- Capital markets bankers help clients raise money through public markets.
- Capital markets bankers usually specialize in equity or debt. They’re known as Equity Capital Markets (ECM) bankers and Debt Capital Markets (DCM) bankers.
- Capital markets jobs are well paid. The highest pay goes to people originating deals and bringing in new clients rather than just executing on capital raising transactions.
- Entry to the best capital markets teams is highly competitive; junior bankers get ahead by impressing bosses with skill and hard work.
- To succeed, you need to be good with people and have a really strong eye for detail.
Capital markets bankers are all about facilitating expansion for their clients. When companies want to make investments and expand, they need to raise money to do so. Sometimes they just take out a bank loan, but if you want to raise a lot of money at the best rates possible – or if your financial needs are a little bit more complicated than the average lending officer can accommodate – then you might need to go to the global capital markets and sell debt or equity to investors. If you do that, it’s the Capital Markets divisions of an investment bank you’ll be talking to.
Sign up to our student newsletter here 🎓
As Virginia Draper, graduate recruitment manager at Deutsche Bank in London says, “roles in corporate finance can broadly be divided into two categories: origination teams, who work with clients to understand their needs and identify new business opportunities, and product teams, who develop and execute specialist solutions within capital markets or by providing advice they may require."
Investment bankers working in capital markets are responsible for providing advice to companies on capital raising and then finding investors to provide the money.To do this, they act as a kind of go-between.
On one hand, they talk to client facing advisory bankers to understand corporate clients’ capital raising requirements. On the other, they talk to the sales and trading division to understand what the investors are prepared to buy. As they move between the two, capital markets bankers are responsible for managing the capital raising process, including hiring lawyers, getting the documentation put together and ensuring that everything complies with all of the regulations that cover the act of issuing securities to the public.
What’s a debt capital markets banker? What’s an equity capital markets banker?
Because they depend on investors to be able to deliver the cash to the corporations, capital markets teams are usually split into Debt Capital Markets (DCM) and Equity Capital Markets (ECM), specializing in either bond (debt) or equity issuance, respectively. The two areas are quite different from each other, because companies tend to issue bonds much more regularly and as an everyday part of their financial management, while equity issuance is a much rarer and more strategic decision.
“DCM brings a unique combination of corporate finance (a profound knowledge of how our clients’ business operates and how to advise on their financial needs), fixed-income markets exposure, and mastering of complex financial products,” says Demetrio Salorio, SocGen’s head of global banking and advisory. Firms expect their DCM analysts to be highly numerate, and to understand the technicalities of company financing
However, while most investment bankers are very focused on individual deals, the high-volume nature of debt issuance means DCM bankers must be able to develop relationships with clients over time and provide them with relevant market information at regular intervals. Salorio says success in DCM depends on having a “strong capacity to develop a relationship based on mutual confidence with the issuer clients”.
ECM bankers, on the other hand, have to go out and make deals happen. “A typical day begins by understanding the market complexities for that day and week,” says one co-head of EMEA capital markets at a European bank. “We do this by reading newspapers, listening to the research briefings, and participating in team meetings.”A good capital markets team will anticipate their clients’ needs – maybe there’s an opportunity to take advantage of good news to issue shares at a higher price.As the opportunities are identified, the team moves into “pitch” mode.
As soon as a pitching process opens up, it’s the senior ECM bankers that will hop on a plane to try and sell the investment bank to a potential client. This is the ‘origination’ stage of the deal, but although it’s the directors and managing directors who are expected to be the face of the bank, junior employees are engaged in preparing the marketing material required to convince a client to go with a particular bank. If they’re successful, the team involved moves on to the ‘execution’ stage of the deal.
“Origination could include preparing or conducting client pitches. Executing would include drafting or structuring work with clients, lawyers and/or accountants or distribution efforts involving syndicate, sales, and investors,” says a senior banker at a boutique investment bank. A “syndicate”, in this context, refers to a specialist team that sits (in organizational terms, but usually also physically) between the ECM division and the sales and trading floor. If you work in syndicate, your job will be liaising with the sales and traders and keeping track of investor interest in the products being issued. During a deal, syndicate is responsible for preparing feedback from the market about how well received the offering is going to be.
ECM jobs are typically divided into three separate areas. Firstly, there will be the industry group or sector that you’re focused on – such as healthcare, technology media and communications, or financial institutions. Then there’s the geographical area you’re covering, and then there’s the product type you specialize in.
That’s not to say that you’ll be focused purely on, say, glamorous bells-and-whistles stock debuts, known as Initial Public Offerings (IPO)s, which occur when companies first float their stock on publicly accessible exchanges.
ECM bankers work in teams divided by ‘common’ equity products. This includes IPOs, follow-ons (additional stock sales immediately after an IPO), and secondary offerings (additional stock sales a while after an IPO).
Convertibles, which are more complicated instruments that are bonds that can be paid in/as equity, are separated out (and - just to be confusing - tend to sit in both ECM and DCM teams) and there are also teams that focus on more complex derivative products. In some banks, there are teams of bankers who focus solely on private placements (targeted stock sales to specific customers, as opposed to the wider public).
