UBS to Merge M&A, Sponsor Advisory in Investment Banking Revamp
Well, UBS now has two top groups: LevFin and Industrials. Sponsors becoming combined will significantly impact the extent of live deals and the experience of junior to mid-level professionals. Also of note, the group lost its global co-head; the other group co-head is moving to FIG, and various MDs have left. The only new hire is yet another ex-Barclays and ex-Lehman guy.
So rough for the incoming sponsors, interns, or FTs. Expected a top-tier experience relative to UBS, going to get an experience of a group collapsing and losing its top MDs. Very rough, especially since the UBS group placement as a whole is super rough, given that everyone knows there's such a huge gap in group quality. Can't wait for them to ruin the other two as well, maybe combine Industrials with TMT to allow the TMT team to show creds, or combine LevFin with DCM because they are both debt-related products.
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the banking sector survived GFC and you are telling me this is a big deal? this will be forgotten within 3 quarters, tops
This doesn't make a lot of sense. I could see the rationale maybe of moving LevFin and Sponsors closer together, but M&A? Are they just throwing in the towel then on public to public M&A?
I lateraled out of UBS and ended up at a group that turned out to be surprisingly sweaty so sometimes have woulda coulda shoulda thoughts, then I see articles like this
This really sounds like the move of someone trying to squeeze "synergies" out of the IB, but what's actually going to happen is your heavy hitters go elsewhere which has been happening. Talent aren't just cogs in a machine. Top talent will leave if they feel like they can't be successful and you can't just replace them with mids and expect top results
LevFin/Sponsors recombining would make a lot of sense, I agree. I think they are just completely going back to the old strategy of doing anything and everything for sponsors as their main fee attribution. That's the only logical thing I can think of behind combining these two groups. Seems like the group is going to be a Sponsors group that also does M&A when the sponsors ask/for sponsor related deals. UBS and MV have given up on their lofty goals of finally winning corporate clients for UBS, and corporate M&A will probably just be run out of the coverage groups, I suppose.
I think top talent is already leaving, and the rainmakers that are left are the ones on huge guarantees or who get paid insanely well. However, given that UBS cannot hire well and maybe like 10% of their MDs bring in 80% of fees, these top bankers left at UBS have all the leverage in the world. What made you leave in specific, and did you also switch groups or something, to where the new place is more sweaty? From my experience, industry groups are sweaty everywhere; just different levels of sweatiness.
Do you think this change creates a much more negative experience from a junior perspective in the combined group? Or is it possible that the work is still majority sponsors related deals & coverage groups do more M&A work in house.
Where should incoming people at UBS rank Sponsors/M&A now? Seemed like consensus was M&A is an okay but not top group and that Sponsors is somewhere in the top 3, curious how it changes the order of top groups at UBS.
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FIG? Thought top groups were LevFin and Industrials, with a gap between them and the rest. Might have fallen into LevFin propaganda, though, since the suspicion seems to be that the SVP in Corp Dev is probably a LevFin guy, and for better or worse, it seems like a lot of people in these threads just parrot him.
M&A, Sponsors, Family Office and PFG all are totally silo’d and have extremely different cultures and types of people.
Mashing these four groups together, if done badly (likely), will be a disaster, no matter how much they can save through redundancies.
Will juniors in these groups now get cross staffed across these four different areas? They are all very different and require different skillsets
M&A is a bunch of technical nerds that are ~losers, whereas Sponsors is more bro-y as is Family Office. PFG isnt really investment banking…
Between this and dropping another barclays person on top of a well functioning levfin team (should just make the existing people in charge…) wont be good.
