UK IB outside of London
Anybody have insights on working in cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds?
The likes of Rothschild, Houlihan and Kroll have offices in these areas.
I imagine pay is quite a lot lower, but so is cost of living and competition for places.
What about exit ops, work life balance…
wlb probably significantly better - doubt any of those people work very long hours. I imagine they aim for volume as they rarely win mandates on businesses >£15m EBITDA
don't discount KPMG - they also do well outside of London. PwC also ok
exit opps will be regional VCs and small cap private equity e.g. LDC, ForeSight, regional players, Waterland likely biggest brand name outside of London with their Manchester office but heard they prefer consultants
alternatively, you can just stay in this IBD role your entire career and do some VC/PE investments on the side as you'd have the network. not a bad choice if you genuinely hate London and don't see its appeal
Very useful info thanks.
Do you think it would be feasible to get to Associate in one of these cities, then lateral to London?
If so, are BB and EB roles out of the question, and should it just be MM players that are realistic destinations?
there's nothing wrong with MMs because if you work in MM IB (any of the aforementioned banks) your clients are often the regional PEs + London-based PEs. So it's not that hard to move.
If you think you can be a genius by starting outside of London and moving to London in the future, that's tough. Depends on many things but in general those who are in London will have an advantage for London jobs due to the convenience to do interviews and mutual connections. So the associate/director could ask someone in your IBD team informally whether you're good and/or cool.
Career paths are not linear and people definitely move around. I'd say that outside-of-London MM IBD > London PE is not impossible, just slightly disadvantaged. It will depend on your personal network and partly on recruitment dynamics. Same thing applies to moves like small cap > mid cap or mid cap > large cap
EDIT: what PE thinks about is the quality of work they get from the said bank and the deal flow the bank has. The logic is that if the bank has strong deal flow and the output of work is strong, they assume that you are technically skilled and you understand the process and deal dynamics. If you go to a crap bank, they may just assume your technical knowledge isn't there hence less interviews
Houlihan’s offices outside of London are the result of the merger with GCA. Mostly focus on smaller and local transactions. Quality of people reflects this. I’d highly suggest to start in London.
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