When we talk about the field of corporate finance, we usually refer to that area of the finance industry, which generally focuses on all of the final decisions that are usually taken by corporations and the various tools and methods of analysis that actually go in the making, for these decisions.

The end goal of corporate finance ensures that a firm’s value is maximised while at the same time, any and all of its financial risks are reduced to a minimum.

The professionals working particularly in this field are like the captains of a cruise ship who are supposed to steer the ship, through any and every financial iceberg, ensuring a smooth sailing for their firm.

They are supposed to manage not just the financial capital of the firm but also decide the amount of money that their firm must invest, the percentage of profit that is supposed to be given back to the shareholders as well as take important decisions regarding the mergers and acquisitions of the firm.

There is a huge career scope for those aspirants interested in the corporate finance sector. They can be hired at many different positions like that of a Senior Financial Analyst, Financial Manager, Business Development Associate, Financial Analyst, Treasurer, Controller, and so on.

These professionals, as a part of their daily functions, are required to do a thorough analysis of business metrics and the financial results in order to help in the decision making processes in the future for the business.

All the financial leadership and aid that a company requires for its strategic development and in order to make important investment decisions, is provided by those working in the field of corporate finance.

Investment Banking jobs are generally offered in Investment Banks. This is one profession which is touted as the premier field when it comes to the financial industry. For one to foray into this profession as a career, an individual doesn’t just require the experience credentials, but also requires the prescribed educational credentials.

Getting a degree in the field of finance, economics, banking and even investment analysis proves to be quite helpful in furthering your career options.

Investment Banking positions in usually head honcho banks situated in cities like London or New York are quite competitive as much as they are financially rewarding. What investment banks usually do is that they raise money or capital for various other companies, by selling many debt or ownership instruments in the market.

These could be securities or shares which would be sold in debt or equity markets. It is the job of the Investment Banking professionals to help in the functioning of mergers and acquisitions as well as offering their services and advising various clients and perform financial analysis for the same.

There has been quite a lot of debate between the two fields of corporate finance and investment banking on the finance block these days. Regardless of whichever field you choose getting a professional certification will always increase your chances of getting that dream job. There are quite a few finance certification courses offered by institutes like Imarticus Learning that you can opt for these days.

To begin we should perhaps be clear about what Investment Banking is. For instance, not everyone who works for Goldman Sachs or Edelweiss is an Investment Banker engaging in Investment Banking. Investment banking roles can also be found across different types of companies. While the most popular investment banking jobs are found at Bulge Bracket Investment Banks like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, they can also be found in the Investment Banking units of commercial banks like ICICI Bank and Citibank. They are also found in smaller regional firms like Avendus Capital and Jeffries or more sector focused banks like Piper Jaffray. These are often called boutique banks in India and middle-market banks around the globe. Investment Banking jobs can also be found in large private Equity institutions like Blackstone. But an area a lot of people completely ignore is similar Investment Banking career paths at corporate firms like Reliance and Mahindra & Mahindra, large Multinational companies that engage in large amounts of fundraising, restructuring and, M&A. Many of these companies have in-house Investment Banking units.
Related Article: How to Become an Investment Banker
The different types of Investment Banking Jobs
Mergers & Acquisitions: This is the key role of an Investment Banker and most definitive of the profession.

• Role: Investment Bankers are intermediaries that help a client- individual or company, to buy or sell assets be it companies or stakes in companies. As an intermediary, they provide strategic advice in terms of which industries to enter and which assets to invest/buy after doing a thorough financial and business analysis in the context of the company/clients strategic vision and mission. Sometimes they are part of executing the companies strategic vision and other times they are brought in only to negotiate on the behalf of the company on a single transaction.
• Job description: Regardless of the situation and how the transaction originated, Investment Bankers are expected to build robust financial models to calculate valuation and potential synergies.
• Skill sets: Investment Bankers are not only expected to be highly proficient in fundamental valuation, capital markets, financial modelling and forecasting but also excellent storytellers – pitching a company for sale, marketers, and negotiators with excellent people management skills. Often, during a transaction, they wear many hats including that of an accountant and a lawyer and in many cases, especially during large sell-side transactions, an Investment Banker is almost as knowledgeable about the company as a senior level employee. In the light of such responsibility, pressure and significantly lucrative compensation, Investment Bankers are then expected to work very long hours and do not have great work-life balance.

