What is life like at no-Bulge Bracket Investment banks?
You will always hear about daily life and exit opportunities at BBs and Boutiques, but what about other large banks like Mizuho, Nomura, Wells Fargo, HSBC and etc?
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bump
You just sit on the right of every deal and chill
Assuming this is not a joke, can you please expand?
Bump
I'll speak to my experience at a boutique firm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Size: The shop I'm at has 10 people in the sf office, 5 in NYC, and 4 in LA.
Deals: Our dealflow is moderate--on average 4-6 a year.
Hours: 9am-7pm is average with some days closer to 6pm. Latest junior bankers have stayed is 10pm when we're working on a deal.
Comp: 1st year analyst: 60 base + 20-40 bonus, 2nd year analyst: 80 base + 30-50 bonus, 1st year associate: 100 base + 50-75 bonus, 2nd year associate: 100 base + 80-130 bonus, VP: 200 base + 50-150 bonus
Let me know if I can answer any other questions.
Also interested in this topic for both the banks OP listed and for regional boutiques— would you say you spend a larger proportion of your time pitching than someone at a BB/EB might or do you simply target a different market? Assuming your bank is tech-focused by the HQ location, is it top- or bottom-heavy? Is there a significant amount of turnover in junior people jumping to BB/EB or buy-side?
Overall, what brings people to your firm vs. larger/more name-brand firms?
50%+ of our time is spent pitching and sourcing deals. I'd say it's a pretty even split leaning more towards junior people. A lot of our deals come from the relationships our CEO/MD have. Most junior bankers lateral to BB's/VC. We place well into MM Bay Area VC (think tenaya and the like). Typically we get people who like the hours/fact that pay is very bonus focused--puts the onus on you to up your pay, thus better work.
Are you hiring?
Sorry, that's as specific as I'll get
Holy shit that is amazing hours.
haha yeah man the hours are pretty great. they gave me an offer to come back when I graduate contingent upon interning at a BB or somewhere that I can hone my technical ability (which is crap, honestly, I'm terrible at the technical side). like take this for example: my VP just asked me to pull deal comps, but he doesn't need it until tomorrow. I have 24 hours to pull a single set of deal comps lol
Do you know what the average annual deal flow at a BB or an EB is? I'm curious.
Global YTD M&A statistics from Dealogic:
GS: 236 deals for a total of $508B in transaction value MS: 214, $439B JPM: 254, $421B Citi: 172, $407B BAML: 150, $367B
Anymore?
Do SA's learn more @ non BB's? (Originally Posted: 01/07/2008)
Just curious, what do you guys think?
From reading listings @ my schools career center, it seems that @ places like Jane Strt, DRW etc. interns have the opportunity to learn a lot more. Some of the them also advertise - classes after work!!
I have a strong engineering background, and know very little about finance. I was wondering if these places would be a better starting point? What about pay at these places is it comparable?
Thanks
i'm going to take an educated guess and say you go to UMich.
i'm also going to be dead honest with you, don't decide where to intern by where you're gonna learn the most. how much you know often doesn't mean dick.
take the internship at the company who's name will look best on your resume (assuming you apply for the same type of internship everywhere). you might learn more at drw than some BB but when you are applying for FT, your resume is more likely to be passed over than if it had Morgan Stanley on it for example.
also keep in mind that if you're not a complete dumbass, you'll probably get a FT offer from the company you intern at. think about where you'd prefer to work full-time after school.
and by the way, how much you learn is very dependent on who your bosses are during your internship, particularly in trading. you might get put on a trading desk where the guys are douches and don't want to have anything to do with you or you might get along really well with them and subsequently learn a lot.
I go to a school less known for its engineering, but thankfully its a target school. (I had no idea about target vs non-target when I decided to go there :D)
Yes I am indeed hoping to convert the SA into a FT offer. But what are the chances that a BB would hire a guy with no finance background? Thats my concern. These non-BB places have no issues hiring students with no finance background.
Anyway I'm getting way ahead of myself. Let me first apply to all these places and see what happens!!
"Yes I am indeed hoping to convert the SA into a FT offer. But what are the chances that a BB would hire a guy with no finance background? Thats my concern. These non-BB places have no issues hiring students with no finance background"
BBs have no issues hiring non-finance students. Do some more research on the industry, the employers, and more importantly figure out what you want to do FT. BBs hire more than their fair share of engineering, econ, and other liberal arts majors. Think about it, why would these places be any more inclined to hire non-finance majors than BBs would?
