Day in the Life: Investment banking head, Mediobanca
07.15 I'm something of an early riser. I aim to be in the office around 7am every morning so I can read and respond to my emails before the day begins. My inbox usually contains late messages sent by colleagues the day before. It's the classic stuff: people questioning about a potential M&A mandate, or asking where we stand in our pitch to get a certain piece of business. Going through them takes until 9am, when everyone else arrives.
09.00 This morning I've got a meeting with another colleague from Paris and two Mediobanca colleagues from Milan. We're all making a pitch to a client later in the morning, so the meeting is to rehearse. Rehearsals are common in this business: if you want to do a good job, you need to practice first!
We run through the kind of questions and answers we think the clients might ask, and we look at the way the presentation is structured. We've already spent a fair amount of time going over everything, so it's mostly a question of ensuring everyone's fully on board, monitoring timing, and stressing specific points. The important bit is sharing roles: everyone must know what they have to say, what they will deliver and who will take of which questions. I'm doing the introduction.
09.45 The rehearsal finishes.
10.00 We take a cab and head for the client, a large French corporate, on the other side of town.
10.15 The delivery of the presentation begins! Our client is looking to make an acquisition to strengthen their presence in an existing market, so the presentation addresses potential target companies. It lasts around an hour and half and goes exactly as we expected. The client asks three very specific questions which we need to follow up on, but he seems pleased that the presentation is in line with their own strategy.
12.00 After leaving the client, we arrive back at the Mediobanca office and I get a quick update from my assistant on calls and emails that I've missed.
12.30 I leave for a lunch meeting with a client. We're going to Laurent, on Avenue Gabriel. I go there regularly: it's a great place for having an 'efficient' meal - if you want to you can be in and out within an hour.
The client is another large corporate. The meeting is a chance to catch up face to face and review areas of opportunity and look at mutually interesting fields. We arrange that I will meet some of his colleagues for a working session to look at matters in more depth.
14.30 I'm back in the office, and have another quick look at my phone messages and emails. A colleague has already written up a report from summarising the discussion that took place during the morning's presentation; I spent an hour or so reading this.
15.30 We have a weekly internal meeting with the Paris team where we review the projects we're working on and the pitches we've made during the week. We're typically working on around 10 mandates and we usually make around 5-6 pitches. We're quite diversified: we work on both medium sized and large transactions.
The French M&A market is quite healthy at the moment, but not great. Hopefully next year it will be better.
17.00 We have a meeting with another client and their lawyers. We're working on an acquisition for them and we need to issue a letter of intent (a legal document declaring our intention). We spend a couple of hours discussing what should go into the letter, and how it should be structured.
19.00 I head back to the office and read a presentation I'm supposed to make next week. After a quick discussion of the finer points with the colleague who wrote it, I decide I'm fine with what he's prepared/
21.00 The week over, I go home at 9pm and leave for the vineyard I own near Saumur, where I spend the weekend trying to sell the wine we're producing.
