Truist’s Strengths in IB?
Curious to know what groups at Truist are well known and/or possibly up and coming. If anyone in any of their groups could speak to how they’re doing in terms of growth that would be appreciated. Also, how does management view CIB?
TMT and HC are strongest coverage groups like others have said. Outside of those, industrials has historically performed well also.
LevFin is the strongest product group. They also recently brought back a junior M&A-only team that mainly seems to work on deals sourced from commercial bank.
Culture has improved since merger, not sure about strength of exit opps but doesn’t seem like a bad place to be a career banker given the MDs they’ve recently headhunted from CS, Goldman, Wells, etc.
All this from roommate so take it with a grain of salt.
If you're going to work at an IB group within a predominantly commercial bank (ie, Truist) you are going to want to be in any group debt related. Levered lending, DCM, etc. Not the place to do M&A / ECM
Their main asset on the Investment Banking side is lending capability and thus large balance-sheet, primarily commercial driven banks tend to lend themselves (no pun intended) best to DCM mandates. There's a big difference though between getting in on massive DCM mandates because you have a lot of lending capacity, as opposed to winning over M&A business because you're the best advisor. Think of Truist as the opposite of an EB. They aren't known as the sharpest advisors in the room on stuff like M&A or RX, but have massive lending capacity & do a ton of huge DCM deals.
This is spot on. Truist is a very large bank, larger than most give it credit for (6th or 7th in the US by assets). Thus even if not always playing a strategic role in DCM they participate in quite a few large deals. I would argue that the DCM platform is stronger than most on WSO give credit for. Hopeful that more recent strategic hires in M&A and ECM help move things in the right direction.
Would also add that there are a few non-IB product suites that Truist does very well, mostly on the asset finance side (securitization, real estate investing, equipment finance, project finance) that rank higher in the competitive set relative to its more traditional IBD platforms.
I think layoffs are unlikely. All the seniors (Tom Hackett, Michael Carter, Jim Pirouz) are really pushing a growth story around the Securities business. The basic gist is that Truist as a whole is double the size of SunTrust and BB&T, but the Securities business is not (mostly SRTH).
In practice, they're hiring a bunch of senior bankers to build out the TMT group (brought in the Wells Fargo team recently), Sponsors, and so on. It would be a very weird choice to cut a bunch of juniors to save costs while spending a ton on seniors across several groups.
But hey, wouldn't be Truist if they didn't make counterproductive and conflicting decisions lol.