What is life like at no-Bulge Bracket Investment banks?
You will always hear about daily life and exit opportunities at BBs and Boutiques, but what about other large banks like Mizuho, Nomura, Wells Fargo, HSBC and etc?
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I'll speak to my experience at a boutique firm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Size: The shop I'm at has 10 people in the sf office, 5 in NYC, and 4 in LA.
Deals: Our dealflow is moderate--on average 4-6 a year.
Hours: 9am-7pm is average with some days closer to 6pm. Latest junior bankers have stayed is 10pm when we're working on a deal.
Comp: 1st year analyst: 60 base + 20-40 bonus, 2nd year analyst: 80 base + 30-50 bonus, 1st year associate: 100 base + 50-75 bonus, 2nd year associate: 100 base + 80-130 bonus, VP: 200 base + 50-150 bonus
Let me know if I can answer any other questions.
Lol no worries dude. I probably took the anonymity part a bit too seriously. Yeah the hours are fantastic and the current team is super chill. I genuinely look forward to going in every day.
DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER!?!
Highly suspect this is a troll thread but there is really nothing wrong with going to a MM IB. I know a few people who even prefer being at a Jefferies/Lincoln/etc. as opposed to some of the BBs. MM PE is a good place to be afterwards and I wouldn't be surprised if they were less bureaucratic and political.
Can speak to my time at a MM - roughly ~15 MDs (2 per major sector) focused primarily on sell-side M&A deals in the $50M to $500M space.
Most of my career has been focused on the M&A side, but in terms of process the work done on $50M deals isn't really all that different than $1Bn deals. You still need to collect the same dataroom information, identify buyers, write the CIM and other marketing materials, etc. In fact, doing a $1Bn deal is often easier for juniors since the buyers list is significantly smaller and the internal systems for pulling financials and other operating statistics are significantly better at more developed companies. You also often work with more sophisticated management teams and you have to do less leg work on building their strategy/marketing message from the ground up.
The hours are slightly worse than the example posted above (analysts get in at 9 and work till 8pm to 10pm usually) but rarely are juniors pulling all-nighters (weekends are common though). Comp is approx 80-100 base for analyst, 130-150 for associates, and 170-200 for VP with bonuses ranging from 50%-100% depending on performance.
I think one of the key differentiators is the client base. At BB's you are often covering a 'finite' universe of mid to large-cap companies and thus you are constantly meeting them to pitch refinancing opportunities, stock issuances, and material M&A deals. At the MM level the universe of companies is massive and thus you spend a lot of time reaching out to clients early on in their lifecycle to build relationships and eventually aim to sell them once they are ready. Many MM's like Houlihan, Harris Williams, Baird, etc. do this same work but also benefit from having a strong name and thus will get invited to bake-offs on name recognition alone. My firm was a mix of MD personal relationships and brand recognition.
Also given we only had 2 MD's covering a sector with 4-5 juniors, our ability to update comps templates and put together sector updates was limited just due to bandwidth. At BB's as an analyst you'll spend a lot of time tracking market transactions and updating comps templates. We also utilized things like equity research significantly less since most of our clients were private - at larger banks you put together PIBs and constantly keep up to date on your large public clients.
Also want to mention that covering public companies at a BB is significantly more technical than private mid-market companies. With private companies you often have little to no information available for putting together meeting books or even the bake-off. At BB's you are often running financial models to show potential public M&A combinations, debt capacity, and other analyses that can be done with public information. This is often why the BB skillset is highly desired even at mid-market and even lower mid-market PE funds since you don't get this same modeling exposure at middle markets. That's not to say you get any exposure to modeling at middle markets, but the repetitions are significantly less.
Happy to answer any other questions you have. I can't really speak to some of larger full-service banks you mentioned above. However, if you look at say Wells Fargo's product split, they do significant amounts of debt placements and less M&A/IPO so I would imagine your workload is heavily geared towards debt financings (someone like Mizhuo in the U.S. is almost solely focused on capital raising). The somewhat sarcastic comment above about sitting on the right and chilling is partially true to some extent - the BB's will normally lead the bigger offerings and the stronger MM's like Jefferies likely due better on lead lefts for mid-sized offerings.
