💹Pay & Market

Two things: advise and underwrite. Advisory bankers guide companies, governments and funds through mergers, acquisitions, sales and restructurings; capital-markets bankers raise money for them by underwriting new stocks and bonds and placing them with investors. Investment bankers do not manage individuals' savings or take deposits — the day-to-day work is valuation, negotiation, documents and long client meetings.

No. A commercial banker takes deposits and makes loans; an investment banker advises on deals and underwrites securities. The two were legally separated in the United States by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 — which split Morgan Stanley out of J.P. Morgan — and although that wall came down in 1999, the jobs, skills and pay structures remain entirely different.

In the United States in 2024, first-year analysts typically earned around $170,000–200,000 in salary plus bonus, and managing directors from roughly $1 million to many multiples of that in strong deal years. London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo pay less at every level, and bonuses — the majority of senior pay — swing sharply with the deal cycle.

A bachelor's degree, almost always from a university the banks actively recruit at; finance and economics are common but not required — London desks hire historians and classicists. There is no pre-hire license: US bankers sit the FINRA Series 79 exam after joining. The MBA is a separate, later door, used mainly by career-changers entering at associate level.

Junior bankers commonly work 70–95 hours a week during live deals, including weekends; a leaked 2021 internal survey of Goldman Sachs first-year analysts reported averages around 95 hours and five hours of sleep a night. Hours moderate with seniority, and since 2024 several banks, including JPMorgan, have formally capped junior weeks at roughly 80 hours.

The presentation a bank prepares to win a mandate: valuation analysis, market context, potential buyers or targets, and the bank's credentials, often running to a hundred slides. Analysts and associates assemble them, frequently overnight. A famous irony of the trade is that most pitch books lose — banks routinely pitch many times for every mandate they actually win.