what's up everyone it's Kenji here and today I'm joined by my good friend Matthias who's an
investor Banker in New York with experience a Goldman and Bank of America and he's been
kind enough to share with us some of his insights on the role so firstly we'll go
over the recruiting side looking at all of the application aspects the interview and
then we'll move on to the day-to-day what the job is actually like and finally we'll
get to some of these key skills you need for the job so let's get into it
so Matthias just starting with the basics can you tell us a bit about your background yeah yeah sure
so I I grew up in California didn't really have much experience uh in the whole banking space
until I made it out to the east coast for college I spent my first year at NYU studying business
there with a focus on on finance as well but made a switch over to Cornell same time you did um and
study applied economics and management there which is uh Cornell's equivalent of a business degree
and how did you get to your banking job did you do previous internships before that yeah
so it was one of those things where you know my family didn't have background in the space I was
kind of going into it with a with a blind eye and so I spent a couple Summers just trying to
explore different opportunities in finance to see what what was right for me um my freshman
year I was at the fox networks group back in Los Angeles focused more on the fpna side of Finance
um sophomore year made kind of a switch towards my current type of role where I was at a a smaller
private Equity Firm in New York uh where one of the Cornell um had had been nice enough to let
me in turn for the summer and that got me good exposure heading into to my summer internship
where uh I was with Coleman in the structured Finance group and for that structured Finance
group internship did you have to do any kind of networking I know it's a big thing in fine hunt
yeah yeah networking networking is a huge thing in finance um so there's there's a whole process
to it you know I think from a more structured perspective when Banks would come onto campus
um definitely take advantage of those opportunities and go to the networking events
but you know beyond that I think it it's it was critical at least in my recruitment process that
I I'd be a little bit proactive about reaching out to people and getting getting my face in front of
others um and so you know one of the things he did is is cold call and called email a lot of people
um LinkedIn is your friend for sure and you just find yourself on there a lot just trying to see
if there are School uh Alum at certain Banks reaching out to those contacts first because
they're probably the most likely to respond back but uh if not just reaching out to whoever I could
and whoever I could find the contact information for and suppose you know you get past that stage
you send the application and what's the interview process like at a bank like Goldman yeah yeah
I mean for for summer analyst positions which is really kind of the the segue to a full-time
position um they do have a very structured interview process it it's fairly consistent
across Banks I would say um obviously the first is just to submit your resume and that's that's
a huge vetting process on its own but once you get past that that's usually um what they call
like a phone screen or a higher view interview for some larger banks that just don't have
capacity to phone call every single person that that applies for the position and so you'll do
like an initial interview will where it'll mostly be behavioral questions just asking you about you
know your background why you're interested in the role why you're interested in the company
and then kind of transitioning after that uh you get invited to something called a
super day uh which is typically a three or four interviews where you go into the
to the bank's headquarter uh in New York City or whatever location that you're applying for
and you speak to two reps per interview round typically 20 to 30 minutes depending on the bank
um and you do those consecutively and uh following that you hear within a couple of days of of uh
whether or not you got the job offer nice and just going back to the networking side like
where does that come into the picture is that on the application or or just after in the higher
view or yeah I mean the the cold calling the cold emailing it's it's a little bit of both um I would
say it the principal focus is probably beforehand okay you definitely want to have exposure before
you submit your application you know at the end of the day it's somebody who's on the other side
of it picking applications out and um it comes to maybe if they even recall your name when they're
looking through the resumes you know they might see your qualified as well but if it's something
that pops out to them maybe somebody that they've heard that's been speaking to people on your team
um it'll just increase your likelihood of being able to to be selected and so I definitely think
it's something that you know we focused on before um the interview process began and in terms of you
know actual skills that you need um for for That interview and potentially for that internship are
there any courses in University that you'd recommend taking yeah I mean for sure 100 I
think the most important class is is accounting you know it's it's I it's an understated class
and I I don't think it's um necessarily the most dynamic but um it's one of those things where you
learn the the foundational skills that you need to for this job I don't think without accounting
you are able to do the day-to-day tasks that you're required to and it honestly does serve
as the foundation for almost everything we do in finance right and so from that perspective
I think that that was definitely the most important class I took all together in college
um you know that's not to say that you need to go to a program in college that offers a business
program or where there's accounting uh classes that that are offered I think one of the things
with this job especially with the way that it's structured in recruitment Cycles is that you'll
end up having to self-teach yourself a lot of it just because you you know maybe at the time
