24 Comments
 

At my EB, capital markets analysts get same bonus as M&A (within 5k). We don’t bucket

 

You should change your mind.

Capital allocation is one thing to take into account which also brings risk. M&A is a risk-free business, you dont lose more than the salaries if companies go bankrupt.

With ECM / DCM you may have to underwrite consuming capital and you may not be able to syndicate or sell it creating a BS problem or even losses. (Not typical but could happen on a credit crisis)

Also M&A helps to gain ECM/DCM business

 

Not really.

When you have BS you attract clients and helps for specific situations like current environment.(check marker share gains in Q2 and you will see a huge correlations)

But when you source M&A deals you usually need to raise the debt in order to make it happen which leads to DCM activity. And these transactions lead to crrating bonds that lead to more activity and fees. Advisors of choice tend to be M&A bankers, more than DCM ones.

If you were spot on, BNP Paribas should be a huge M&A player in Europe and guess what... not a big player. BS and DCM definitely helps, but M&A is sourced by creating relationships... and this derives in broader mandates. (Specific moments lile last april may be different and banks being able to commit or underwrite BS have won important mandates / clients)

Having a great DCM franchise helps, but M&A is key to bring business and banks reward it with higher pay.

 

it’s because when you close an m&a deal, there are only a relative few that the fee gets split between. capital raising on the other hand has a lot more hands in the cookie jar so to speak - a lot more people involved and a lot more splitting of the fee means less money. generally at the junior level this won’t be so impactful but it becomes more pronounced as you move up

this is obviously dependent on how strong deal flow is for both at your bank but assuming they’re both decent

 

my friend's bonus in DCM was actually way higher at a top bb than my other colleague at my bank in m&A and they are same level so it's just down to how well u know HR and how well u perform sometimes

 

It's very simple and it comes down to the structure of deal sourcing / execution. Use ECM for simplicity and IPO'.s These are 99.9% of the time NOT sourced by the ECM head. It is instead sourced in by the coverage MD with ECM offering a layer of product knoweldge. If you SOURCE a deal, you naturally are goign to be allocated more fo the share of the fee.

There is absolutely NOTHIGN proprietary about running an IPO process once you've secured your bookrunning position. An IPO ran by GS versus MS versus JPM is all the same no matter what a banker will tell you. That means the execution is the bread and butter part. It's grutn work, it's relatively easy. Actually ahving the company SELECT you as lead bookrunner is the hard part. That's why the coverage MD is going to make more and it tricles down naturally to their junior team (albeit it's less noticeabley differena t junior levels. Base and bonsu roughly the same until past VP

 

BankerconsuIt's very simple and it comes down to the structure of deal sourcing / execution. Use ECM for simplicity and IPO'.s These are 99.9% of the time NOT sourced by the ECM head. It is instead sourced in by the coverage MD with ECM offering a layer of product knoweldge. If you SOURCE a deal, you naturally are goign to be allocated more fo the share of the fee. There is absolutely NOTHIGN proprietary about running an IPO process once you've secured your bookrunning position. An IPO ran by GS versus MS versus JPM is all the same no matter what a banker will tell you. That means the execution is the bread and butter part. It's grutn work, it's relatively easy. Actually ahving the company SELECT you as lead bookrunner is the hard part. That's why the coverage MD is going to make more and it tricles down naturally to their junior team (albeit it's less noticeabley differena t junior levels. Base and bonsu roughly the same until past VP

The above makes perfect sense, logically. However at Citi this past year, product bankers got paid higher bonuses than the coverage bankers who sourced the deals. I guess you know you are at Citi when nothing works and logic is stood on its head. 

Further compounding the misery of a record revenue generating year in which everyone basically worked 40% more hours for no discernible difference in pay. Trying to boost that laggard ROE I suppose. Share price is still down like 30%, proving that a literal monkey / cat / flower pot could run Citi without affecting the result.

 

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