eFinancialCareers

Whether you are interning in M&A or capital markets, the work you carry out will take a similar form. Forget attending high profile meetings - you’ll spend most of your time in front of a computer. But what will you be working on exactly?

The answer, as you’ll very soon find out, is pitchbooks.

The truth about pitchbooks

The business of corporate finance is advice. This advice is conveyed to a client via a presentation which includes text, tables, graphs and outputs from financial models. These presentations are known as ‘books’. But only the ‘books’ that are presented to potential clients to ‘pitch’ for advisory assignments are known as ‘pitchbooks’.

Table of contents

Suffice to say, all pitchbooks are different. But if you’re making a presentation to Company A, you can expect something that looks a little like this:

• Introduction to the investment bank – only included in a pitchbook and not in a mere ‘book’. This section includes information about the investment bank, its recent high profile deals, and a background to the people attending the meeting. Its purpose is to sell the bank to the client.

• Company information – background information about Company A along with any potential acquisition targets. Includes recent financial performance, recent share price performance, views of research analysts, a list of shareholders, and a list of the company’s directors. Its purpose is to show the client just how much the bank knows about them.

• Market background – includes recent trends in Company A’s sector, recent deals and market sentiment. Its purpose is to show the client just how much the bank knows about what else has been going on in its sector.

• Financial analysis – valuation of Company A and any potential acquisition targets, the impact of different corporate finance scenarios, eg an acquisition or debt funding. This is the meat of the pitchbook – it’s here that the bank lays out its opinion of what’s next on the agenda for Company A and how it will continue to grow.

So where will you fit in?

First, you need to understand the junior hierarchy of an investment bank. The terms used vary slightly from bank to bank, but the junior team structure will work in the same way.

• Analyst – responsible for the majority of the initial research and analysis (0-3 years' experience)

• Associate – responsible for checking the analyst’s work (3-6 years' experience)

• Vice president (VP) – responsible for the contents and structure of the book (6-9 years' experience).

During the summer you will help the analyst and sometimes the associate with presentations they are working on. Initially, you will be given tasks to help complete the company information and market background sections. First impressions are important, and if you do well you may even be asked to help out with some financial analysis.

Hazel Schofield worked as an analyst and associate in corporate finance before leaving to set up her own graduate recruitment company, Smith Howard (www.smithhoward.co.uk).