Worst Bank You've Ever Worked with? Perspectives from the Buy-Side
Whether its their inability to respond in a timely manner, to misleading you about where you stand relative to other buyers in the process, to providing horrendously inaccurate or incomplete information / data, there are a few banks that come to mind that would cause me to roll my eyes the minute we receive a teaser from them.
For those of you on the buy-side, which banks do you absolutely abhor working with?
Additionally, which banks do you actively seek out when you need to sell a platform / portco / divest / require buy-side advisory?
Goldman - I know something's fucked, but I can't quite figure it out (they are very good at their jobs)
Agree
First time seeing a GS sellside this year and they nearly blew up their client’s process in the most comical fashion. Then continually catered to one of the buyers in the interest of future fees, arguably at their client’s expense (I’m sure a lot of banks do this). N=1 but the whole thing was a hilarious shitshow.
Nice lol. What sector?
Harris Williams - will wring every dollar out of you
I am not sure I have ever heard anything good about their M&A capabilities, might be why they seem to be shrinking
Might be misunderstanding here, but is that not a positive as a seller?
This is likely from the perspective of a PE selling an asset with them.
We do a lot of business with BofA (across ny / menlo) because one of the csuite at my firm (who ran the investing team) worked there and his old contacts are very high up there now
They don’t do a good job on their materials, low quality work with many errors. Also don’t put any effort into framing sell side materials they’ll just take what people in our company (portco) say about financials etc. almost verbatim
Need lots of handholding etc. Evercore, JPM is great along with other boutiques like WB for smaller processes. Goldman experience has been solid, Barclays pretty good. No exp with MS. A lot of the random banks we get inbounds for / may have worked with on smaller / MM transactions are just plain bad on almost every front
Thanks for the POV, this is exactly what I was interested in.
I'm waiting for someone to drop the name of the bank that frustrated me enough to make this post, but lets just say they have a lot in common with the BoA groups you just described.
On the flip side, have been extremely impressed with Evercore. Only worked with them on one deal but their work quality and effort was top notch. Generally, the folks at Evercore seem really sharp too. May sound like I'm simping so obligatory I have never worked there or even applied there, they are just sharp folks who work hard
Why not reciprocate and add to the discussion yourself..?
That’s what happens when all of the high performers leave (and still leaving) because the firm decided to not do RIFs. BofA is stuck with a biggest bag of shit A&As in the history of Wall Street. 50 associates in a group is just ridiculous. If you are bottom bucket, why try? You’ll get paid anyway and you won’t get fired. Might as well coast and collect the check. And if you are top bucket, why try either? You’re just going to get fucked on comp and not much more than the guy sitting next to you who knows absolutely nothing about the job aside the fact there are no consequences for A&As. Makes more sense to get your life and weekends/nights back.
You have all these duds in the A&A pool that wouldn’t make it anywhere else and then a handful of high performers doing all the work, who will leave right after bonuses when they get bent over and reamed on comp for the 4th year in a row… This whole issue flows up the chain… Morale is also low across the VPs/Ds since the pay has been absolute shit since 2021 given the market and all these A&As you have to feed. They need to pick up after these worthless A&As who get paid marginally less than they do to make the five MDs on each deal happy… on top of that, VPs and Ds are told not to make the A&As work hard given recent events - i don’t see why a VP or D wouldn’t jump ship if an opportunity comes up
Not that I have a say in which bank my fund hires, but until BofA fixes this and start to pay the high performers and those who work hard so they actually stay to keep things afloat, this issue will just get worse and worse.
From personal experience (these aren't generalizations): Goldman makes their materials as physically challenging to tie out as possible, and the hard-coded financials make me want to slam my head against the wall trying to tease out implied drivers. Also worked with them in banking for a shared (large) client and they fucked up free cashflow build, had to hop on a call when they insisted we were wrong, and finally taught them to add NWC or something dumb. Prickly and annoying, and the people I knew there personally were super unchill.
Evercore, while super sharp and very diligent (poor analysts), have always sent massive excel files that crash my computer, and I still don't know if that was on purpose.
