Should I stay in corp banking or leave?

Ultimately, I think I want to do corporate strategy or corporate development in the long run. I currently have a full-time offer to do corporate banking at a large bank. My question is, should I take the offer, and then try to internally lateral within my bank to do IB, or should I recruit at a small boutique IB firm? I know most of the top and large IB firms are done recruiting, which is why I need to target the smaller ones.

 
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It seems to be difficult to lateral to IB from CB in my experience of the people that I've met and spoken to (even within the same area). I met with a 2nd year analyst in TMT IB who got his spot after coming from the same bank in TMT CB, except he was a 2nd year associate there.

Are you still in school? You should take the offer if you don't have another AND recruit. If you get an IB offer at another firm then take it and reneg. Yeah you probably are never going to get into that original bank in the future because of it, but it will save you the struggle of trying to move around. Burning bridges at a low level is overrated to me as long as you are extremely respectful and apologetic. You're still going to burn them, but they won't go out of their way to harm you.

 

Yeah, I'm still in school. I just don't know which firms to recruit at.

Maybe this is the wrong mindset, but I don't want to renege on this job for a small IB firm where most of my work is going to be pitches. I will obviously renege if I get something like evercore, but does it make sense to renege for a 10 person IB firm just to have IB on my resume? Will my exit opps even be that good at such a small firm?

 

Evercore is like... the top of the top from last I saw, you aren't going to get into Evercore. I can't comment on the reg for a 10 person shop comment as I've never done anything like that. Exit opps should not be your main focus, getting in is your main focus. Cart/horse analogy.

Edit: Also, what do you mean most of your work will be pitches? What do you think you do in IB? Like 60-70% of my day is creating, editing, updating pitch books and sending them to my MD who hates them and wants them redone this other way.

 

Personally? No, but I’ve seen at least a few do it when I searched LinkedIn a year or so back.

Not everyone will be able to make the transition - but like I said, If you’re a top performer and self study the modeling, you can do it.

Plenty of people seem to stay in CB due to good pay and better work/life than CB

 

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