the MDs and EDs were largely specialists to a sector. Tbh unless it was a particularly large deal, my group did the modeling and excluded M&A juniors.


That said… having M&A was nice as a coverage analyst. Modeling was the one cool thing they would pick up; other than that… manually redacting hundreds of documents and running the diligence process… no thank you.

 
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you should consider yourself lucky 

M&A group is really a BS group. You spend so much time doing admin (timetables, VDR, buyer logs etc) and develop ZERO commercial acumen

The best banking model is the one where you do everything end to end like GS /Evercore (or like JP now). The M&A group for me is the back office equivalent in a front office role. You also have 0 origination responsibilities as a senior and just have to peg to sector bankers to share some fees given you’re just cost 

I did a deal once co-advising with JP. We were doing model and marketing materials alongside the JP sector team, and their M&A team was basically just scheduling calls. A friend of mine was on the at deal on the JP M&A side and described himself as a “glorified PA”


And this unified model also works better for sector bankers which otherwise have no understating of process and more nitty gritty M&A mechanics 

 

As rule of thumb most large banks have a separate M&A team and most MM / EBs have only sector teams doing everything (except jefferies which also has an M&A group)


There are bank by bank specific dynamics where some teams will do more or less of some workstreams but that’s hard to tell from the outside (or eg some M&A teams will have people ringfenced on some specific sectors / some sector teams will take ownership of the model every time and leave only the admin to M&A) it all depends on the bank


It’s an awful model from a junior perspective - sector juniors spend their days doing marketing materials and comps and never see a funds flow, M&A juniors spend their days doing some more technical stuff and a lot of admin without learning anything commercial. It works from a senior perspective because sector teams need to staff half the people so they can operate leaner (you can’t have one sector analyst doing process / marketing / model - but you can have one sector analyst doing the marketing materials and borrow one M&A analyst to do the other stuff). So the bank has a “flexible” pool of generalist resources that can be allocated more efficiently based on sector team demands (otherwise  you need to increase sector team sizes to staff multiple sector analysts on the same deals - but then what do you do when deal flow in one sector goes down?)

Once you have enough deal “density” within sector teams (or not enough in case of smaller banks) it makes sense to do everything within sector teams. I am not sure why GS never split it, I think they just have very large classes of sector people and retained a more “traditional” banking style

 

Anyone know what this means for return offer rates for both summer assoc and analyst if all the coverage teams are getting more interns

 

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