What Investment Bankers Do on a Day-to-Day Basis

Investment banking is one of the most coveted jobs in the financial industry. It is no surprise that an average day in an investment banker’s life can be long and bustling. The ones who are persistent and continue to stay in the industry often go on to have long-lasting and financially rewarding careers. An entry-level Investment banking analyst may work up to 80-100 hours per week. Lets unwrap a typical day in the life of an investment banker for an entry level analyst position:

Morning

A work day usually starts around 9:30am. The mornings are usually occupied with checking text messages, emails, presentations from clients, colleagues and mostly senior bankers who are looking for updates, status reports, final presentations, or asking you to review calculations.

From 9:30 am until lunch, associates and analysts work on company analyses and financial projections. This often includes factoring in adjustments requested by senior colleagues, who have spent the previous evening reviewing the day’s work. This becomes a more comprehensive task if a company has declared quarterly or annual results. 

If you are lucky, on a slow moving day, you may get an opportunity to chat with one of the senior bankers on their recent projects. Around the same time, you may have to attend a once-a-fortnight meeting hosted by your group, which includes all your colleagues, and immediate supervisor. During these meetings, the group discusses ongoing and future projects as well as deals that are about to come through, market trends, and client engagements that are planned for the week ahead. This gives you an opportunity to share and absorb knowledge about the current market trends, state of the economy and companies, in general.

Afternoon

On a regular day, lunch is a comfortable 45-minute or an hour-long stretch, generally spent with co-workers at a nearby restaurant or the company cafeteria.  Post lunch, analysts return to their desks to send updated financial models and presentations to the team’s associates. The associates evaluate these models, suggest corrections or alterations before sending them back to the analysts.

This is a demanding part of the day for an analyst as they need to make multiple revisions and get back to the associates. They also want to prove that they can handle responsibility and contribute towards the deal. 

Afternoons are reserved and keenly focused on active deals. Investment banking teams are assigned different deals – one deal at a time along with a senior banker who is diligent about details. These usually include corporate transactions such as initial public offerings (IPOs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Short coffee breaks are common and spread out in between.

The Second Half

The second half of the day is divided into two segments: before and after dinner. More often than not, on most days you will have dinner at the office. Before dinner, the work is more structured and predictable. Associates finish their work by early evening and pass it on to the analysts to go through the presentations, financial models, projections, and reports again for a final review. 

Post-dinner work starts with reviewing the morning’s work. Major revisions are required to be made to the pitchbook in which senior bankers and associates have offered their comments. This may include minor changes in cost structures or the time period of cash flows, among others. During this period, associates and analysts also work with many other departments such as equity research analysts and sales professionals.

Wrap up

Depending on the frequency of comments, revisions and the correction cycle, which might repeat anywhere from one to four more times, the night ends. Although many might consider this a very hectic work schedule, for those who are passionate about finance and corporate deals, a morning is incomplete without financial presentations, or with the news of a new deal. An analyst’s afternoons get even more exciting when he or she works on live deals and interacts with experienced bankers. Evenings are intensely focused on hardcore finance and team work.