Investment banking isn't just a tough field to work in – it's also super tough to break into!
Before you sink a ton of time and effort chasing after that elusive internship, take a moment to reflect—is it really for you? We've gathered insights from insiders on 15+ aspects of the job to help you make the call.
💼 What investment bankers do day-to-day
😊 How happy investment bankers are with their job
💃 What type of people thrive?
👍 Pros of the job
👎 Cons of the job
🌍 Impact
⚖️ Work-life balance
🤸♂️ Flexibility
🤝 The people
⬆️ Your managers
🧭 Values alignment
👫🏽 Diversity
⚓ Job stability
🌱 Learning & development
🌟 Job outlook
💵 Pay
📈 Career progression
🔀 Exit options
4. Where can I find internships?
What will your daily grind look like as an investment banker? Find out in Junior bankers share what they actually do – and why their hours are so long.
I think it really depends on the person. I'd say if you took a simple random sample, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being very happy and healthy), most people are probably at a 4.
I'd say I was probably at a 1. All the analysts, associates, and even some VPs quit within a year, so it was an especially toxic environment. It was at a level of toxicity where I had to get HR involved. If the team was just normal toxic, I probably would have stayed. But because of the level of toxicity, I don't think I'd ever go back to investment banking.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
I think a lot of investment bankers are miserable and like one-upping each other on how miserable they are.
Here's a dialogue with a friend to give you an idea. Like if I said, "I'm so tired. I've been staying til 3 am and am now on my 3rd cup of coffee," he'd say "Welcome to the club. I've been staying til 4 am and am on my 5th cup of coffee. Also my analysts did this thing that was so stupid."
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
Your level of satisfaction will also vary depending on how senior you are.
I'm a second-year analyst being promoted to associate in a couple of months and about 70% of my analyst class is already gone or has secured other gigs. Basically every analyst and associate I know thinks that life sucks and is just trying to survive the day.
However, you can clearly tell that most MDs are really passionate about what they do and genuinely enjoy the work. I definitely think that this is why they stay, because there is no way the money alone would be enough to justify working 70-80+ hours a week when you are in your 40s and have a family.
If you're staying to associate, that means you've passed the time most people exit to PE and hedge funds, which means you probably enjoy the work.
As you progress, you still work a lot of hours, but you get more power. VPs tend to be happier because:
- You're getting paid exponentially more
- You're more managerial. You're still hands-on but you can come in at 9:30 and leave at 7 or even at 5 on some days.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
When you go thru school, think about:
- Am I taking a ton of courses?
- Am I enjoying the challenge?
- Do I want to take on more?
- Am I learning quickly?
- Can I learn independently?
The type of people who are able to take on lots of courses and challenges at the same time will be a good fit for the job.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
You have to be able to understand the dynamics of the job. This includes understanding hierarchies and power dynamics.
Generally, when you join a team, there are analysts and associates, then VPs, EDs, then the MD. If you have a question, you probably shouldn't go to your ED or MD. You need to be able to recognize when you have a dumb question and make sure to direct those to your analysts and maybe associates.
The work is already stressful. The last thing you want is people getting annoyed at you asking them questions instead of asking other people. It helps if you've already done another internship or even just taken the time to learn about the dynamics.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
You'll need to pull all-nighters and work weekends. Some people can be friendly on two hours of sleep. I can't, since I'd get sick.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
When I'm on an actual deal for a known company, that gives me some pride in my work. And when it gets announced, it makes it really worth it.
At the end of the day, all the things we advise on make a significant impact on the company. You know you're part of a team that makes that happen. The work is generally meaningful.
I used to work in tax accounting for instance, and in tax, you're basically just saving companies a certain amount of money. With investment banking, you're advising on really, really important decisions and you get to see your efforts pay off.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
In my group, we would interact with the financial directors at healthcare institutions. Maybe they needed debt to build out a new hospital wing. And it felt great, because you weren't just making big corporations bigger. You're actually helping fund projects for the healthcare system.
I was literally going in and helping to decide what was the best debt structure.
So in a way, I felt like I was making an impact. I did enjoy the work and find it impactful. But my happiness just meant more.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
It's surprising but I'd say "marketing" work takes up more than 50% of my job. By marketing, I mean:
- Endless work on books: Work on pitch books never ends! If you're getting the book printed and bound, you work on them until the day before you meet potential buyers. If you're not printing them, you keep making changes to them up to an hour before the meeting!
- Endless meetings: You meet with potential buyers and nothing happens. The meetings just keep going. It's always kind of frustrating.
