Meritocratic IB groups / banks

Personally I believe that the absolute elite EB's would be the best for this. For example Dyal, Mkline, and Q. The teams are so lean that your pure ability is weighted heavier than at large banks with larger teams. Just my opinion though I haven't worked at any of them so who knows lol.

You need to be in a product group like M&A where technical ability is valued, and aim for banks which don’t care about  DEI / Gender targets. 

At the larger banks, you are dealing with two cults at the moment, white men (same frat/school/hometown) vs. DEI Beckies (mostly white women but open to all women). Once, these two cults plunder promotions and bonuses, you will be fighting for leftovers.

in theory every bank should want that and does to some extent. It’s a matching process to figure out where you will most succeed and be able to contribute. For what it’s worth, I can share my experience about my search for a meritocratic bank and how I see / saw things. Hopefully this helps guide your thinking. For context I ended up at Moelis generalist in 2015 after undergrad graduation. 

I can vouch that though at times and in many ways even Moelis can be kind of a family firm and more about who you know than what you know / do. Like kind of a college fraternity at times especially among the MDs, overall I did find it a more or less meritocratic environment in terms of people were there to make money. If you could help the bank make more money then you were generally celebrated and promoted. At the junior levels, the contribution there generally takes place on the cost side of the income statement until ideally a banker grows into having a positive effect on the revenue side. More details below  all based on my individual experience at the bank and since as an alumnus 

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Yea I would add to the above that though an analyst doesn’t necessarily bring in revenue, you can contribute to firm profit by lowering costs for sure. That may be a way for your work to speak for itself because everyone appreciates working for a more profitable firm, especially when they don’t have to do any extra work themselves. 

Some ways I found to reduce costs and let my work speak for itself during my time as an analyst:

1. During training, there’s a large amount of junior bankers that are not ready to hit the desk and model and all that. Teach your fellow analysts how to model. How to be a master of excel / PPT. Any way you can make the general analysts more productive and efficient will lead to profits. If your fellow analysts find ways to finish their work faster and be able to leave earlier, that improves morale. Also allows senior bankers to give them more work to do more for clients and better convince them to pay the bank some fees. 

2. Obviously be a great team player. Take on and succesfully do as much work as possible. Better to have someone making minimum wage do the work than a senior MD who is charging the firm millions. An unhappy MD is much more costly for the firm than an unhappy analyst. Make sure your MDs and VPs and senior bankers are happy. Them being happy means clients can be happy. I think we all have a sense of how bad life can be when the client is unhappy. In banking it’s all about happy client happy life. The client is your wife (and husband) in that sense. 

3. These days plenty of new AI tools. You can also figure out ways to incorporate them to take something formerly 3 weeks of time into 1 week. Make nicer presentation to wow clients. Clients don’t want to look at ugly things. Only send them beautiful manicured perfect things as much as possible. 

4. If you cover an industry or product - know that area A LOT. Become an expert and give away your expert knowledge for free to your colleagues. Saves the bank tons of money on needing to pay for data subscriptions and news services and consultants and expert networks or whatever. If you understand every technical concept about Enhanced Geothermal Systems and then can be part of the next Fervo’s IPO pitch team to show the client you know the space really well and will be an amazing advisor to them on who best to raise money from, that is valuable. Starting this early helps. MDs have limited time. Less time they need to spend teaching you about their sector and clients and industry and product the better their lives are and the less costly you are to the bank. Hence again, more profitable to the bank. If you want to be an M&A banker, know everything about M&A. Save your bank the need to bill their lawyers so much about regulatory and legal questions. For example, I found during my time in restructuring, the team would have much preferred asking an internal analyst a legal question that impacted the financial model about a credit document than having to ask outside counsel. The internal analyst is already a relatively fixed cost on the payroll (once you are top bucket, they aren’t really going to add too much more to your bonus, generally). Outside counsel bills on the hour. If you can understand the latest developments in double dip courf decisions and how a specific judge may approach a case. You saved 3 hours of outside counsel billing which at today’s rates can be $3,000. 

5. Also obviously if you are just a machine and can do the work of what 2 analysts used to do. Like for example a prior deal needed 2 analysts to be staffed on it. They both left the firm and now the firm is considering staffing 2 new analysts on it. If you can do the work of 2 analysts yourself, then you have saved money for the bank and contributed to P&L. 

Doing one thing like this a day adds up and eventually you become a very efficient low-cost provider to the bank of its operations. Yes, we all want to be revenue producing one day and all that but these are legitimate ideas to help your early years in your career be more profitable and let your work speak for itself.