Vice President - Adam Bastin

Investment Banks have the most extraordinary number of jobs within them - it can be completely mind-boggling. Every time we went near one, we found a whole new department or group of people that did something we’d never heard of. This seems to be due to the immense specialisation within banks, where it can be quite possible to sit next to someone but have no idea what they do.

There are a couple of major distinctions worth highlighting. Investment Banking or ‘IBD’ tends to be the department which most people imagine when thinking about an investment bank. They are the ones doing huge M&A deals, putting in incredibly long hours (14 hours plus each day - including weekends, for months at a time - is not uncommon) and schmoozing with business leaders. Work/life balance is not easily found, but on the flipside the work you do will likely be high-profile and give you an enormous breadth of business and finance experience. This means that if you want to leave London or Investment Banking at some point you shouldn’t have a problem, as the skills gained are very transferable. We've met ex-bankers in companies ranging from renewable energy start-ups to large pharmaceuticals.

Capital Markets is where you’ll find the traders, salespeople and research analysts. They’re market-based and are the ones you see on TV shouting down phones and pacing frantically in front of five flickering computer screens. They’re monitoring market activity and reacting immediately to any changes. It’s noisier and a bit more adrenalin-fuelled than IBD. One of the big perks of Capital Markets (other than the actual job), is that the hours tend to reflect those of the market. That means early starts, with most people in the office by 6.30am, but it also means you tend to be out by six in the evening - and there is almost never weekend work. So if you’re an early riser the work/life balance is pretty good, especially compared to IBD. One limiting factor is that you’re in a highly specialised, role usually in a very specific market area, so there’s not much in the way of transferable skills. If you’re an FX institutional salesperson it’s not that easy to move into another product area, and you’re going to be tied to working in London (or another major financial centre).

Beyond these two areas you have a massive range of middle and back office functions. There’s Technology, Operations, Legal, Finance, Marketing and HR for a start. So if banking interests you then it’s definitely worth looking at the breadth of what’s on offer. The other thing that struck us about banks was just how diverse they were. Without doubt, they had the most mixed workforces we saw, with every member of a team often from a different country. While this makes for a really dynamic and interesting work environment, it does mean that when you’re applying for a job, you’re not just up against your peers in this country but across the whole world - so that application form had better stand out!

Who are you and what do you do?

What is Investment Banking?

The part of the bank that I work in, we advise companies in merges and acquisitions, IPOs and financing especially for transactions which they are contemplating. So if you are a client and you want to acquire a competitor, we would advise you how much you should be paying, how you can raise that finance, what the company you are buying is actually worth, what are the strengths and weaknesses of that company and things you should be aware of, how you should structure that acquisition for tax and legal implications of it and we will essentially hold your hand from start to finish, from identifying the company you want to buy right through to completing the transaction and owning the company yourself.

What attracted you to this career?

It is a combination of things, I did quite a lot of research before I made the plunge after university. It is a very fast paced environment, it is a sort of head line grabbing industry in that you will work on transactions on a day to day basis, which on a certain day will then appear on the front page of the FT and the Times, etcetera. So it is a very noticeable industry, you are kind of in the public eye, or what you do is in the public eye, and so I guess it strokes a few egos from that perspective. It is very, very competitive in terms of remuneration and everything I heard about it made it sound like a very varied job and an interesting one too.

What does your job involve?

The investment banking division at Merrill Lynch is divided into focus teams. So my team will focus on the global industrial companies, so automotive companies, metals mining companies, aerospace and defence companies, sort of heavy industry segmentation and then we will advise companies at industries at buying competitors and selling divisions of their and listing on the stock market on financing for acquisitions and general it is called mergers and acquisitions is what people describe it as so it is buying and selling companies and the necessary financing to support those transactions.

What do you do on a typical day?

The role changes quite a lot from the junior end to the senior end so if you take the senior managing directors within a division, they will spend a lot of their time on the phone to clients and they are the face of Merrill Lynch in terms of winning new business and generating the revenues for the firm. As you go down scale to more of the lower end there is a lot of analysis which needs to be done, so financial modelling, spreadsheet work, financial analysis of companies, profit and loss accounts, balance sheets and cash flows, preparing presentation for the managing directors to go and meet clients and then actually when you get the mandate and the client says 'I want to buy company A', actually advising them on the transaction, so how much you should pay for the company, how you should finance it, what are the shareholders likely to think, what is the employee reaction likely to be. And so it is quite a variety, there is not a standard day that you could get in at nine o’clock, come in and do this until lunch time, in the afternoon you will do this - there is a wide variety of tasks which you will do during the course of the day. Because of the very nature it means that you don’t wake up in the morning and know exactly what you are going to be doing during the day, which keeps life quite interesting.

