Over recent weeks I have been looking at full-time IB vacancies at the BBs (but also MM banks) across Europe. The vast majority of available positions seem to be at FIG groups. I was wondering what the underlying reason for this could be? Lots of deal activity, boring sector, generally bad cultures, not so good exit opportunities?
Does anyone have an idea?
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which banks specifically?
Mix of tough lifestyle, FIG groups tend to be sweaty across the board, niche sectors with few people passionate about them (often try to leave after 2 years if they want to stay in banking and move to more generic groups such as TMT, HC, C&R) and the few people passionate about FIG are in high demand by PE/HF to cover FIG as they are building out their teams.
Finally at the more senior level (VP+), corp dev roles tend to pay better than "generic" industries - for some reason FIG pays better at all levels in the corporate compared to say Consumer, Telco, etc maybe only tech beats them.
what do corporate fig exits look like?
Strategy, IR, Treasury, FP&A, M&A/CorpDev at a large FIG Company, you can also work for Corporate Venture Capital/accelerators within large FIG firms
It's a pretty massive industry and I could see it being a harder group to fill thus recruiters get used and post the jobs online.
Boring sector, most groups are sweat shops. Not a ton of transferable technical skills if you want to change sectors.
Ex. Not many people are interested in covering speciality lenders or insurance companies.
Burnout.
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