Like if I'm doing a deal for Apple, and I know it will come to something, the work makes sense. But you're doing all this work without knowing whether it'll lead to anything. It makes you wonder if you're just wasting time, especially when you worked through a weekend.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
You'll work through decks and hours of work just for them to be like, actually we don't need that anymore. So pulling the all nighter was for nothing! [maybe elaborate?]
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
I think the work makes you feel like you're making a bigger impact than you actually are. And the banks actively try to make you feel that way when in reality, they can replace you just like that.
- The big paychecks make you feel really important and people will look down on other lesser-paid roles at the bank.
- You get a name placard. It's a little piece of metal with your name carved onto it. It's ridiculous because you sit in a room that's past layers and layers of security and nobody sees it except for your team and you sit in the same desk every day. But it's another way the bank tries to make you feel important.
- Yacht parties. At the end of the internship, they rented out a yacht. so if you were thinking about quitting, you'll change your mind, because they just rented a yacht for you in the middle of the Hudson.
I absolutely think the company does these things on purpose. That's how they keep people.
But the reality is that you're highly replaceable. You have to have some level of intelligence to do investment banking but it's not rocket science. Not to mention thousands of students want your job.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
Things come up. It's hard to plan your day. Sometimes you're working really late into the night. Sometimes you're working weekends – or on vacations sometimes.
Every bank knows that's a problem so they all have initiatives to help people have work-life balance. JP Morgan for instance has "Pencils Down Friday" – You stop working and are protected until noon on Saturday, so you can actually make Friday night plans. You have to get permission from the head of the group if you need an exception to this.
We also get to pick one "protected weekend" per quarter.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
You'd be lucky if you get one day of remote per week. Also, some groups, like RIB (real estate investment banking) are more relaxed compared to, say, tech.
At JP Morgan, I think analysts were allowed two days of remote per week. But again it depends on the group. If your MD says you're coming in every day, you're coming in every day.
And even if your group lets you work remotely, your group may have a culture where people don't feel comfortable working remotely. For instance, in my group, people were allowed to work remote one day a week. But nobody did that even when they were sick. So people would come in with the flu!
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
There can be some flexibility with schedule if you communicate appropriately in advance. People call in sick sometimes or notify that they would come in later because they have an appointment or request to work from home and they are typically not questioned.
But one has to be mindful of these type of absence. For example, it's understandable if you're out maybe once in 2-3 weeks but if you start asking to be out or late every week or multiple times in a week, there is just a perception that the person is avoiding work. Instead, it's encouraged to take PTO if you plan to be out for multiple days
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
One thing I appreciate about investment banking is that people come from all kinds of backgrounds. There are people who, for instance, don't have a finance degree. I knew someone who went to med school for instance. He's in the healthcare group. You meet lots of interesting people, with different personalities and different backgrounds.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
In general, investment bankers have a low EQ. A lot of people think investment bankers have great interpersonal skills because they know how to interact with clients, but all those mannerisms can be learned. Like when a client says X, you learn to say Y. Here are some examples:
- My VP who told me, "You know what your issue is? You don't have an EQ." This was ironic because someone with an EQ probably wouldn't have said something like that.
- Or people would say stuff like, "I just work harder than you" which isn't socially acceptable. Most normal people don't compare work ethic like that.
To be honest, I don't know if they have a low EQ or are downright rude. The point is they're OK saying things like that which people with basic levels of sympathy wouldn't say.
I also think investment bankers are boring. VP and below, you don't have any time to do anything. Like I didn't get to meet anyone when I first moved to New York and when I quit, I realized I didn't have any friends or have a support group.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
Managers are typically very accessible. We all sit on the same floor and see each other almost every day. Also we have in person group meetings where everyone is in a conference room. And when you're on a deal team, it's normal to have regular check-ins that mostly happen in the VP/ED/MD's office so you all meet and chat.
For informal chats, people ask to get coffee occasionally. If it's with an MD, you have to work around their calendar but you would typically be able to get them for 20-30 minutes to chat.
We get assigned formal mentors but there are a lot of opportunities to develop informal mentorship with people both in your group and outside and you can easily identify who you connect with that would be a great mentor.
We have a performance feedback process. It's always encouraged to get feedback after every deal. We have formal mid-year and year-end reviews where you request official feedback from the people you worked with and these feedbacks get aggregated by the performance manager who then relays that to you.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
I think some values are not prioritized enough. I'm all for pursing high quality of work and putting clients first. I just worry that the same respect that is given to clients is not sufficiently given to employees as well.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
There's an interesting podcast by an ex-MD at Goldman because she realized how toxic she became. I saw that in myself as well. I found I was becoming meaner, colder.