you haven't taken up a level Finance classes or whatnot um and so external third-party resources
of are probably the best best resource for you and speaking of finance courses out there if you're
looking to land a job in Investment Banking FP a or any Finance related Department you
can check out our finance and valuation course we're an investment banker a financial analyst
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interested in checking it out go to the link in the description below alright so moving on to more
of the day today and what that's actually like first of all can you explain what an investment
banker actually does because I feel like a lot of people don't really understand that yeah
um it definitely depends I think on the role you have within Investment Banking
you know banking is largely bifurcated into two different areas one the capital markets and one
more advisory they might be called different things at different banks but largely those
are always the two splits on the Capital Market side you know your your essential function is to
help execute Capital markets transactions just meaning that you're helping to issue Securities
for clients whether that be some type of bond some type of loan if you're working
on IPO you're issuing stock I mean so your your job is definitely focused on the market side of
things you know you're helping to do things to to get to execution of that transaction
and so you know whether that's keeping up to date with the markets so that you can get the best
pricing for your client be most informed at what what is just happening in the general environment
um putting together you know types of Market updates for your team or for external clients
whether that's putting together you know internal committee memos for
for getting these transactions approved and for your bank's role in the transaction
um or coordinating with different parties along the process with investors with legal
counsel those are kind of things that I would say largely you do on the Capital
Market side of things on the advisory or more corporate finance oriented side of things
um where you're kind of saddled into different Industries you do a lot of work in in PowerPoint
in Excel I think that's kind of the reputation of the job but it would surprise you you know I
think I think one of the things a lot of a lot of people think about when they go in is that you're
just going to be you know turning an X all day right and it is quite surprising how much time
you actually spend in PowerPoint I think that's probably actually the more predominant thing it's
it's just a matter of the types of presentations they're putting together in banking you know it's
one of those things where you're using PowerPoint for everything right whether you're you're baking
off for a deal just meaning you're trying to win the win the pitch win a mandate or you're putting
committee memos together or different types of transaction related documents so for data for
debt issuances it could be something like uh like a ratings agency presentation where you go to you
know s p or Fitch and try to get a certain rating on a on a on a credit right or if you're working
on an IPO if you're working on you know an analyst Day presentation or an investor presentation when
you're going out to Market um or for like an m a process if you're putting together a Sim or
a confidential information memorandum like these are all things that are very PowerPoint based and
it's it's it's just putting together essentially for the most part a profile of the business so a
lot of it is Powerpoint Excel of course is is enough is another thing that you have to know
um from a valuation perspective but also just general models operating models and understanding
um the mechanics of excel is something that's pretty pretty crucial to the job understanding
data is something that's pretty important um and then beyond that I think it's it's surprisingly a
lot of Outlook work right responding to bosses they want to make sure that you're that you're
a busy worker um which which you inevitably will be but but those are probably the things
that you know describe you know what you do in banking at least on a junior perspective
um and what you do on a day-to-day fair enough and and just kind of uh similar to that can you
walk us through what your day in the life would look like on say an average day you know you can
fluctuate a bit yeah I I think um you know when I wake up it's usually a matter of getting up to
speed with with emails that are coming in yeah usually by the time I wake up say 8 30 8 A.M
um there's already kind of a an inflow of of emails from more senior employees kind of getting
things kick-started for the day um and so I'll spend the first hour or so just catch them on
emails replying to things beyond that until maybe like 5 p.m during the regular way working hours
you'll often find yourself stuck in meetings um you know as an analyst it's important to be able
to attend these meetings and kind of think through the things that are most important synthesize the
things that are the key conversation points in those calls to be able to to send around to your
team it's always useful given how many things are going around for for everybody on your deal team
um just because they're exposed to so many different deals that they also have a reference
point for for what's going on and so you do find yourself taking a lot of notes during these calls
and kind of getting getting everything aggregated from uh from an admin perspective I think once
kind of the 3 4 P.M Mark shifts um that's kind of when you when you start working on your
deliverables for the day it'll obviously depend a lot on where you are in your deal processes and
um you know what what you're looking at at the time but you know again it's kind of getting
into the PowerPoint working on slides that you might need to put together for for a deadline
that's coming up or or working on Excel for for different types of analyzes that you're looking at
um I need to put together for the Powerpoints um and kind of just keeping keeping up to speed with
with requests that come in as they as they do because um you know with a job like this it's
a request can come in at any time so you got to be attentive to uh to Outlook and and when
