LevFin League Tables

This is response above is key - you'll get a very different experience doing LevFin at a WFC (corporate refi heavy) vs. a CS (predominantly sponsor / acq financing). Anyone who's actually worked in LevFin knows how boring those double-B, frequent-issuer corporate refis are (and likewise the best-efforts fees reflect this). Great for league tables though

Just speaking strictly in terms of getting LevFin deal experience at the junior level:

- JPM / BAML - they have heavy presence in both sponsor-related financing & corporates, so it's just a matter of staffing on whether you get on the acq financing deals vs. corporate refis. Lot of lead-lefts, but note at JPM, the credit memo is run by their IB Risk team, and their LevFin is really more of a terms / pricing team.

- Citi - Similar to JPM / BAML but just with (relatively) less volume.

- WFC - corporate refi heavy, very little sponsor backed financing (if they are involved, they are typically on the right with v little economics, usually just brought in last min to fill out RCF holds)

- MS - I don't see them in as many deals as you would expect but when they are involved, they typically are lead-left or hold high percentage economics. Usually involved in large corporate M&A type financings (likely leveraging off the relationships from their strong M&A franchise)

- GS - used to be similar to MS style but ever since their push to grow their LevFin business in around 2016, they've grown their presence in more corporate type (read: balance sheet heavy) refis. Standard success story of leveraging their M&A relationships to win more LevFin (or pretty much all types of) financing business. Note one unique thing about them is that they got a large Mezz fund in their merchant banking arm that they aren't afraid to swing around. So in hairy situations where the Company needs some sort of subordianted / mezz financing, GS would tell the client "hey our internal mezz fund can provide that missing debt piece you need, but in exchange you gonna need to give us the lead-left role for the 1L TL syndication" or something along those lines. With that said at the junior level, note their levfin groups are more capital market roles (you just running cap tables / debt comps / term sheets type of stuff) rather than a true (model-intensive) banking role, for what it's worth.

- CS - extremely sponsor / acquisition finance heavy. LevFin is like almost half their IB advisory side revenue. More importantly at the junior level, LevFin / Sponsors here is a true banking role where you hold pen on the model. They have a separate LevFin execution team (I think it's called Transaction Execution Group or something like that) who deals with all the terms negotiations / funds flow closing stuff, so their origination teams can focus on the modeling / due diligence. Can't comment on departures post the Archegos / Greensil blowups but friends there have told me their Sponsors / LevFin teams have stayed pretty much intact. Makes sense since LevFin is pretty much CS's crown jewel (and their comp likely reflects this)

- BARC - used to be more like CS style where they were sponsor heavy but expanded aggressively to get more of the corporate refi business - at this point they are a big player in both acq financing and corporates. Think general consensus across the street is that BARC IB franchise (not just LevFin) has been on the upward trend in the last couple years (in contrast to DB, and now CS). Note their LevFin group is also more a cap markets group (like GS/JPM).   

-  JEFF - think these guys don't get talked about as much here but if we are talking LevFin, JEFF def needs to be in the conversation. Very sponsor / acq financing heavy, and moreover they are an unregulated bank so have ability to underwrite deals that typically turned down by the BBs. LevFin makes up a huge portion of their IB revenue, and I believe is the cornerstone of much of their other IB business.

Just my 2 cents.