| Topic Name: |
Investment Banking Experience |
| Message Name: |
Wish I Knew this before accepting |
| Date Posted: |
01/31/2006 |
| Message: |
As a member of Vault for six years and after having spent almost four years at HSBC I figure I'm in a position to submit useful feedback. I would have loved to have had the insight I now have and would have chosen differently from HSBC.When I started with the bank they were promoting themselves as leveraging off their global footprint and significant relationships across corporates and institutions to develop the investment banking platform.I figured that as someone interested in an international career, that it would be worth taking a chance with HSBC-they were of course the second largest bank and very global with strong footholds in Asia and the UK, along with offering rotations in offices between Europe, Asia and North America.HSBC is strong, but in its core competencies, of corporate banking loans, transactions services, payments and cash management, trade services, custody, retail and personal banking, and other traditional banking areas but NOT M&A, equity capital markets, sales and trading, or developing innovative financial products (Note: that on Vault if you click on the HSBC profile from the Investment Banking list it comes up as a Commercial Bank rather than an Investment Bank).Within a year and a half of joining there was an exodus from the M&A department-so much for the build. Since 2003 HSBC has been making another effort to build out "based on its impressive international platform and corporate banking relationships" yet again. This is at least the third effort as there was at least one, and I suspect two to build the investment banking business in the 1990s with the James Capel and Montagu.I was hoping to get experience across at least a couple offices, but needless to say it didn't fulfil expectations with most rotations in London (I was already London-based, so it wasn't an overseas experience), and very low deal flow. I had the opportunity to do a rotation in France in a business area I was interested in, but HR "dropped the ball" on arranging a work visa although they had two months to organise it and HR's track-record is terrible in dealing with graduates. I can honestly say that I have never witnessed, nor heard of, such a propensity of a department within a company to work against the career development of its employees, especially new ones, as I witnessed from the experiences of colleagues. I've had colleagues who were forced into a rotation they were not interested, or in line with their aspirations, and it is now a drawback in their profile as they look for new opportunities externally and even internally. Needless to say my previous experience at other companies was the complete opposite in terms of basic treatment.Also, as a North American, I'd caution those (Canadians too) coming from reputable (and hence marketable) institutions especially, as you'll be played as a marketing tool for the bank in investment banking. They'll be able to show that previous graduates have taken a chance and this is very important to the roll out of the bank in general and particularly so that the bank can stake its ground in the US. Basically, it credentialises the bank for its efforts across the US to be positioned as an attractive opportunity. I know that an immediate reference to evaluating your opportunities with investment banks is to look at league tables. Try to get an independent source like Bloomberg (21nd in 2005), Thomson, or Dealogic, that way you'll have a good idea of where each institution stands in terms of deal flow, types of deals and volume. When going through the list of HSBC's actual deals, be careful to strip out acquisitions by HSBC?? there are normally around three, and if you want to further be evaluative of the deal flow, then see how well the bank does without CCF ?? the French bank they acquired who has a good domestic French M&A franchise as they are quite a self sufficient operation.
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