I started my career off at a "no-name" boutique before lateraling to a MM. I have never worked at a BB, so I can only compare my experience to what I have heard.
I'll start with exit opps because they are vastly different. My analyst class had one or two out of 50-ish leave for MFs. Another one or two left for top MM PE shops. One or two left for HFs. The rest either place in LMM PE, corp dev, stayed in IB, moved into some other role in finance (corporate finance, credit analysis, RE investment analysis, etc.), or are still exploring their options. I BBs and EBs clean house even in MM PE, so just be aware that even if you get into a top MM IB, you will face stiff competition breaking into a top MM PE shop. Out of the top headhunters (Oxbridge, Amity, Henkel), only about half reached out to my class.
As banks moved from $70,000 to $85,000 base for first years, there was a lag, but other than that, base pay will be the same. Bonuses is where things can differ. For 1st/2nd/3rd-year analyst bases of $85k/$90k/$95k, my MM paid bonuses of $55k/$70k/$95k with some variances between groups. That $100k bonus that Moelis recently paid out to analysts would never have happened at my MM.
The work could be a night and day difference. We had one coverage group that regularly competed against BBs, but other than that, most of our clients were smaller, private, and only mildly sophisticated. This resulted in frequent hand-holding, but not nearly as much as what I experience at the "no-name" boutique that I started at. Generally speaking, our clients were family owned or still owned by the original founders who either wanted to retire or needed capital to expand their business. Read: we were not dealing with the Apples or GEs of the world looking to amend their credit facility, looking to issue a follow-on, or looking to acquire a competitor for several billion.
I won't comment on the modeling or day-to-day experience of analysts simply because there is so much variance even within the same bank, but what I will say is that at my MM, and I imagine all MM banks, the analyst involvement was intense. We never staffed more than one analyst on a transaction. Analysts were always the go-to person for the client and all potential buyers. We participated in all management meetings, all diligence calls, all site visits, etc.
Hope that helps. Happy to answer any questions.
I don't know about banks, but I can tell you about the time I entered a non top-tier frat's house....
I was going over to the Beta house because one of my boys told me you could get high off of acne medicine. Being in a top tier frat I was siced for a new way to get wasted, but the flip side of being in a top tier frat is that all of my bros are super hot and don't have acne. I was like, dude, where tf am I supposed to get acne medication. My bro was like "idk bro, I don't know anyone whose ugly" and I was like "yeah, me neither, that'd be gay. We'll need to find someone. But where does one go to seek out the biggest NF, neckbeard, acne having pussies that this world has to offer....???"
So there I was, attending my first 8am accounting class of the semester to scope out some GDIs with acne. What I found was even worse....sitting in the front row were three human neck-beards with Beta Theta Pi t-shirts on.
Fast forward five hours, I stepped into the not top-tier frathouse of the Betas. The inside was cold and dark. There was a female restroom on the bottom floor with cobwebs on the door handle because Beta hates getting laid and no female has ever seen the interior of their house. As I stepped through the hall time seemed to slow down. One by one a bunch of glue-eating mouthbreathers started anxiously poking their heads out of their doors to see who the visitor was - they were worried someone might have brought a girl over, and Beta HATES getting laid. I finally got to the room I was looking for and that's where the real horror happened. I found Chief Beta with the bad chest acne and asked him for three pills. "Sure thing m'dude" he said, before adding, "But seriously, you didn't bring any girls with you did you???? We HATE getting laid". I was like "sure man, whatever,no girls allowed can i just get my pills and get out of here please?" He obliged and put three of them in my palm. But something didn't feel right, something was off. My frat senses were tingling. It was then that I realized that the Beta Fraternity President was not a human being at all but was rather a walking dildo with anal beads for eyes and two butt plugs for arms...."we reallllllly hate getting laid here FratLord" was the last thing I heard as I sprinted out of his room and back to the safety of my top-tier frat castle down the street.
So yeah, that's about what I'd imagine working at a non BB is like.