TLDR: Some synergies (bad for junior HC for sure), more than offset by the risk that this causes even more discontent and attrition of valuable people
Agreed on the junior part, going to be a terrible experience. You are going to somehow end up being skilled in nothing and barely familiar with 4 very different things. Culturally, from my conversations with the teams, I also agree. FSG and PFG both seem like they have chill bro-y people, and the M&A people are, to put it nicely, a bunch of nerds who are really into finance. Will say from the announcement seems like the dude is leading the Cap Markets side of the LevFin/LDCM role, which the guy who went to Barclays previously held, not LevFin originations. Both co-heads of LevFin are still there, and no announcement of demotion or leaving, so I do not know if there's any effect on the LevFin team outside of capital markets reads becoming more aggressive.
Funny that Barclays and UBS basically traded Heads of LCM or whatever you call this. Of course Barclays comes out on top as Warm is the much stronger banker.
Is this Toal guy any good or another dud?
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How did anyone even convince themselves to be optimistic about this news? At the very best, your culture gets way worse, and your deal flow drastically decreases. Good luck! LevFin/Sponsors should've gotten you a lot of deal experience, so at least you should have things to talk about in your interviews, unlike most of the UBS juniors.
I think this thread has solidified the Senior VP in Corp Dev's position as the ultimate UBS hater. Wonder how much of his views affect how people around the street view UBS and the various groups at this point. Influenced juniors and prospects given how widespread these threads are in WSO, but wondering if any of that seeped through to mid-levels or seniors.
These Barclays people aren’t nice or good people, they deserve every ounce of criticism they get and then some
OP has to be same guy that was dragging UBS for months as "Executive Director - Industrials". Clearly this person has affection for industrials and levfin at UBS......has to be a former UBS levfin industrials banker or a former UBS industrials banker with heavy levfin exposure. Either way.....have to assume he was canned as part of the UBS / Barclays shakeup. Wondering if they are still unemployed given frequency with which they are able to post on every single UBS related topic....
As someone who's going to be interning next year, would you say his assessment of the top two groups is wrong, then? It seems pretty clear he does think higher of LevFin and Industrials, but it also seems like that's the unanimous opinion on this forum, assuming sponsors are not considered as a top group because of this combining of groups. Want to get a sense of how to approach placement, really trying to optimize for exits as best as possible, and optimize for getting live deal experience. Thanks!
No idea if he has a job or is just on severance. Can believe he is an ex-senior, just unsure how much his views are correct or not. It's wild that he's the poster or top commenter on a lot of these posts though, seems like everyone on this forum has collectively decided to believe him and agree with him for some reason.
He is right in that 1) UBS only has 20% of the MDs that do any legitimate fee generating deals (outside of financing) 2) most of the sector MDs that bring in any those deals are in industrials OR select verticals in C&R and FIG 3) Levfin / sponsors (I am keeping them combined, because they are still largely the same purpose and function) and GIG were definitely the most sought after groups for juniors from 2022-today and 4) Most of the Barclays hires (with the exception of Marco himself) have been a massive swing and a miss (wasn't UBS = to Barclays in IB revenues in 2021 anyway? why did they even hire Barclays guys instead of EVR, GS, MS, Moelis, etc etc etc......)
However he is clearly biased and taking it to extremes. As a whole, most UBS bankers (incl juniors) have it pretty good compared to A VERY LARGE PORTION of the street. You would be hard pressed to find more than 50% of the juniors across any group actually logging 80+ hours a week. Even his stories about levfin cranking 100+ hour weeks are just not remotely true today - that era ended in 2021 once the markets had their financing boom and UBS has grown headcount substantially since then despite fees being lower.....
Reality is regardless of what group you land in.....UBS is still a household name (globally, not just US), it is still a bulge bracket investment bank, and you still make and obscene amount of money and you are not working nearly as many hours as WSO posters make it out to be. You ever see GS or EVR posts blowing up forums on WSO like UBS? No - because they are actually working 80-100+ hour weeks and dont have time to spam post on WSO.....
M&A works way longer hours than these other 3 groups. Sponsors, FO and PFG should lateral out before they actually integrate is my key advice.
In a few months everyone will be building merger models and managing VDRs for deals that will never close
*Fake deals
Sponsors group has been undesirable since it split from Lev Fin almost 2 years ago. Some of their sharpest analysts saw the writing on the wall and left shortly after.
