Interviewing for an IB Analyst role (M&A BioPharma) with a B.S., healthcare experience, but no finance background. Need all the context for the day-to-day responsibilities as an Analyst, good and bad, please.
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Based on the most helpful WSO content, here's a rundown of the day-to-day responsibilities of an Investment Banking Analyst, including the less glamorous tasks:
Pitch Books and Presentations: A significant part of your day might involve preparing pitch books and presentations for potential deals. This can be quite repetitive and detail-oriented, requiring a keen eye for accuracy and design.
Financial Modeling: You'll spend time building and updating financial models. This is a critical skill but can be monotonous, especially when dealing with large data sets and complex calculations.
Client Performance Tracking: Monitoring the performance of clients' stocks and staying updated on news that affects them is part of the routine. This involves using tools like Bloomberg Terminal.
Administrative Tasks: Expect to handle a variety of administrative duties such as arranging calls, writing emails, sending documents to the printing room, and other similar tasks.
Updating Comps and Marketing Decks: Regularly updating comparable company analyses and refreshing marketing materials can be tedious but are essential for keeping data current for clients and deals.
Detail-Oriented Work: The level of detail required in investment banking is high. Even small mistakes, like using commas instead of semicolons, can be significant.
Long Hours: Be prepared for long hours, often stretching to 70-80 hours a week, and sometimes even more during busy periods. This includes working on weekends and late nights.
On-Call Expectations: Especially in your first year, you'll likely be on call almost all the time, ready to respond to work demands as they arise.
While these tasks may not be glamorous, they are fundamental to the role of an IB Analyst and provide a foundation for learning and growth within the industry. With your background in healthcare, you'll bring a unique perspective to the M&A BioPharma space, which could be advantageous in understanding the nuances of the deals you'll work on.
Sources: Investment Banking Analyst: A True Day in the Life, Expectations vs reality of being a first-year IB analyst, Confessions of a former second year IB Analyst, Q&A: 2nd Year IB Analyst at a Bulge Bracket, What’s the first day like as an IB analyst?
There are probably 100+ “day in the life of an Investment Banking Analyst” videos on YouTube.
First things first you gotta use ur brain and your resources…
Most annoying thing for me personally is prob taking notes for calls that aren’t gonna be looked at 95% of the time (but that’s ur ass if they need it in that 5% and u don’t have any)
90% of the time I click on one of those "day in a live of a banker in LDN/NYC/whatever" in turns out to be a non M&A role.
Send 3 separate calendar invites to different parties for the same call because god forbid they see each other’s email address
Why not just do BCC?
Outlook does not have BCC for calendar invites. If you click into the meeting you can see everyone invited to the call. Hence having to make multiple different invites
The least glamorous thing in my view is the subordination of yourself into "the hive" for the purposes of accomplishing broader objectives. It's not about you when a client or counterparty in Asia wants to see something very soon and they're in a time zone halfway across the world. It's not about you when someone uploads a document to a data room at 11PM on a Sunday and you need to download it in under 5 minutes so that the bankers on the other side don't have time to yank it down and keep it away from you. It's not about you when you have a call that's way too early or way too late in the day in order to accommodate someone who's traveling to another country. It's not about you when you're turning comments during a time other people were expecting to do something fun with you. It's not about you when you need to cancel concerts and dinners and dates and games and parties and appointments and all manner of other things because "something came up."
Doing the analyst job and doing it well involves a great deal of almost monastic self-denial. It's telling yourself no. It's staying calm under high pressure. It's continuing to deliver even when things feel like they're falling apart.
Love the highest rated comment above but if I had to give you a specific task, I fucking hate VDR management.
Checking spelling, making document names uniform, tracking changes / uploads / views. It is the most monotonous, brain dead work, and I hate it.
Indexing them omg. Shit give me ptsd
Managing VDR / Q&A, dealing with conflicts checking / KYC (compliance stuff), bored directors making you research random things to distract the MD from the fact that they have nothing going on deal-wise
Yup - will also add tracking buyer logs in a sellside is also amongst the most cancerous things I’ve ever done. Tracking NDAs back and forth amongst 100+ parties is literally the most hellish admin work imaginable.
Not working in M&A but MBB but having plenty of friends in banks. Since I am doing a lot of life sciences PE I might add in on something:
Besides the mind-dulling work already mentioned I am often slapped in the face with challenging/over-my-head requests from seniors. It is often like "can you pull up this? can we put this analysis together, would still be important for the deck. No we need the split by generics not like this, split it like treatment area per sub country and per age" ... a lot of these amendments are often zero-value adding but doing each additional analysis will take you several hours to complete (if even possible, most of these weird requests are doomed from the start due to fallacious data).
Shaving your Senior MDs gooch
Listening to people bicker and whine about stupid shit
Getting asked questions I don't know the answer to
Feeling pissed all the time for no apparent reason - > this one is fine, just take it out on your analysts, because that helps
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