Baird was super responsive, but they tend to just make shit up sometimes just to get a response quickly, feel bad for the junior team.
On the flip side, I've found that industry-focused boutiques can be really easy - for example, Bank Street for telecoms makes everything very easy and transparent, and I like that approach. Makes the real buyers more real and easier to get a good deal done more quickly. Not like they will shit on the company in their CIM, but they have every DD item T'd up, and their models actually make sense, saving me from jumping out of the conference room.
Worked at Evercore as an analyst who frequently used one of those massive excel files that probably blew up your computer - can confirm they are real and a severe pain in the ass for analysts. Usually the source of 1-2 MDs who has built their gift-from-god overkill excel template and forces it on any junior that works with them. Waiting for files like that to load / recover crashes probably accounted for 1/3 of my hours each week.
Am notorious for creating ridiculous models that crash computers. Fell down a rabbit hole earlier this year about how to use certain formula structures over others to improve file size and calc speed. Probably one of the best things I’ve ever done my files are still large and dynamic but now can run things on the fly. Has been a game changer on saving time and being able to run scenarios in IC.
Reading this back realizing what a bot I sound like, but hopefully someone finds this useful.
Bofa Consumer very good
LionTree good
Citi ok
Raymond James bad
N=1 but Baird fucked us huge on a deal after we spent >$7m on diligence
having used to work at Baird I would love to know which deal this was. There are some great MDs there, but also some greasy ones
Would be curious on this as well
+1 for Baird - did not enjoy the mid-level folks we got staffed with - seniors were good, felt bad for the juniors (largely due to two mid-level chuckle heads)
Very bad experience with Jefferies. Needed a ton of hand holding, first drafts of materials made no sense clearly no senior oversight.
Can attest. At Jefferies if a client isn’t important enough or the fee isn’t big enough for the MDs then the bulk of the work will be handed off to VPs or below.
That’s exactly what we do lmao.
Probably how it should be tbh
Probably stating the obvious but in my experience it really really depends on the "pod" of folks running the deal. Within the same firm, there's some senior guys who are absolute rent seeking dipshits to don't do anything after winning the pitch and others that care, are tactical, and have a strong execution director/vp under them who is good at managing the junior team.
Worked with BofA. An absolute disaster. At some point we were speaking directly with the VP from the co-advisor even when we had questions about the workstream of BofA as he was extremely good and could understand every aspects of the deal
Not a specific bank but I’ve gotten some trash CIMs in the past year from PCA groups. I know they’re intentionally holding back info in the teaser, but in the CIM I should be able to figure out what the underlying companies do and their basic financial profile. Too many times it’s vague as hell like “B2B SaaS platform doing between $10-200M ARR, strong margins, break-even in 12-24 months”. Exaggerating a little but not too far off from some gp led decks we’ve seen.
Shittybank (Citibank) did Terrafirma so bad on their EMI deal many years ago, it has basically not been able to recover since. Citi was the sell side + buyside advisor + lender...no COI there huh
A colleague of mine had a very bad experience with HL on the sell side. Significant hand holding, terrible CIM, MD didn't see obvious upcoming potential issues
Definitely Goldman. Never have I worked with a professional services firm that was so nakedly self interested. MS is a huge pain to work with on the buyside but I suppose that gets them good results on the sell side.
Goldman Sachs TMT. By Far
Houlihan Lokey.
My MD tends to throw incoming stuff from them directly into the trash. They once lied to us on one deal straight into our face. After we realized that they lied we called them and my MD was pissed af and screamed at them and they had the audacity to scream back and lie again. This was an absolute shitshow.
What sector is this? Have had several similar HL run ins.
DB
It was bad, really really bad. Incredible amount of hand holding, no ability to frame out the story, every time they sent the model there was a #ref error, they didn’t know how set up a tracker…
Can confirm. DB is the second worst bank I've worked with. >150 page CIM, insane amount of opining on what the business could, maybe, just maybe achieve, difficult to work with, irresponsive, almost like IDGAF energy.
What’s the first worst bank?
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