Special Situations/Workout to Leveraged Finance

Hi!

I graduated 2018 and spent the first 2 years working a controller for a global non-financial company. After that, I decided to start to work for a bank in Europe as an analyst in their workout/special situations group. I am currently in the same position today and I really enjoy my role. However, based on the information I have heard from people in the industry is that the pay is way better in Leveraged Finance. Therefore, I want to examine how easy/hardit generally is to do the transfer?
In my current position we are having someinteraction with the leveraged financeteam within our bank when their clientshave an increased amount of risk, but theinstructions usually are limited to readcredit memos and discuss how we canreduce the actual risk for the bank.

Since both of the positions (workout and leveraged finance) are credit related, I assume the nature of them are similar in some senses, which means that the move should not be a very big step?

In addition, how good PowerPoint skills will you need in leveraged finance? I know it is crucial when working in m&a for instance. Why I am asking is because my skills are very limited since I have not needed to use it in any large extent in my current position since I mostly uses word and excel when preparing credit memos. 

3 Comments
 
Most Helpful

I work in levfin and this shouldn’t be a very difficult transition. Some banks will even cross staff levfin and RX analysts. Powerpoint will depend on the bank. At “active” shops where the levfin team runs point on the lender model and financials (BofA, JEF, CS (sponsors), RBC to name a few) you will do very little powerpoint except for a few charts in the RAP/LP, pasting the EBITDA rec from excel into PPT, and other random pages which are largely text, coverage will do the rest and 90% of the powerpoint lift. Your job is limited to excel (cap table, model, incremental capacity analysis, debt comps, breakeven analysis, EBITDA adjustments, spreading historical financials, liquidation waterfall, etc). The powerpoint work is primarily pasting what you did in excel into the deck and text (ebitda rec descriptions, disclaimer (often from legal), pro forma org structure, investment thesis, risks & mitigants, etc). I suck at powerpoint compared to my coverage friends who are basically graphic designers on top of being bankers. For other shops where the LF team has less responsibility (JPM, BARC, MS) you MAY be in PPT a bit more. All depends on a case by case basis. 

 

If you are in workout/special situations and the pay is better in LevFin, I assume you're in the corporate or commercial bank. Restructuring is different. The transition from workout will not be as easy as moving from IB RX to LevFin. 

 

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