Working as a junior in a Sponsor coverage group that is largely removed from execution is a disaster for your technical skills and career development.
Today's announcement only makes it worse for them.
The fact my group head (M&A) didn't even give us the courtesy to send an email or talk to the group about this huge move and what it means is concerning.
I give him the benefit of the doubt to update us though. Until then I am concerned what this means.
A lot of people I know have left recently (across many groups), many see the writing on the wall I think. I generally like being here so have been staying around but now I am strongly considering lateraling.
How many groups are now run by barclays laterals?
M&A
Sponsors
PFG
Family Office
Tech
M&T
LCM
and of course, global head of investment banking
anyone else I am missing?
Yes he probably thinks he’s better than everyone in the group and none of them deserve the notice of what is changing, or any reassurance.
I’m sure he blames his groups low numbers on the other coverage groups not brining him M&A deals, or bad mouthing his own team to selfishly make himself better. “If I didn’t have such weak people in my group, maybe we could triple M&A revenue”
3 x 0 is still 0
Some bankers are tall, dark, and handsome, while others are short, bald and monotone. Some get lots of deals done and some do not.
I’m sure he was just too busy today working on a blockbuster $50bn deal
UBS doesn’t do those anymore
Re-orging mid internship is crazy
Anyone interning in m&a right now definitely try to get another offer. This group likely doesn't exist in 12 months (or it's just a bunch of senior m&a and sponsor Bankers mixed in with some select juniors).
At minimum you may be deferred 6 months after you signed a lease.
Its just insane how bad the culture has gotten in my group (Tech). No real sense of team - a bunch of silo’d people that all compete with each other to save themselves. People root for others to fail just so they look comparatively good.
Not sure if every / most groups are like this now, but if they are UBS stands no chance at being successful. We compete more against ourselves inside each group than with other banks to win over clients…
Expect thats how this new group will become as its merged together and there will no doubt be a multitude of factions.
Why you all competing, we all know the Barclays people are default top bucket and then the staffers will hand select their favorites to be top bucket. Competing throughout the year to try to change that won’t do much
Also true. For most people settling for middle bucket is the usual anyway so
Yeah especially most legacy UbS people left who were more collaborative and very cut throat and selfish people from CS and Barclays came on who are willing to sabotage the group for personal gain
So what can incoming analysts in this combined group expect?
It seems like opinions here all point to a bad experience mostly because M&A is the one taking over. The group's reputation at UBS seems bad. Don't think it's just those with an overall negative opinion on UBS, as even the ED above that was trying to defend UBS, didn't say anything positive about M&A or the new combined groups. Also heard terrible things about M&A culture from placement calls, and the people there seemed like they were toxic hardasses with the data showing UBS doesn't do much M&A without LevFin/Sponsors involvement, so opinions largely check out.
Ultimately, though, if you are incoming Sponsors, yes, you are going to a worse "group" than anticipated initially, but there's not much you can do about it. I think the ED above brought up great points; UBS is still a respectable platform, and I think if we work hard, we can still end up in decent places post UBS.
Talk to the GB program manager
The HR teams are never going to tell you the truth about any situation. Talk to people from your internship on the actual team and/or people who have left the team recently. I agree with the intern above, there's nothing you can do about it either way as an incoming analyst. Just grind it out for a year, see how it goes, and if you don't like it, try to lateral. If you want to recruit for PE, do it whenever that timeline is. Nothing to be really done this close to the start date of the full-time program; only focus on what you can control.
I am not going to lie to you and tell you M&A is the best group in the bank or close to it, but it's still a better landing spot than 99% of all people that try for IB and the vast majority of people in IB given you are still at a respectable global bank. It might be toxic and long hours, but you just have to grind for these early years, crush it, and then hopefully move on to better and less toxic places).
Talk to the GB program manager
Talk to the program manager
Ask program manager. She will know
layoffs
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