What is an internship in investment banking?
An internship in investment banking, which usually lasts for 10 weeks and is compensated, is an essential first step in landing a full-time position in the field. Banks provide internships in a range of departments, such as leveraged finance, corporate finance, global markets, mergers and acquisitions, and structured finance. Depending on the front office organization of the bank, interns may be allocated to a sector team, such as Metals & Mining or Power & Utilities.
Who Is Eligible to Apply for an Internship?
To put it briefly, anyone interested in finance, undergraduate or graduate, may apply for an internship. Candidates in their penultimate year of study who can start working full-time at the bank following graduation are usually taken into consideration for bank internship programs. While STEM graduates have historically been given preference in bank recruiting, university degree type is not a prerequisite. Candidates may benefit from having appropriate Investment Banking Work Experience, industry expertise, and contacts in the banking business, among other things. While most banks provide training programs, technical expertise is not usually required, but having a basic grasp of accounting and financial statements can be helpful. It’s also critical to demonstrate a basic interest in the financial sector via commercial awareness.
What Does an Intern in Investment Banking Do?
The primary responsibilities of an intern in investment banking are to assist analysts and colleagues in creating marketing collateral and carrying out business and industry research. They could also be given an internship-specific project to work on, which might be related to the business requirements of the team. Depending on the nature of the assignment, there can also be some financial analysis and modeling involved. Typically, a week-long training program is conducted before work starts to guarantee technical competence.
A Normal Day in the Life of an Intern in Investment Banking
Typical daily activities might include the following:
9:00 a.m.– When you go to work, check your inbox for any new tasks or remarks from senior colleagues on the work you’ve already turned in. Your industry or product team may request that you create an internal market update newsletter. As an alternative, you could be requested to attend a morning meeting where internal economists or specialists on rates discuss current macroeconomic events like changes in interest rates or the publication of fresh job statistics.
10:00 am – Internal team meetings are often held in the mornings and may include going over a pipeline of client prospects, deciding on a deck format for an impending client meeting, or discussing a possible pitch. It is unlikely that you will actively participate in meetings as an intern; instead, you should take notes for your own education in case someone requests the minutes.
11:00 a.m. Your current analyst could put you on a new project and go over the details, such when the client pitch is scheduled and the history of the business. Creating a Public Information Book (PIB), which includes data from the company’s most recent annual report, equity research reports, sector updates, news items, and credit rating agency reports, will often be your first assignment as an intern here. Team members won’t have to search the internet for this information if the PIB is saved on the appropriate project disk.
12:30 pm – Get lunch for the team and return to the office with the other interns. Because they frequently have hectic work schedules with back-to-back client conversations or are working on a project with a tight deadline, bankers typically eat lunch at their workstations.
1:00 pm – The analyst you are collaborating with provides you a “shell” of a pitchbook that lays out the presentation’s page layout and includes remark boxes that indicate what information should be included on the slides (see example below). Before being evaluated and further refined by other team members, interns may be assigned to work on the initial iteration of selected slides.
03:00 pm – Throughout the internship, there will probably be a number of team orientation speeches and activities to familiarize interns with the many positions and responsibilities within the bank. For instance, the teams in charge of leveraged finance or structured finance may have an orientation for interns where they would go over their daily tasks, the qualifications needed, how they collaborate with other teams, and how they make money.
04:00 pm – A few hours have passed since the analyst on your team gave you the task, and you have finished the first draft of the chosen slides. It will take some time to double-check that the slide is precisely structured and aligned, that all the figures are accurate, and that the information is current. One of the best tips is to keep source backups in Excel and PDF while you work on the deck. This will make it simple to cite any sources you use when the analyst asks you where you got the material.
5:00 pm – You begin working on the long-term intern project that was given to you at the start of your internship after turning in your work to the analyst. For instance, this might entail automating any Excel files using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), compiling a research report on the most recent ESG trends for the industry in which your team operates, or building a database of previous transactions.
7:30 pm – You use a delivery service to order meals at your workplace. Typically, interns are given between £20 and £25 for supper. Depending on the bank, you may need to work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. in order to expense meals.
8:00 pm – The analyst provides feedback on your preliminary version of the pitchbook slides. You could be requested to add to or remove portions of the slide during these, which usually center on the content and style of the slides. The financial statements may need to be adjusted in certain ways. For example, adjusted EBITDA should be included, as it eliminates non-recurring, irregular, and one-time events from EBITDA. In the event that charts are used, the labeling and axis scale may need to be adjusted. If you use the same font and color scheme across the slides and make sure that footnotes are positioned consistently, the analyst can also ask you to make sure that formatting is consistent.
10:00 pm – After incorporating the most recent feedback, you return the most recent draft to the analyst for assessment. This is an excellent opportunity to catch up on any administrative work, like required training, that you had to do earlier in the day. You could also wish to use an online learning platform like Financial Edge Training to hone your technical abilities in financial modeling and valuation. To hone your abilities on the fly, download and save the Investment Banking cheat sheet with financial statements breakdowns and Excel shortcuts.
12:00 am – The analyst approves for you to distribute a revised version of the deck to the internal team, making a few small adjustments. Senior colleagues will probably evaluate this in the morning as part of the following set of remarks.
1:00 am – You check to see if there are any more tasks you can complete to assist, then you leave the office and take a cab, which you can bill to the firm, back home.