Who do you liaise with on a daily basis?

You liaise with the people up and down in your team, I guess I am about half way up in terms of titles in an investment bank I will have a lot of interaction with the seniors in my team and a lot of interaction with juniors in your team, that is not to say you have to be in the middle to speak to both of them, the juniors will have good interaction with the senior guys simply because it is good for their development. Outside the firm I will speak to clients multiple times on a daily basis, we have interaction with lawyers and accountants because they will be involved in transactions we are working on, and whilst as a banker you have a good idea of law and accountancy, these will be a specialists and on a transaction they will give the specialist technical, legal and accountancy advice.

There is the perception that if you join an investment bank you sit behind a computer 24/7 and you are shut off from everyone else in the world but the reality is completely the opposite and there is a lot of interaction with other people and if you don’t have people skills then there is a very firm ceiling of how far you would be able to go.

What are the specialisms within your industry?

You start off in an investment bank as an analyst and you are an analyst for three years and whereby you are at the bottom of the rung, you are doing the less glamorous work and the hours are tough. There is a lot of numerical analysis and a lot of preparing presentations, research on companies who the managing directors are going to meet, research on companies who may perform suitable acquisition targets, after three years you become an associate, where you are then managing those beneath you and there is more client interaction at that stage and more travel and you become vice president, director, managing director. At MD level you will be expected to have a certain level of client relationships, you will be expected to generate revenue for the firm depending on what firm it is, there are different amounts for different MDs and you will be meeting clients on a daily basis, you will be travelling quite a lot and you are the face of Merrill Lynch or whatever bank you are working for.

What kind of work would an analyst do?

Most MDs in an investment bank will have their own clients list and know their clients back to front but if you took an example whereby an MD had a meeting with a client in two or three weeks time which they had no clue about, and you would take the analyst role on what they would do on that. First of all they would understand the company they were going to meet, so what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, have they publicly said they are looking to do to grow, which countries are they looking to grow in, what parts of the industry do they want to grow in and broadly what is their strategy? Then you would probably have a look at, what, if they were going to buy a competitor or someone in a slightly different industry, could they afford to pay and how would they finance it. So you are then looking into their balance sheets, their cash flows and you are trying to get an understanding of what debt or equity they could raise in order to finance an acquisition. Then you could take that and say the strategy of what they can afford to pay and try and marry the two up and you would look for businesses which may make sense for them. So you could buy this competitor, what savings could they possibly extract from overlaying those two companies together, what benefits would it give them would it increase their scale so that they got better positions with companies or clients by overlapping the two networks are there costs that can be take out and the profits go up. Generally, why would you buy this company, how would it fit in with this strategy from then you possibly go and meet with the company and if any of the ideas really took their interest and wetted their appetite you come back a few weeks later with more detail on the financing of it, how the shareholders would view it, how the target shareholders would view it, how you would go about doing the deal and how you would face any issue to do that deal, so from an analysis they can be involved in that whole spectrum of activities whether it is the researching on what a company can afford to pay, looking at the targets what the targets do, whether its on their websites or annual reports, on brokers notes which people write about companies to talk about their strategy and where they are going and how much those companies are worth, how much would you have to pay and therefore could your client afford to pay for it. So there is a range of research, financial analysis, modelling - it is quite a varied role.

What are the best bits about your job?

The best bits about the job is the variety as I previously mentioned, is a huge attraction, I speak to a number of friends who I was at university with, and they have very typical days doing the on the same over and over again, so you don’t get the chance to get bored, it pays very well, it is in the top fraction of a percent of my job you could take when you leave university so that is always an upside. There is a degree of travel involved, different amounts at different levels, although even the juniors do have a chance to travel and the satisfaction when you are working on a transaction it will complete, you see it on the front page of a paper and you see what you have done in the public eye, so you are not just performing some process which goes in the background and goes unnoticed you are actually able to see what you have done when the transaction completes.

What are the worst bits about your job?