I was under the impression that places like Jane Strt use more quantitative methods which is why they are more open to engineers? no?
yes, jane st. does use quant. methods and favors people who are very strong in math and sci. but again,BBs also have SA positions for quants
Highly suspect this is a troll thread but there is really nothing wrong with going to a MM IB. I know a few people who even prefer being at a Jefferies/Lincoln/etc. as opposed to some of the BBs. MM PE is a good place to be afterwards and I wouldn't be surprised if they were less bureaucratic and political.
Could you possibly expand on the work life at Jefferies? I have a friend and Lincoln(Chicago) and he gave me a fairly good idea of his culture/work life balance on his team.
The site makes it sound like Jefferies is a sweatshop when it really isn't that bad. The people there are pretty cool but again it is ib so work/life balance isn't going to be like working at Google if you're in M&A.
Lol I love how much shit this is getting. Even Lazard and Evercore are non-Bulge Brackets and they beat the hell out of most banking gigs. Prestige whores.
Yea those are EBs. You're getting shit on bc you said people would prefer Lincoln to a BB
Can speak to my time at a MM - roughly ~15 MDs (2 per major sector) focused primarily on sell-side M&A deals in the $50M to $500M space.
Most of my career has been focused on the M&A side, but in terms of process the work done on $50M deals isn't really all that different than $1Bn deals. You still need to collect the same dataroom information, identify buyers, write the CIM and other marketing materials, etc. In fact, doing a $1Bn deal is often easier for juniors since the buyers list is significantly smaller and the internal systems for pulling financials and other operating statistics are significantly better at more developed companies. You also often work with more sophisticated management teams and you have to do less leg work on building their strategy/marketing message from the ground up.
The hours are slightly worse than the example posted above (analysts get in at 9 and work till 8pm to 10pm usually) but rarely are juniors pulling all-nighters (weekends are common though). Comp is approx 80-100 base for analyst, 130-150 for associates, and 170-200 for VP with bonuses ranging from 50%-100% depending on performance.
I think one of the key differentiators is the client base. At BB's you are often covering a 'finite' universe of mid to large-cap companies and thus you are constantly meeting them to pitch refinancing opportunities, stock issuances, and material M&A deals. At the MM level the universe of companies is massive and thus you spend a lot of time reaching out to clients early on in their lifecycle to build relationships and eventually aim to sell them once they are ready. Many MM's like Houlihan, Harris Williams, Baird, etc. do this same work but also benefit from having a strong name and thus will get invited to bake-offs on name recognition alone. My firm was a mix of MD personal relationships and brand recognition.
Also given we only had 2 MD's covering a sector with 4-5 juniors, our ability to update comps templates and put together sector updates was limited just due to bandwidth. At BB's as an analyst you'll spend a lot of time tracking market transactions and updating comps templates. We also utilized things like equity research significantly less since most of our clients were private - at larger banks you put together PIBs and constantly keep up to date on your large public clients.
Also want to mention that covering public companies at a BB is significantly more technical than private mid-market companies. With private companies you often have little to no information available for putting together meeting books or even the bake-off. At BB's you are often running financial models to show potential public M&A combinations, debt capacity, and other analyses that can be done with public information. This is often why the BB skillset is highly desired even at mid-market and even lower mid-market PE funds since you don't get this same modeling exposure at middle markets. That's not to say you get any exposure to modeling at middle markets, but the repetitions are significantly less.
Happy to answer any other questions you have. I can't really speak to some of larger full-service banks you mentioned above. However, if you look at say Wells Fargo's product split, they do significant amounts of debt placements and less M&A/IPO so I would imagine your workload is heavily geared towards debt financings (someone like Mizhuo in the U.S. is almost solely focused on capital raising). The somewhat sarcastic comment above about sitting on the right and chilling is partially true to some extent - the BB's will normally lead the bigger offerings and the stronger MM's like Jefferies likely due better on lead lefts for mid-sized offerings.
This may be hard for you to answer, but is it normal for MM bankers to "only" (I use that word very loosely) work till 8 or 10? I feel like a lot of people on here say you'll still be pulling 10-2 AM type of days at MM firms like Jeffries, Baird, etc. Is that an exaggeration or the truth in your experience?
It really depends on the bank - I can only speak anecdotally but classmates I know who have worked at places with serious deal volume like Houlihan and Baird work similar 80+ hour weeks as bankers at BB (you also get paid more in line with them as well, at least at the junior level). Was talking with a guy who works at Lincoln International (CHI office) and he said most juniors work till around 10 so take that fwiw.
I previously worked at a boutique that was slightly larger than Skyler's above. We primarily focused on a few specific verticals within tech and telecom, and we spent very little time pitching, like less than 10%. One of the advantages in the lower middle market is that if your senior partners have great relationships then much of your deal flow doesn't involve bake-offs. This allows for much better hours.
