I've seen this come up a few times but never quite understood the role. From what I gather, it's essentially a MD who is no longer client facing but serves in an advisory and mentorship role, or sometimes comes out to meet clients to chime in with industry expertise. Is this more or less accurate? I'm familiar with the normal rank and reporting structure, MDs report to group heads, group heads report to the president of banking, etc., but not sure how the vice chairman role fit in with this. What's their day to day?
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when a group has a lot of key man risk from an MD or group head who wants to retire, they promote said person to vice chairman. Effectively, the transition is meant to introduce clients to new bankers at the same firm that will take care of all their investment banking needs before the original relationship manager retires, runs for public office, etc. It serves as a transitional role so that the bank doesn’t lose a ton of clients when a rainmaker MD retires.
“Runs for public office” lmaoo what you think this some episode of Billions or something?
did you never hear the colloquialism “government Sachs” growing up? they have an obscene amount of alums go into government mostly not elected but still. Rishi sunak ring a bell?
Glorified retirement plan.
BB banks’ way of soft boot before throwing you off the ledge.
Not a bad gig per se, but I sincerely hope one doesn’t have to stay that long at one bank, rather fuck the BB and join an EB… or best retire and leave the bank high and dry
Spot on, the only time that’s not the case is when someone is also the head of something as well as a Vice Chairman of Banking - say “Global Head of Energy and Vice Chairman”. That means, they have a real role but they are enough of a hittter that they use the Vice Chairman title to call on non energy clients in addition to their day job.
Congrats on Global Head of Energy and Vice Chairman
Have seen it be both voluntary and involuntary - either someone wants to move out of the Head/Global Head origination role or they need to free up that title to promote someone else. If it’s enforced you’re likely being put out to pasture to retire.
As those have stated above, it's basically being a senior relationship manager for MDs who won't be involved in the day-to-day of managing clients or deals anymore. During this time, the vice chairs generally pass on relationships to incumbent MDs as they transition out of their roles at the firm. Many times they'll stick around because they need the structure in their lives and want a job they go to / feel productive at. And sometimes they are kept by the firm because their relationships are invaluable. Very subjective and situationally dependent.
I’ve had a run in with one where he was going to have lunch with a CEO to soft pitch a big deal - basically learned that they have very senior relationships. The worst is when the director on the pitch wants to jerk off the VC and wants a million metrics on the 10 slides we’re preparing and then on the call the VC just asks me to walk through the highlights and we’re done.
I think this topic is generally overstating the "out to pasture" concept of this title. Anon MD above is right, and I'd say that there are plenty of Vice Chairmen that fall into the category they outlined.
Maybe I'm biased because I was at Morgan Stanley, but at least there, the "out to pasture" title was Senior Advisor. Those people typically had been around forever and didn't want to leave, but were put on a fixed salary and didn't receive a bonus anymore. The Vice Chairmen tended to be either A) heavy hitters that were quite senior, still very involved in client relationships, and were deserving of a title boost beyond just MD, or B) people that had clearly capped out in terms of progression (i.e., they were never going to run a division) but still highly valued and the firm wanted to keep them around. I can't think of too many that were out to pasture, to be honest, but I could easily just not have been paying close enough attention.
Essentially senior bankers that are kept around for the "vibes". Forget excel or powerpoint, they likely haven't logged onto an actual desktop for work in over half a decade, but they know everyone and are connected everywhere.
You'll bring them along to the pitch even though they haven't looked at the book and probably do not even know what transaction you're actually pitching on. They'll do their 5-minute bit about how extremely important this relationship is to the firm, and that them and the "senior powers that be" will be intimately involved in every step of the deal to make sure it is done right; this is a lie, but that does not matter. They have grey hair and take annual golf trips with the chairman of the board.
This may sound like a glorified retirement plan the bank hands out as a gesture of goodwill for their decades spent at the firm, but that's only half true. The VCs are truly valuable in winning business. The handshake and little wink and nod the Vice Chair brought to the meeting did way more to secure the mandate than any of the 60+ page deck you slaved over for 2-weeks, and that's just the hard truth of working in a relationship oriented business.
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