For example, all banks have security people at the doors. Starting my internship, I'd say "Good morning" and smile, ask them how they were, you know, because that's how I was raised.
A couple months into investment banking, I'd walk right past them. I genuinely didn't care they were there. I was so drained and unhappy. Even if they greeted me, I'd think, "Oh, it's just their job to do that." But they're human and they appreciate being acknowledged.
I also never called my family, and that's something I usually did at least once every 1-2 weeks. But I ghosted them for a month. I put them on a backburner. And if they asked me if I have time on the weekend, I'd say "No, I work on Sundays. And Saturday's my day to de-compress."
I didn't like this side of me, but it helped me see why people become like that. Nobody's eating properly and everybody's a couch potato.
In any role, you look up the chain to see what you're going to become. I looked at my associates and VPs, my EDs and MDs. My VP looks miserable and is a terrible person. He's rude and doesn't care about anyone.
In my office, people would come in and not greet anyone. For example, my MD sat next to me but if I said "Good morning," he'd look at me like "Why are you talking to me?"
It depends on the team, and I've heard good stories as well, but they're super rare.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
Investment banking is friendly towards internationals. All bulge-bracket banks sponsor work visas and a lot of boutique banks do so too. They definitely encourage international students to apply.
Generally, people are quite understanding of internationals. For instance, if I speak with an applicant who's struggling a little with English, I kind of give them a bit of a break. It's hard to go to a new country and start anew, so I already know that that person is determined to persevere.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
There are also affinity groups: BOLD for black people, groups for veterans, people from Asia-Pacific. It's like at school.
We have a black and African group that I hang out with. We do some fun events where we cook traditional dishes. So there are fun things we do to meet and understand each other. The work is hard enough, so it's great to have people in your corner. And if I have questions about H1B, visas, these are the people I can ask. So it helps to have people you can ask questions to.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
A big part of investment banking is M&As, which is affected by business cycles. This means banks hire a lot of people during years with lots of mergers & acquisitions and let go of a lot of them when there aren't.
If overhiring and overpaying staff during good times has been a standing tradition on Wall Street, then so have steep job and bonus cuts during lean years.
In 2020, the panic that gripped the markets early in the year ... quickly gave way to a massive rally. The stock market routinely touched new highs and corporate deal making brought in blockbuster fees.
And the Wall Street firms, in turn, went on a hiring spree, often offering big bucks to lure new employees and keep current staff from jumping ship.
The party came to a halt this year. With uncertain markets and a recession potentially on the horizon, corporate clients went jittery. Wall Street firms have been forced to confront a steep slowdown in many of their businesses.
Job stability will be better at banks who provide a range of services compared to those that only advise on M&As. For example, both Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan
Goldman’s prominence in investment banking and trading has made its results—and its stock price—more sensitive to the ebb and flow of the capital markets than many of its peers.
Banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. have consumer-lending operations that dwarf Goldman’s. And in the years since the financial crisis of 2008-09, Morgan Stanley’s push into wealth and asset management has left it less dependent on deal fees than rival Goldman.
In general, consulting provides more stability than banking (though M&A-related consulting is equally affected by downturns).
Job security in consulting is much less cyclical than banking. Regardless of good economic times or bad economic times, consulting firms continue hiring and minimize layoffs of junior staff.
Investment banks, on the other hand, layoff more workers and enact hiring freezes during financial downturns. For example, this summer after I left Goldman Sachs, the Hong Kong office laid off 20 analysts and associates because the market isn’t doing well now.
– Former intern @ Goldman Sachs and former consultant @ McKinsey
We do get a lot of training!
- During the internship, we had a full week of training where we just trained and did no work. And they start from core accounting, core finance – they train you from the beginning.
- It's even better when you come back full-time – We did one full month on core accounting and finance before we moved onto modeling. We're getting paid for training. We also have to sit some exams and get some licenses. All the banks do a good job of getting external people to train you to pass the exams – and most everyone passes the first-time.
- Then when we enter our groups, we get more training again.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
We had 2.5 months of training. I stayed up until midnight most nights studying, since we had exams.
During training, they'd highlight certain individuals who did very well. Your name would be put on the screen and shown in front of all the 200+ analysts. So they would let you know who were the smartest people, and people will want their name up there.
So from the get-go, they're curating this competition and ego. And if you don't pass an exam or pass certain grades, then you're on probation. You already have the job, you're not going to get fired, but nobody really knows that. In hindsight, now that I know about the process, I know they'll work with you. It's all a scare tactic.