DCM jobs have a similar split into geographical and sectoral teams, but the financial institutions team, which works with banks and other financial clients, is generally much bigger than the rest. This is because financial clients themselves account for nearly half of all bonds issued. There are also a number of special types of bonds only issued by banks (such as AT1 bonds) and insurance companies to meet regulatory requirements. DCM bankers working in this space need to have very detailed knowledge of the ever-changing world of regulation.
If you work in DCM you'll probably need to know a lot about private placements, as these are more common in the bond market than in the equity market. DCM bankers will also work closely with experts in interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives, so that clients can borrow efficiently even when the investors want a bond in a different currency.
What do junior capital markets bankers do?
As a junior capital markets banker, you’ll be doing a lot of spreadsheet work, making financial models for client companies.For a DCM role, you’ll need to understand how credit rating agencies model the impact of new bond issuance on a company’s credit rating; you also need to be able to create detailed profiles of interest payments and debt maturities in order to track how a client’s financial structure develops. If you have a job in ECM, the modelling is a little less nitty-gritty and more devoted to the creation of “pitchbooks.” Pitchbooks are the great big PowerPoint documents that bankers pore over in order to sell clients on the merits of a new transaction, and to promote their own skills as the best bank to execute it.
When they’re not doing pitchbooks, junior bankers are heavily involved in the execution of deals, something which can require a considerable amount of multitasking.During busy periods, particularly in DCM, you might have as many as half a dozen transactions, all at different stages, with a lot of hard deadlines for things to be completed by.One of the key skills for a capital markets banker is to be able to keep track of things and prioritize. At VP and director levels, this makes up most of the job, marshalling a small army of analysts and associates to keep everything moving through the pipeline.
In the senior ranks, Managing Directors will tend to be either “originators” – the people who bring the deals in and maintain client relationships – or “structurers”, the technical experts who give advice on the right kind of transaction for every client.As your career develops in capital markets, you might find that you are drawn to one side of this divide or the other, although there is some overlap as structurers are intimately involved in the pitching and origination process while originators have to understand the deal structures relevant to their clients at any given moment.
Skills you’ll need for jobs in ECM or DCM
Capital markets bankers sit between advisory bankers in areas like and people working in sales and trading. Therefore, if you work in capital markets, you’ll need some of both skillsets. Capital markets is a job in which long hours are constant; if you aren’t rushed off your feet with deals to execute, you’re expected to fill in the gaps by working on pitches.
Capital markets bankers are famous for their attention to detail.Since the actual service is something of a commodity, banks try to differentiate themselves by reassuring the client that they will be able to make the transaction go without a hitch, so any tiny mistake in a pitchbook or model will tend to undermine the overall branding. Even getting a font or color wrong can be the occasion for long recrimination sessions and angry managing directors, so beware!
Because of the way that the capital markets division works, people in these jobs also need to be good at teamwork. Salorio says leadership and collaboration skills are key in DCM because you need to forge relationships with colleagues across the firm in order “to attract advisory resources from other units of the bank to present the client with ad-hoc, high-quality strategic financing advice”.
It’s the same in ECM. “Senior capital markets bankers need to have broad internal and external contacts, as well as strong interpersonal skills, marketing capabilities and strong project management skills to balance interests of complex stakeholders,” says one of Asia’s top ECM bankers.
Finally, if you have a capital markets job you’ll also be required to multitask. Even a relatively simple capital markets transaction will call for many different skillsets as it moves through the pipeline, from pitching to modelling to legal and compliance to project management. An ECM or DCM banker is expected to stay with the transaction and to liaise with the clients all through the process, and to retain grace under pressure.
Qualifications you’ll need for a capital markets job
Capital Markets roles have a similar skillset to M&A advisory ones – there’s a reason that the phrase “investment banking” applies to them as a collective. That means, much like in M&A roles, getting a finance or STEM degree is probably the best bet, although neither are (strictly) necessary. Recent ECM hires at Citi, much like M&A bankers, are hired from finance, economics, and business degrees. DCM bankers at Deutsche Bank had similar profiles, although we have seen communications graduates too, of all things in the world.
Away from your degree, you could, like M&A study for the CFA Charter, or a good MBA a few years after you graduate. There’s also the Diploma in Capital Markets by CISI, which gives you an idea of how capital markets operate; the level of knowledge is probably not worth a week of work experience, but it could make the difference in an interview.
Salaries & bonuses for capital markets jobs
Capital markets job pay really well. Banks take a percentage of each “deal” they complete in fees. The amount they take varies – in an IPO, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK estimated that around 1.7 to 5% of a deal’s value would be taken as a fee, with variations based on size of the deal (bigger deals took less). PwC in the USA estimated that it was 4 to 7%, again depending on deal size. That can easily make up tens of millions of dollars. DCM deals take much smaller percentages, but the deals are bigger, balancing the two out.
Our 2024 salary and bonus report found that DCM bankers averaged $204k salaries, while ECM bankers average $209k salaries. That was higher than a lot of other front-office revenue-generating functions, including their cousins in M&A.
Bonuses also make up a significant portion of compensation. DCM and ECM bankers averaged bonuses of $139k and $103k respectively after an admittedly miserable 2023.
Our suggests that investment bankers, which capital markets professionals are considered to be, can earn over $350k in total compensation around five years into their career at VP level.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share?Contact: +447537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail).Telegram: @SarahButcher.Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