Fundraising: Investment bankers also help raise money from both the private equity market as well as the public markets on behalf of their clients. While boutique banks like Avendus Capital and Map focus on only raising capital through Private markets like Private Equity firms or High Net Worth Individuals, bulge bracket investment banking units like Goldman and Kotak are Book Running Lead Managers and also help a company tap the Equity Market through an IPO and subsequent rights issues.
Private Equity: Investment Bankers will often move from the sell side to the buy side and join a Private Equity or a Venture capital firm because of their experience with working with companies and understanding the various dynamics with respect to valuation and investing.
Related Article: CIBOP (Certified Investment Banking Operations Professional)
Contact Us for More Details
Mumbai (+91 22 61419595), Bangalore (+ 91 80 45129918/924), Chennai (+ 91 44 42691466), Delhi-NCR (+91 124 4874033/40), Coimbatore (+91 9952168073), Hyderabad (+91 40 47123304/06), Pune (+91 8433905205) and you can do online courses for that you can call us on this number 18002677679.

We spend a lot of time at the Imarticus Learning on developing key Investment Banking skills and if you’ve read some of our prior posts on Investment Banking you’ll see that the skills are not just confined to number crunching or being a whiz kid to excel. You can’t just be good at analysis, you also need to be good at presenting that analysis in a structured manner. You can’t just be a great client management, you also need to be good at teamwork and have a good disposition – you spend a lot of time with your team. And finally, it’s not about just having these many skills, it’s also about showcasing them in the right way in both your resume and during your interview. So today, we’re going to spend some time on looking at three of the critical skills you need in investment banking as well as the best way to showcase those investment banking skills in an interview or in your resume.
Also Read: Different Types of Investment Banking Jobs

1. Problem Solving and Analytical Skills

Are you tired of hearing this? What does it actually mean? It’s essentially connecting the dots to help, ask the right questions, whose answers can either be the solution, or the tools to help you arrive at a solution or a set of solutions. Huh? Okay. One example is analyzing a twenty-year steel price data set and pulling out trends and insights that can then help you understand impacts steel prices, which will help you forecast steel prices for the next five years. Another example is being asked, how many litres of paint are sold in Mumbai every month? You use one data point, and a whole set of assumptions and questions to arrive at a number in a logical manner.
The great thing is you don’t have to be a knot jockey, but you do need to be confident of your abilities to spot trends, do basic math fairly quickly, and be able to use information in an effective manner.

How do I showcase this skill in my resume?

A specialization in Finance or a degree in Engineering puts you in good stead from the get-go. And having prior work experience will obviously mean you already have many instances, but what if you’re a fresher and did history or Commerce in your undergraduate. Well, we’ve got you covered. This is how you showcase problem-solving and analytic skills require in Investment Banking in your resume.

• Any sort of summer internship, ideally a financial institution, but it could even be a cafe where you saw how a cafe was run.
• Talk about a school or college project where you had to analyse large sets of data, ideally financial data, like an Industry or Company analysis.
• Create a phantom portfolio (notional investments in stocks whose performance you track over a period of time) which will also showcase your enthusiasm for the stock market.
• A treasurer of a school club where you were in charge of the budget, which will show your ability to understand funding and investing.
• An instance where you put up a school/college production.
• Case competitions you have been part of.

Try to write one line describing what each experience taught you.
Please see our post on Great Investment Banking Resumes
How do I show off this skill in an interview?