I think they purposely want you to go through something intense with your cohort so you become closer, and that makes you want to stay longer.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
Formal training is great, but you learn a lot more from the job.
- The amount of knowledge you gain is a lot. They always say it's a steep learning curve but it's way steeper than you think it is. When I joined, I probably knew some things from business school, but I was still learning.
- The amount of growth within 3-6 months was just immense. You get to learn so much and become independent quickly. For instance, 6-12 months into the job, you're already leading client meetings.
Every client is different. We typically send emails to the group to ask for help. "I'm doing X, has anyone done anything like this before?" Most of the time, someone will reply. It's rare where you ask for help and nobody helps out.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
However, the quality of your on-the-job training really depends on the team.
People will train you but they're also very busy. In my case, all the analysts, associates, and even some VPs quit within a year, so everyone was even busier than normal.
Even when I asked for a file path (where a file was saved), people would be like "You can figure it out yourself." And if I told them "I've been at it for three hours," they'd be like "I understand you can't find it, but I'm busy so you need to figure it out yourself."
When I asked for help understanding a certain concept, people in my group would be like, "Didn't you learn this in training?" "I shouldn't have to teach you this." "Do you even listen?" "Do you need me to write this down for you, because clearly you don't know how to take notes."
I didn't feel like I was learning at all, which is why I quit.
– Investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
There's no doubt that investment banking pays well.
It pays well! It can be argued we work more than we're paid, but we get paid well with good benefits.
Typically analysts make $130k-ish. Associates start out at $175k. Every year you get promoted and your pay gets bumped 10-15%.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
In general, however, pay is on the decline compared to previous decades.
A host of factors have conspired in the past 25 years to reduce the pay and the prestige of the M&A adviser and other investment bankers — such as those who specialise in executing debt and equity underwritings — to levels that once would have been considered unacceptable.
What used to be first-year managing director pay of $1.5mn is now more likely to be $800,000, bankers tell me. That is still a lot of money but not quite what it was when M&A bankers were the alpha males of Wall Street. “And it’s not coming back,” one top longtime M&A banker told me.
There are myriad impediments to investment-banking specialists getting paid like they used to. At most of the big Wall Street banks, investment banking is no longer a driving force of the business — in fact, it is increasingly subordinated to less flashy areas such as wealth and asset management, trading, traditional lending and credit-card receivables.
And does investment banking pay well compared to other careers you could be considering?
If you're saving up for something or trying to pay off school debt, that's not a great reason to be an investment banker. If you want to make money, be a software engineer. You'll be treated better too.
There are even project managers who make exponentially more. My friend at Google is a cloud project manager. He makes ballpark of $450,000 and he's worked there for 4 years now. He does no coding, works three hours a day, has started a company on the side. Also he gets free meals. People just don't tell you about those jobs.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
For more info, see From Intern to MD: Career & salary progression as an investment banker
For more info, see From Intern to MD: Career & salary progression as an investment banker
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs like investment banking will grow faster than average.
A lot of private equity firms don't recruit from schools. A lot of them don't even do internships. So they recruit from investment banking. If you look at a private equity firm's team, most of them are ex-investment bankers.
PE pays better than investment banking and instead of spending a lot of time on marketing tasks, PE is buy-side so everything you're staffed on is deal-related, which makes it more rewarding. Like, you won't waste your weekend on books for a deal that doesn't happen.
They also only do buy-side stuff so you're not scrambling to juggle different things – M&As, IPOs, etc. It's more streamlined.
Their day-to-day is also more predictable. Since they don't have clients who request random things, they have the upper hand to determine their schedule and it's rare for things to come out of the blue.
So you're making more, doing less!
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
It doesn't have to be an investment banking firm. A friend of mine was in a technology group, and he became CEO of a tech company.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
If you stay until VP or ED, you can be part of a company's finance team, like as a CFO.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
The grind isn't for everyone. Some people are happy to leave the frontline action to others and move into the middle and back office of the bank.
I also know people who went into HR and operations. I mean, you can do whatever you want to do.
– Investment banking associate @ JP Morgan
The perception is that investment banking analysts all go to work for private equity, but what you'll actually see is that maybe out of a team of 5, only 2 go into PE. And sometimes all the analysts leave and nobody goes to private equity.
That's what happened with my team. Some went to their original jobs (before investment banking) or to tech. Nobody went into PE.
– Former investment banking analyst @ JP Morgan
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For more deep dives into the field of investment banking, check out: