What's it really like to work in M&A? A day in the life of a junior M&A banker
This is an account of an average day in the life of a junior investment banker, told to us by an associate at a bank in London. It’s anonymous as she didn’t have permission from the bank to talk to us.
8am. You don’t get up that early in investment banking. Most people live near the office, so they don’t have to spend a long time travelling to work. In London, no one lives in Richmond, for example. I live close to Liverpool Street, so I can usually get up around 8am.
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9.30am. Everyone is in the office by this time. There can be an expectation that you’ll be in the office by 9am, but a lot depends on when you got to sleep. I’ve you’ve worked late, there’s a bit of leeway.
I usually arrive and check the news. I’m on a healthcare team, so I’ll see if anything’s occurred in relation to healthcare companies. If there’s something interesting, I’ll send it to the managing director (MD), although in most cases he will have read it already at 5am!
10am. The mornings can be slow and a bit boring in investment banking. It depends slightly on the kind of team you’re in. – If the team is good, there’ll be work to do and it can be very dynamic. If it’s not, you might be left to your own devices. Senior staff can themselves be a bit inefficient – they have their own emails to write and meetings to attend and in some teams, you’ll find that they ignore you and that you’re left to find your own work to do early in the day.
As a junior in a bank, you’ll often work on multiple deals. Right now, for example, I’m working on two live deals – one of which is an M&A deal and one of which is a financing. I also have three other deals that we’re pitching for and which I’m staffed on.
It’s up to me how I juggle all the work that results from this, but the live deals must take priority. After I’ve checked the news, I pick up the tasks associated with the live deal, help coordinate the due diligence and make sure I’m on top of everything. My tasks depend on the way the situation evolves. As an associate, I coordinate the work of the analysts on the team.
At the big banks, a lot of the work that needs to be done by junior bankers involves the creation of PowerPoint slides and financial modelling, both of which are very time-consuming. The job itself is really fairly simple. The problem is the time pressure and the culture. – You need to be self-starter: people often won’t make an effort to help you learn, as there’s almost a presumption that you’ll quit after a few years. This becomes self-fulfilling. A lot of people don’t progress much: they just do the PowerPointing and the Excel and then they leave the job for something else.
11am. I pick up some of the tasks from the live deal we’re working on. Live deals are very process driven. A lot of it is about coordinating due diligence and making sure that all the relevant data is included in the materials we produce.
11.30am. I’m asked to jump onto a client call and listen in. As a junior banker you don’t speak to the client – it’s the VPs and above who usually do this, but it can help to be present so that you understand the client’s requirements.
12pm. I’m working on a PowerPoint presentation and model for a deal we’re pitching for. I’m building out the model, but not in too much detail, as this is just the origination phase. Once we get mandated to execute a deal, we’ll usually make the model far more complex, and this can be a lot of work. I often put in a bit of extra work during this initial phase, just to avoid being killed by a wave of work if the deal progresses.
1pm. I get lunch at my desk.
1.30pm. This is when things can start to get busy. After lunch, senior bankers will typically start turning comments around on the work we’ve done for them. Some will send comments almost for the sake of it and will ask you to do more work no matter how much you’ve already done on slides or models. For this reason, it can be a good idea not to put too much work in at the start. – The trick is to give the senior bankers something of quality with no obvious spelling mistakes, but to be prepared that they are always going to ask for things like additional comparables for a transaction.
5pm. Things get busier still. Senior bankers will often start sending work through now and will say that it needs to be done by “the end of play,” which can mean 2am or later. They’ll usually want a lot of last minute changes, some of which can be very time-consuming.
7pm. We get an allowance to order dinner into the office. If you like, you can go home at this time, but almost no one does. When you go home, people look unfavourably upon you. There’s a lot of expectation that you’ll put in facetime in the office.
1am. I leave the office and get a cab home, which the bank pays for. I work until midnight anything from two to seven days a week, depending upon the deals I’m staffed on. 10-20% of the time I work until 4am. There’s no time for exercise, which is unfortunate and is something I’d like to change!
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