I don't know what things look like at the second tier large banks. I would guess that there's a lot of pitching to try to raise the firm's profile on bigger deals.
At BBs (I started as an analyst at a BB) you are always pitching either as part of a bake-off or for hypothetical deals to just stay in front of larger companies (the worst kind of pitch).
I started my career off at a "no-name" boutique before lateraling to a MM. I have never worked at a BB, so I can only compare my experience to what I have heard.
I'll start with exit opps because they are vastly different. My analyst class had one or two out of 50-ish leave for MFs. Another one or two left for top MM PE shops. One or two left for HFs. The rest either place in LMM PE, corp dev, stayed in IB, moved into some other role in finance (corporate finance, credit analysis, RE investment analysis, etc.), or are still exploring their options. I BBs and EBs clean house even in MM PE, so just be aware that even if you get into a top MM IB, you will face stiff competition breaking into a top MM PE shop. Out of the top headhunters (Oxbridge, Amity, Henkel), only about half reached out to my class.
As banks moved from $70,000 to $85,000 base for first years, there was a lag, but other than that, base pay will be the same. Bonuses is where things can differ. For 1st/2nd/3rd-year analyst bases of $85k/$90k/$95k, my MM paid bonuses of $55k/$70k/$95k with some variances between groups. That $100k bonus that Moelis recently paid out to analysts would never have happened at my MM.
The work could be a night and day difference. We had one coverage group that regularly competed against BBs, but other than that, most of our clients were smaller, private, and only mildly sophisticated. This resulted in frequent hand-holding, but not nearly as much as what I experience at the "no-name" boutique that I started at. Generally speaking, our clients were family owned or still owned by the original founders who either wanted to retire or needed capital to expand their business. Read: we were not dealing with the Apples or GEs of the world looking to amend their credit facility, looking to issue a follow-on, or looking to acquire a competitor for several billion.
I won't comment on the modeling or day-to-day experience of analysts simply because there is so much variance even within the same bank, but what I will say is that at my MM, and I imagine all MM banks, the analyst involvement was intense. We never staffed more than one analyst on a transaction. Analysts were always the go-to person for the client and all potential buyers. We participated in all management meetings, all diligence calls, all site visits, etc.
Hope that helps. Happy to answer any questions.
What do you think of the Elite Boutique model? It seems as though it is the best of both worlds. Evercore, Lazard, Moelis, etc. are still some heavy hitters in M&A and Rx while also being incredibly lean and not using their B/S like a BAML or Citi. Not to mention the fact that they get really good placements in PE/HF for even some of their not as good groups.
I don't know about banks, but I can tell you about the time I entered a non top-tier frat's house....
I was going over to the Beta house because one of my boys told me you could get high off of acne medicine. Being in a top tier frat I was siced for a new way to get wasted, but the flip side of being in a top tier frat is that all of my bros are super hot and don't have acne. I was like, dude, where tf am I supposed to get acne medication. My bro was like "idk bro, I don't know anyone whose ugly" and I was like "yeah, me neither, that'd be gay. We'll need to find someone. But where does one go to seek out the biggest NF, neckbeard, acne having pussies that this world has to offer....???"
So there I was, attending my first 8am accounting class of the semester to scope out some GDIs with acne. What I found was even worse....sitting in the front row were three human neck-beards with Beta Theta Pi t-shirts on.
Fast forward five hours, I stepped into the not top-tier frathouse of the Betas. The inside was cold and dark. There was a female restroom on the bottom floor with cobwebs on the door handle because Beta hates getting laid and no female has ever seen the interior of their house. As I stepped through the hall time seemed to slow down. One by one a bunch of glue-eating mouthbreathers started anxiously poking their heads out of their doors to see who the visitor was - they were worried someone might have brought a girl over, and Beta HATES getting laid. I finally got to the room I was looking for and that's where the real horror happened. I found Chief Beta with the bad chest acne and asked him for three pills. "Sure thing m'dude" he said, before adding, "But seriously, you didn't bring any girls with you did you???? We HATE getting laid". I was like "sure man, whatever,no girls allowed can i just get my pills and get out of here please?" He obliged and put three of them in my palm. But something didn't feel right, something was off. My frat senses were tingling. It was then that I realized that the Beta Fraternity President was not a human being at all but was rather a walking dildo with anal beads for eyes and two butt plugs for arms...."we reallllllly hate getting laid here FratLord" was the last thing I heard as I sprinted out of his room and back to the safety of my top-tier frat castle down the street.
So yeah, that's about what I'd imagine working at a non BB is like.
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