88 Comments
 

I got a Triple Tree deck recently that felt like it was made by interns. Had two typos in the first sentence on the first page. 

 

I got a Triple Tree deck recently that felt like it was made by interns. Had two typos in the first sentence on the first page. 

Who the fuck are Triple Tree?

Sponsors M&A (London)
 
Analyst 1 in IB - Cov

Have a buddy that laughs everytime he gets a book from Piper Sandler. Very curious to hear what other banks have ridiculous looking decks.

I always thought UBS decks were ugly because of their unfortunate color scheme. Brown, dark red, dark orange, yellow, grey color scheme always looked bad no matter what was on the page. 

 

If bankers had a sense of humor that would be a good punishment, just have the guys present a normal pitch deck

 

This was exactly my thought. Literally was thinking how much do I really read the slides that are in any powerpoint (or how much does anyone really?) 

I always would talk with colleagues about the usual adage of "I can't wait to put XX hours into a deck that will literally be thrown into the garbage"

I giggled out loud once when someone actually threw a deck I made away in front of me. My boss then told me never to giggle again. 

 

They just look terrible? Not visually pleasing at all. Lots of white space. I’ve seen some of my ex finance professors make better PowerPoints than lincoln’s decks

 

Lincoln International's analysts (generally, with exceptions I'm sure) are not allowed to touch the model, that's associate-and-above responsibilities. As such, analysts and SAs are disproportionately working on these decks, which may explain why you dislike the slides. I haven't seen them first-hand, but this reasoning could explain why.

 

Not sure where this is coming from. Worked at Lincoln and we have had professional slides developed for every deck we produce. Have had clients talk about how clean our slides look saying it’s one of the better ones they’ve seen

 
Controversial

I'm going to paint with a broad brush here, but coming from MBB consulting, I'm confident in saying that, with the exception of a couple one-off decks, *all* of you bankers have the worst slide design for premium professional services. 

- 4:3 vs 16:9

- Multiple fonts on the same slide

- Title on the slide isn't the main takeaway

- Iconography that looks like it was made by epileptic gorillas

- Colors don't match across slides or tie to each other (e.g., if the bar for revenue for X company is blue on page 4, why tf aint it blue on slide 5)

- Utter disregard for margins

- Boxes everywhere instead of crisp row and column headers with no whitespace, looking like an early 2004 middle schooler's deck

- Not using the unified text boxes and bullets, changes from slide to slide

And more

Remember, always be kind-hearted.
 

Iconography that looks like it was made by epileptic gorillas

Hahahaha hilarious

 

Obviously I agree with consistent fonts, colors, layouts, and such, but the rest of the differences are largely because banking slides serve a different purpose. 1. We use a LOT of quadrant layouts so 4:3 just works better. 2. Each of our slides often needs to be a standalone thing, so we don’t just have one idea per slide - they often have multiple ideas, so we can’t do the headline thing. It’s good policy, but we need slides to be more standalone.

 

On the other hand, Baird makes beautiful decks that say nothing. Amazing graphic designers, but they take 110 pages to tell me no more about a business than I can learn in a teaser. 

 

GS is one that surprises me. I wouldn't say that the slides are terrible but very generic average slides. Nothing special.

Some random shops with consistently really good slides in my experience: RBC, Jefferies, and Barclays.

 

Call em a bottom tier BB, not a BB, an in-between-a BB, whatever you want. But by god can those RBC monkeys spit out a pretty PowerPoint slide. 

 

Seeing SoftBank's slides made me wonder whether how much the quality of your slides actually matters. Not to say that SoftBank had been doing well, but was wondering how SoftBank was able to get away with making slides looking like this while all major financial institutions were making slides of a completely different style/caliber

 

ppl invested in softbank because of masayoshi son, not some ppt deck

 

From my personal experience of seeing a bunch of banker decks over the past few years

Best: RBC, Lazard, Allen & Co., Moelis - consistently well-formatted and aesthetically pleasing slides, usually accompanied by higher quality information (or better thoughts/ideas in relation to pitches)

Hit or Miss: BofA, UBS, DB, Evercore - usually aesthetically pleasing, sometimes a bit wonky depending on content (UBS has a terrible color scheme which alone puts them in this category for me); some good ideas and others poorly thought out

Worst: MS, GS, Jefferies - consistently hideous and an eyesore to look at. Straight to the trash if it's a pitch

 

Funny thread...and its true some decks are just embarrassing.

That said, I've been on the buyside decision making end of several restructuring bake offs and no one pays attention to the decks and often the worst decks win the mandate because you're hiring a relationship not a presentation. Brutal for the poor analysts and associates that make them perfect, but that's the reality. 

 
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