About investment banking
What is investment banking?
Investment banking is the area within finance that advises and helps raise money for companies and corporations and occasionally governments and wealthy individuals. Investment banking is also sometimes referred to as "corporate finance" or "advisory." Investment banking is just one of the functions performed by what is today known as an investment bank. Investment banks also perform activities such as selling and trading financial instruments (such as stocks, bonds, currencies, derivatives, etc.), managing the money of institutions and wealthy individuals and writing research reports on stocks and other securities.
Our Introduction to Investment Banking course is specifically focused on the Investment Banking (corporate finance/advisory) segment.
What do investment bankers do?
Investment bankers market and execute transactions for public and private companies and occasionally governments. Such transactions include mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, leveraged buyouts (LBOs), initial public offerings (IPOs), debt offerings and private placements. Investment bankers also provide other advisory services such as valuation, fairness and solvency opinions and financial restructuring. Investment bankers are broadly segregated into two types: (1) those with product expertise who tend to execute transactions and (2) those with industry expertise who focus more on marketing and client development activity. However, many investment bankers have both product and industry expertise.
At the junior levels (Analysts and Associates), investment bankers spend significant amounts time doing analysis such as valuation and financial modeling as well as writing presentations and other documents for marketing purposes ("Pitching") or for transactions that are in process.