The bad bits about the job, you ask anyone about investment banking and 99% of the people will say the hours and working in an investment banking division at any of the legal investment banks, the hours will be long so if you are the sort of person who wants a nine to five day and know they are going to be home at seven o'clock in time for Eastenders and not have the phone ringing all the time then it is not the career for you, it is a very 24/7 job, your weekends are not always your own and the hours are quite long but again that rolls into the fast pace nature of the job and it creates a dynamic, exciting role.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think the greatest satisfaction you get from a job is when it completes and you wake up in the morning and you see it on the front page of the FT or the Times or any other newspaper, the deal you have just done, suddenly something you have been working on in secret for the last three or four months suddenly hits the public eye and there is a degree of smugness or some satisfaction that you did this and then suddenly the world knows about it.

Any regrets?

There is no one big item I would have done differently, one piece of advice to give people to get a faster track to investment banking would be in your undergraduate years to try and get some sort of finance experience or an investment banking internship in your penultimate year. It immediately flags to future employees when you graduate that you have an interest in the industry and you have experience and you vaguely know what it is about and some of the things that go on in the industry and when it comes to the interview stage for a permanent position it kind of ticks a box quite quickly of do they know what they are applying for, whereas if you are an undergraduate from a different background who hasn’t done an internship, the doors are not closed but when you come to an interview process the first question people ask is does this person know what they are applying for and getting themselves into. So it creates an easier route in initially I think.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

I mean in investment banking your phone is never off, your hours are very much not nine to five. At the junior end you spend more time in the office but then when you are out of the office, you are interrupted less. At the senior end you will spend less time in the office, more time on the road and when you are out of the office you will be continuously interrupted by clients; a client won’t hesitate to call you whether it is midday on a Tuesday or eleven in the evening on a Sunday. The hours are long the demands are high but then on the benefits side the remuneration is very good, it is a fantastic industry to work in, from a variety perspective and the travel it can bring as well.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

The pay, without getting into specifics, I would say if you go into investment banking out of university you will be in the top one or two percent of earners out of your class.

Interviewer: And are there perks like pensions, gym membership, nights out?

There are more standard benefits that most large corporations will give you, pensions, a lot have subsidised gyms and there are opportunities to work overseas at different international offices so, for example, when I was an analyst I spent six months working in New York. There are people in my team who have transferred to Germany and Hong Kong or to Sydney. Merrill has a network of offices, tends to be in the financial centres and the major countries and if it is something which attracts you it is always a possibility.

Is there much in the way of travel?

The travel I guess is more European and global rather than in the UK. We tend to focus on rather sizeable clients so there are some in the UK that we would meet on a regular basis but within London, we are a European-focused business, so we have clients in the UK, France Germany or wherever, also covering Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe as well. If the clients is there and there is going to be a meeting there, we will go and see the client. It sounds very glamorous travelling all the time, it is not as glamorous if you are travelling two or three times a week, especially if you get up early in the morning, get a car to the airport, you get on a plane, you go to a meeting and you do the same thing coming back. Sometimes there are opportunities where you have a meeting on a Monday or a Friday where you can tag a day or two on to it at the weekend, which some people do, some don’t, depending on personal circumstances, but is does create a bit of variety from being in the office seven days a week fifty weeks in a year.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

It would be very difficult to be regional, one or two of the UK-focused banks have regional office, but the reality is if you are going to work for a leading global investment bank, you will be working in London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Singapore, Frankfurt, Paris - the major financial centres of the world.

What is the working environment like?

There is a range of ages, people start straight out of university at 21, managing directors who are in their fifties. The male/female split is slightly more weighted to the male side than the female side, it is more a legacy of people who went to university twenty or thirty years ago and if you rolled the industry twenty or thirty years, I guess you would see a reflection of the demographics of a university today making up the more senior elements of an investment bank in 20 years' time.

In terms of formality it is relatively informal on a day-to-day basis. It is a very professional environment - you have to get the job done and you have to be seen to get the job done, but it probably doesn’t have the stiff very British merchant bank image which some people think still exists in the industry.

How did you get into your job?

When I was going through university I did a reasonable amount of research of what I wanted to get into. In my final year I was quite certain that investment banking was what I wanted to get into but the more I became adamant that I wanted to take a year out between graduating and taking up a full time position, plus all my exams were focused in the final year rather than the first two years so it meant there was a lot of pressure in the final year and therefore I didn’t really have time to do the whole application process properly. I graduated with a 2:1 from Bristol and then I spent the next year, divided into two chunks really, the first six months I spent working for an accountancy firm, partly to pay the bills and partly to get some financial experience. Then the next six months, I spend three months in a language school in Spain and three months travelling around and then I started the year after.

What's the application process like?

It would be very difficult to work your way up from a completely unrelated role, to work within an investment bank you generally want to have a 2:1 from a top class university, solid A-levels behind you. The application process is, it slightly differs from bank to bank, but generally you will have a couple or rounds of interviews, a numeracy test, team-building exercises and these sort of things. It is a very competitive industry to get into because of the attractions of the industry, so when you are applying to an investment bank you need to be quite focused in who you are applying to and why you want to do it. I overview a number of application forms for positions from graduates as well as people wanting to move in, the ones that are a few years down the road, and it is easy to spot someone who has spent five minutes putting together an application form compared with someone who has spent two hours doing it because you see a lot of generic wording of someone who has just thrown it out of the door.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

Get a good solid academic background behind you, so good A-levels, a good university and get a 2:1. A 2:1 is almost a prerequisite for people to look at your application form because so many forms will come in and you have to have a cut off point somewhere and it is an industry which prides itself of excellence and high standards so they want people who can work under high pressure and achieve results. Try and get an internship, try and get some financial experience if you can and meet people at careers fairs and try and understand what the job entails such that when you go to an interview you are not reading what you read in a careers brochure you can actually apply it to a question they ask you and then on top of that just trying to read the papers, a year or so before the application process and if someone says to you 'Have you seen a deal in the press recently which has caught your eye?', you can talk about it and what has happened over the last few months of that transaction.

What are the key skills required for your job?

A quick brain, you need to think on your feet. You need to have people skills as well, one thing that people don’t think of when they look at the skills you need is the ability to deal with people, whether it is people in your own team, lawyers and accountants who you will be working alongside on a transaction, or as you become more and more senior, the client skills. You see some people who have the certain skills for analysts, so the hard working nature, the attention to detail, the strong numerical background but as you move up the skill set changes slightly and it becomes more the quicker brain and the people skills and that is one thing that provides a challenge in investment banking, the skill set wont be the same for every single level, so you have to be relatively flexible and adaptable and you have to have a good rounded skill set rather than just in one area, and very week in another.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

I started in another bank and moved to Merrill after five years there, and that was two or three years ago. Investment banking is a true meritocracy, people will say it about a range of industries but in banking the better work you produce the quicker you will move up, the better you will rewarded, the better your reputation will be, and you will get out of it what you put into it. It is an industry which really pushes you on - you won't stand still, there is quite a structured promotion programme and you have to meet those standards to move up - and it is shocking how quickly you do develop.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

There is scope for movement geographically. It is possible to move from one office to another but you tend to have to commit for a year or two so you can’t go there for three months and then come back for three months and then go somewhere else.

In terms of moving outside the industry and into different roles, a lot of decent sized cooperates will have in-house will have MNE, people or development people, titles vary from company to company and their role will be to manage the mergers and acquisitions from their side, so you will find people who work in banking for a number of years will move into this role in the corporate, which has some similarities but then they are then the client for the investment bank and because they will have done a lot of the similar tasks before whilst they were in an investment bank, it is quite an easy step to make because you already have the skills you need.

Can you take career breaks?

Taking career breaks people have done it, it isn’t that common, people when they join banking because of the fast nature of it tend to be quite hooked on it and don’t really want to leave to be quite frank. People travel quite a lot during their holidays and a lot will have travelled before they come into banking so that nail is often hit on the head. The more senior you get, the more difficult it becomes to take a career break because you have certain amount of client relationships and if you go and vanish to sit in the Himalayas for a year, those clients aren’t going to be there when you get back because they will have found another investment bank to go and work with.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

The best thing people can do to try and get a handle on the industry and to understand what is going on is to read the FT, there are obviously a number of stories in the FT a lot of which will be about banking, but there IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, after reading it for a number of months the undergraduate should be able to get a better idea of what the industry is and what it entails.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

I considered going into accounting when I was at university, it was that or banking. Accounting for me seemed to be a slightly mundane job and on a day-to-day basis it seemed to be similar, so you would be doing the same task day after day after day. With banking there is a massive variety, the clients you work with on a day to day basis tend to be different and the things you will be doing will be very different so there is the variety and you don't get the chance to be bored. It is a very well-paid job, it is very 24/7 role and people are either attracted to that 24/7 nature or they are turned off by it. If people want a nine to five job, as I said, or they want to know what time they will be getting home in the evening, and know they are not going to be working weekends, then they should steer clear of banking. If they don't mind the harder slog and they are attracted to the very strong policies within the industry then it is a great career to go into.