M&T Corporate Banking Insight

Since there’s literally no content on WSO about M&T and I have some time on my hands, I’m going to put down everything I know…

I interviewed with M&T last year for a role in their LevFin/FSG team, and I learned quite a bit about their business during that process (seriously considered moving to Baltimore due to a relationship at the time, ultimately went with another bank.) There is a reason you’re not finding much info on WSO about M&T.

First thing to note is that M&T is not really an investment bank at all and has very light IB capabilities. The bank’s strategy is to specifically brand itself as a retail / consumer bank and has commercial lending playing on top of that. The little investment banking presence the bank has is no more than 35 FO people (might even be close to 20, don’t have exact numbers.) To put into perspective how small this is relative to the rest of the bank, the bank as a whole has close to 50,000 employees. M&T manages its retail business very well and is the bank’s core competency. Here are a few major key points that I learned during interviews and discussions with team members:

1. You are not going to get a world-class IB experience at this bank. As noted above, this focus on retail gives the whole organization a “main street” mentality, so it would kind of erode the brand to have a large investment banking “wall street”-style team behind the scenes. Investment banking and advisory will never be at the forefront of M&T, period. Keep this in mind as I go through the next few bullets, as it is an important strategy of the bank that affects the way the IB arm operates.
2. The bank had an M&A advisory business focused on LMM and MM transactions that lifted off in 2018/2019. This means that the bank’s entire IB arm consists of a small LevFin and DCM team.
3. The LevFin team (also called the financial sponsors group, they are one and the same) which I interviewed for does leveraged lending to mostly LMM sponsors and some MM sponsors with companies of EBITDA from $10M up to $100M (not sure on the breakdown). Team seem relatively sophisticated as they had some former BofA LevFin and mezzanine fund directors. At the time that I was interviewing, they had no team members at the analyst level as far as I am aware. As they described it, the work seemed to be in line with the experience you’re going to get at a lot of other LevFin teams: writing credit memos, attending management meetings, reviewing CIMs / deals, reading credit agreements, and exposure to some LBO / refi / recap / add-on modelling. I lost my interview notebook, but I think I noted that the bank had roughly $3B in its leveraged loan portfolio, with roughly 1/3 of that being financial sponsor activity. Lastly, from what I could tell, they focused on Term Loan As / RCFs only.
4. I did not interview in the DCM team but based on LinkedIn and the company website, my understanding is that they do mostly municipal bond offerings with some traditional bond offerings mixed in. Wouldn’t be surprised if they give some support to the LevFin team too, but my guess is that any cross-team work would be limited.
5. The head of IB mentioned in my interview that they were looking to grow the IB arm and potentially purchase a boutique M&A firm to get some form of advisory offering. While I think this is a possibility, remember that above I mentioned that IB will always be handicapped at the bank given the main street mentality. I do not think they will ever grow to be a major player by design.
6. The firm is headquartered in Buffalo, NY, while the entire IB arm sits in Baltimore. Most of the business they do is thus focused on the northeast. As such, the LevFin team deals with mostly smaller east-coast based sponsors. Expect to be in Baltimore if you want to work on this team in the IB arm.
7. Exits to the buyside are a complete unknown and I can’t imagine they’d be great. Given that the junior team is extremely small, you’re not going to get a great analyst training program, and a lot of your training will be on the job. However, it should always be noted that in a LevFin team you’re interacting directly with PE teams so if you are a go-getter and network your skills maybe you can make something work. IMO to get PE offers you’re going to have to lateral to a bigger shop (which probably isn’t too hard given that the work is the same). MF and UMM are out of the question, and MM is honestly a long shot too. I would think LMM is possible but still not easy by any stretch. Note this is all my supposition.
8. Pay is going to be well below street. When I interviewed and they asked for salary expectations (note that they don’t have standardized analyst pay), they made it clear that they didn’t even have a bonus structure in place as they felt it caused internal political issues. We’re talking roughly $70K all-in for an1 (to be honest, that’s if I’m being optimistic). Also note that when I had the HR screening call, the HR rep practically had no idea what the team did and I had serious questions about what the group did until I got into interviews with the actual team to see it was a real IB job. There were zero technical questions during interviews and it was entirely based on cultural fit.
9. As a positive, the hours seemed in-line with the salary. They emphasized a rarity of nights past 6pm and hardly (if ever) any weekend work. In my head I imagine it as a souped-up commercial banking gig (but you could make the case for it as a real IB job in lateral / PE interviews).
10. Other misc notes: Given it's recent merger with People's United, M&T is set to be ~#15 largest bank in the U.S. This is likely why they're looking to expand the IB a bit to put capital to work in more aggressive strategies (along with a healthy M&A deal environment that need financing)

Overall if you don’t have any other offers in IB it could be a good place to get your foot in the door. For almost any other circumstances barring a personal reason for wanting to be in Baltimore, I would pass. This likely includes comparing it to boutique M&A shops unless you have a real desire to go to LevFin and can’t get offers elsewhere.