• Have ready answers to the following questions:
  • What would be the steps you would follow if you had to solve a problem
  • Talk to me about a time when you fixed a problem?
  • Always use examples to showcase your skill. For instance, if they want to know how you use logic to think through a problem, as an example. For instance, if I had to answer how many litres of paint are sold in Mumbai, I would first….
• Practice Brain Teasers.
  • For instance: You have 50 marbles (25 red marbles and 25 blue balls) and 2 buckets. How do you divide the marbles into the two buckets so as to maximize the probability of selecting a red marble if 1 marble is chosen from 1 of the buckets at random?
  • Answer: First you must assume one of the two buckets is chosen at random and then one of the marbles from that bucket is chosen at random.  You want to put 1 red marble in 1 of the buckets and all of the other 49 marbles in the other bucket.   This gives you just slightly less than a 75% chance of having a red marble The math works as follows:  There’s a 50% chance of selecting the bucket containing 1 marble and a 100% chance of selecting a red marble from that bucket.  And a 50% chance of selecting the bucket containing 49 marbles with a ~48.9% (24/49) chance of selecting a red marble from that bucket.  Total probability of selecting a red marble is (50% % 100%) + (50% * 49.5%) = 74.7%.

Practice basic calculations like addition, subtraction, division, fractions, and percentages.
Also, practice reading graphs. The recruiter will not ask you to do advanced equations but will expect you to be comfortable with numbers and charts.

2. Attention to Detail

And we are not talking about perfection here. Attention to details means being able to plummet 30,000 feet to land in the thick of the forest and make out the leaves. If you’re making a financial model, it’s ensuring that all your links are in order, but also understanding the impact of changing your terminal growth rate from 3% to 4% (that’s a high number so you should really think twice in the event you’re actually planning to do it). So it’s the ability to spot important things and articulate the impact. For instance, if you are doing preparing your client for due diligence, attention to detail would mean questioning a trend you don’t understand like inventory ageing that looks fine at first but gets messy when you start to ask questions. It would be looking at the documentation for 450 acres of land but finding only 443 acres clearly laid out in the documentation. What happened to the 7 acres? These are the things that can derail a transaction. ‘That’s lawyers job isn’t it?’, you ask. But an investment banker wears many hats and legalese and accounting are two very important ones.

How to demonstrate in your resume:

• Choose a work situation where your attention to detail helped save a deal or get new business or solve a specific problem.
• If you are a fresher, then talk about a research project where you were able to spot a trend that significantly improved your final product.

How to demonstrate in an interview

• Expand on the above
• Also choose an emerging story in the media, like the current PNB Nirav Modi scandal, and pick out an inconsistency that has not occurred to anyone else. Even if it has, it will show your ability to spot a trend and connect the dots using information.
• Sometimes the interviewer might ask you a trick question and your attention to detail will enable you to spot it. So always take time when answering questions and do not assume the interviewer is always right.

3. Research

The holy grail of Investment Banking and Equity Research. Without research, we don’t get information that enables us to give solutions. You have to use all your analytical skills and attention to detail to ensure your research is effective. A good researcher uses his time wisely. In Investment Banking we aren’t writing a thesis and don’t have four years to procure our information. Therefore a good investment banker needs to be able to define the problem and project clearly to understand the scope and audience. There’s no need to find out why the company began in 1942 if all I have to do to is do a one-page profile.

How to demonstrate in your resume:

• Showcase a report/project you did in a job or at university which required you establish the purpose, understand the audience and outline the scope. Make sure you point out examples where you were particularly resourceful when information was not forthcoming.

How to demonstrate in an interview:

• Expand on the above
• Always ask questions of the interviewer and mention the places where you would get information for facts you are assuming for the purpose of the interview. For instance, if you are valuing a private company, talk about how you would go to the ROC website for a companies tax returns. If you are talking about an industry, talk about your preferred sources of secondary research such as the industry association website and reports published by reputable consultancy firms like McKinsey and PWC.

Related Article: How to Become an Investment Banker

How important is it to look the part? A long time ago I was in a meeting with a seasoned Investment Banker when a colleague of mine walked into the room, introduced himself and walked back out. Later on in the day, I asked him why he left so suddenly – he had earlier expressed a desire to be introduced to her when the opportunity arose.

He said, “Was she the banker you spoke of, she didn’t really look it? So am not sure if I want to introduce her to the client.” Shallow? Absolutely. True? Sadly yes.

The fact is perceptions matter.

Even if you don’t believe in keeping up appearances and prefer to let your work do the talking, the clothes you wear help you exude confidence, which is why fashion is so powerful. Gone are the days when Power Dressing just meant a pant or skirt suit or a boring grey suit and a blue tie. Times are changing.

This can puzzle people. Students at our investment banking courses in Mumbai often ask us, “So what exactly is power dressing?” prompting us to write this piece.

Power dressing means clothing or accessorizing that increases your confidence.

The last few years have seen women heading towards a streamlined, tailored look. Accessories have become fashionable and everything is in the details be it a bright pink shoe under grey trousers or a red handbag with a white jacket. We are fortunate to live in a world where anything goes. But there are some rules, and then some popular myths.

Rule – Be Comfortable

A lot of people feel that Indian clothing cannot be powerful and yet feel conscious while wearing a skirt. Wearing a short skirt and a woolen jacket will only have you tugging at your hemlines and sweating at the armpits. Power dressing means impeccable dressing, not uncomfortable dressing. That means structured neat clothing. If you don’t like showing skin, wear trousers or a long pencil skirt. Find the Indian weather too hot for heavy suits, wear linen. It’s breathable and available in a variety of colors.

Myth – Power dressing applies solely to western clothes

Not true. A Nehru collar tunic with a silk scarf over black trousers and a gorgeous cotton sari or a light Kanjivaram, with pleats held together by a simple brooch.
When in doubt, check out Chanda Kochar, she’s always well dressed.

Power dressing is in the details

The opposite of power dressing is sloppy dressing. Men – watch that crease in front; it needs to be as sharp as a blade. Shine your shoes, iron your shirt. The exact same ensemble changes drastically if your collars are neat, the shirt is ironed and the shoes look good

Be unique, we are not in school anymore

Men, bring out the cufflinks and the interesting pairs of socks. Women now’s the time to accessorize but be careful. Have only one thing stand out. I said pink shoes but not pink shoes and a neon orange top

Get your hair right

A good hair day can make anything you wear stand out. You can skip a lot of shopping if you invest in a good haircut. And not to be greasy. Greasy hair equals dirty hair.  Get rid of the oil. A significant part of the working environment is spent in groups. Imagine being stuck in an air-conditioned room for four hours with the smell of amla hair oil

Respect the environment

When going for a site visit to Raipur, understand your environment. It’s going to be hot and it’s going to be more conservative. That doesn’t mean you don a potato sack. It means you rethink the heels and try a pair of trousers instead of a skirt

Be professional

No matter what environment you are in, be professional. That means you make sure your clothes align with what you do,

Faculty that deliver our investment banking courses in Mumbai spend substantial time with our students guiding them on these points that will help them both with their placements and future career growth. We encourage students to spend time on what they wear to work.

An average person spends 10 hours a day at work, that’s 60 hours a week and essentially most of your waking lifetime. Doesn’t it make more sense to spend time on what you wear to work than to a wedding that you will possibly spend only an hour at?

This could easily be asked as an interview question and one that seemingly causes a lot of confusion for aspirants in the Finance domain. To help you understand investment banking, it’s best to differentiate it from the type of banking that you have experience with: commercial or retail banking – the banks that you see on the street.

The banking sector is split into two fundamental divisions: Investment banking and retail banking.
Let’s understand what Investment banking is. Investment banks are huge financial institutions that assist their clients – mostly corporates and government agencies – in raising capital by underwriting and acting as the agent or an underwriter in the issuance of securities.

An investment bank assists these organizations with complex financial solutions such as Mergers and Acquisitions, Equity Underwriting, Private Placement, Valuation and Fairness Opinion, Corporate Restructuring,  Structured Refinance, Management Buyouts, among others.

In a way, Investment Banks serve as a bridge between large corporations and investors.

Investment banking is split into the front office, middle office, and back office activities. Think you want to be an investment banker?  Chances are the role you are imagining is a front office role.

On the other hand, The bank where you maintain your current (UK), checking (USA) or savings account is a commercial or retail bank. You cannot go into an investment bank and deposit your money, get your ATM card, or ask for a student loan. This is what commercial or retail banks do. – The value of transactions that happen in a retail bank is very low in nature but the number of transactions is significantly higher than those of investment banks Some retail banks have an investment banking unit, others do not.

For example, SBI Bank is primarily a Retail Bank and has established a subsidiary company SBI Cap Securities, which carries on investment banking operations. Retail Banking encompasses a wide variety of products and services like Savings Accounts, Bank Guarantees, Certificate of Deposits, Mortgages, Personal Loans, Letter of credits, Foreign Exchange services for retails clients, Insurance business, Wealth Management Services, Personal Banking, Stock Brokerage Services, Locker Facilities etc. which are not provided by Investment Banks.

Some of the well-known Investment Banks include:

• JP Morgan and Chase
• Bank of America
• Wells Fargo
• Morgan Stanley

Some of the well-known Retail Banks include:

• HDFC Bank
• ICICI Bank
• Bank of Baroda
• SBI Bank

To sum up, here are the key differences between investment and retail banks:
Think investment banking is a career option for you? Interested in learning more? Join our CIBOP (Certified Investment Banking Operations Professional) program to learn about Investment Banking in more detail…

How to Become an Investment Banker?

Investment Banking is a lucrative career that promises global mobility, financial rewards and the chance to be part of exciting transactions like Flipkart buying Jabong or Facebook buying Whatsapp. However, getting in is often next to impossible as jobs are few and far between and highly competitive.
Here are a few tips on how to become an investment banker, to engineer the next couple of years and your resume, to better your chances of breaking into Investment Banking.

Start Working on Your Resume Early

Investment Banks love all-rounders because an Investment Banker is not just a quant jock. She has to balance financial knowledge with analysis as well as client management skills. He has to have a background in working in a team. They like leaders. So make sure you are part of special projects in college and take part in significant team activities. It is also better to focus on excelling in one area, like case study competitions or football, rather than being a jack of all trades. Investment Banks want to see consistent academic performance as well as commitment to an outside activity as it shows them persistence and staying power.

Look for an Internship

An internship is a great way to get a foot in the door even if it is for an extremely short time or the promise of hours of photocopying. It will give you that all-important insight into how a bank functions.

Get Some Training in Investment Banking

Corporate Finance is hard and cracking an investment banking interview will be easier if you do a short training course in Investment Banking

Keep Abreast of Current Affairs

Investment Banking and Capital Markets is dynamic and require you to be on top of the news. So subscribe to the Economic Times and the Business Today and ensure you follow various deals and their outcomes. Choose a couple of industries you want to focus on and make sure you know everything there is to know about them.

Have Economic Indicators at Your Finger Tips

What’s the current US/Rs rate? What is the Sensex trading at? What is the 10-year bond yield? What is India’s projected growth rate for the next year?
We, at Imarticus learning, offers Certified Investment Banking Operations Professional (CIBOP) program. This will help you understand concepts thoroughly especially if you are not a CA or a CFA. Most of these short courses also include interview prep with large sample question banks and take mock interviews so that you are ready for the big day. They also train you in aptitude testing which is often the first hurdle and something most applicants fail to pass.
Some more courses in investment banking can help you succeed, visit our program pages:

Also Read: Technological Skills Needed to Become Investment Banker