it comes to the work hours what would you say an average week uh looks like yeah I think I think
on average I would say probably 80 hours a week I think there's a lot of variance like it I would
I'm a little skeptical to say that it's always like that right if it's slower you know I've seen
it go down to like 65 hours but at the same token if if it's a super busy period let's say a couple
deals on live I've seen it get up to 100 plus hours and so it really varies I'd say like 80 is
probably the median okay um that includes weekends as well yeah yeah so I would say typical day is
probably like nine to one or two a.m um Monday through Thursday Friday people typically like
to get off a little bit earlier just um ahead of the weekend so it'll be something from like nine
to six or seven okay um luckily at Micron firm we have Saturdays protected so usually they're pretty
good about that but Sundays you know it's also one of those things where you always have some
type of work for the most part it could be a few hours but but um there's always something to do
sometimes it can be a full day but it really just depends again on on uh what's going on
in your deals makes sense makes sense and just moving on to something else here for let's say
a first year analyst so somebody that's really fresh out of school and what kind of a salary
can they expect yeah I mean when we were going through recruitment I think there was for a long
time there was kind of a sad expectation that your base salary was was 85 that 85k um since
then there's been a bit of a a competitive process within Banks to try to increase salary as a way of
differentiating themselves to students and so you know it's it varies a little bit more uh than it
used to I would say I would say the normal range for a first year could be like 100 to 115k uh as a
base salary and then as a bonus you know anywhere from 50 to 100 of Base depending on both the type
of bank that you're at whether that's a boutique firm or or more bullets bracket type institution
um but also depending on the general economic conditions of the time okay and lastly just
for somebody that's looking to break into this type of a role maybe as a student or
already a working professional what kind of advice would you give them yeah I you know
it's one of those things where unfortunately with with the banking industry recruitment
happens so early in your college career right that I I often feel like like students feel
pressured to know everything yeah when they start recruiting and at such an early age
um I think the first and foremost thing is just to say that don't don't feel the need to to
know everything or feel like you're you have everything under your belt you know I I came
from a background where I didn't have experience in in this side of Finance or Finance in general
um I didn't know what investment banking was even entering into college and I know
for a fact there were students there who by the time they're seniors in high school
were already prepping by taking internships and stuff I hadn't had an internship to that point
um I only had my first serious internship as a freshman and I didn't really consider Investment
Banking until I was a sophomore and so you know if you're if you're in that position and and I I just
would you know tell you that you don't need to feel the pressure that you know sometimes might
come with with schools that that often have a strong pipeline into banking I feel like
there's often that a type of external pressure on you and so I I would just say take it easy
from from that perspective and and know that you know you have time to develop what you need to and
to to be prepared for the job regardless of when you decide to make that decision
um another thing I I think broadly is you know know why you're getting into banking
I think it's it's easy if you're in a in a business school program
um especially one that a lot of kids like to go into banking too right where you
think that that's something that you want but I would say make sure it's something
that it's not just for you know for the compensation or for the reputation because
the reality of the job is that it is a very demanding job and it's those times when um
you know you're working 100 hours a week when you start to question you know the day-to-day things
that you do that it really it becomes apparent to you who's who's actually there for for having an
interest in in finance and in banking and and who is not no um and this will happen to everyone but
it it's one of those things where you want to be sure that the decision you're making is one
that really aligns to your long-term interest and and your goals um and so those are the things I'd
probably keep most in mind when going into a job like this and kind of following that so I suppose
you've gotten the job what kind of opportunities are you looking at maybe when you leave the job
or maybe do most people stay there what's that Dynamic usually like yeah I I think that's one
of the the great things about banking it's just the flexibility it offers you uh post post a
job you know there is an opportunity to stay I I wouldn't say that the majority of people do that
um but when you leave banking you you have a lot of different opportunities in in the finance area
in general so you'll see kids go to hedge funds to private Equity firms to venture capital and growth
Equity um some go into corporate development if you want to go get your MBA that's always an
option as well and it's something that you may be able to work with the firm that you're working at
um and so there's really a lot of avenues for how you can apply yourself beyond that right
um so I think it from a fundamental skill set it's a good segue into a lot of different careers makes
sense yeah thanks a lot Matthias for doing this I'm sure a lot of the audience will find it really
insightful if you do have any doubts feel free to comment them um Down Below in the video if you
want to check out another interview with a Tesla financial analyst check out this link down over
here or this other link to check out the finance and valuation course that we mentioned earlier
hit the like and that subscribe button if you liked it and I'll catch you guys in the next one