Opportunity to face/deal with the end client in IB depends on your seniority.
The more senior you are, the more you have face-to-face meetings with your existing clients and potential clients.
IB is eventually a sales related job and the best way to build relationships is to have face to face meetings with clients.
Deal Team:
A typical deal team involves a MD/Partner, Director, VP, Associate and an Analyst in which the “on-air” client time can be broken down to
1) Partner/MD: Their job is to go out and win business, which is accomplished by meeting with clients, pitching them on potential transactions, and helping them through the deal process. Hence they are required to constantly be meeting with potential clients in order to fill the top of their deal pipeline
2) Director: The Director is the client facing Investment Banker, accompanies the MD during pitches and important client meets. They have a strong network, knows a lot of people in the Corporate and Investor community. Director is often a team leader in charge of a cluster like CHR, TMT, Industrials, FIG etc. You can expect a lot of travel, business lunch/dinners, revenue targets if you get in this position.
3) VP: The VP acts as the intermediary between the Senior folks (MDs/Ds) and the junior ones (Associates/Analysts). VP is responsible to develop client relations, join the MD/D to client pitches, managing accounts etc. VP often is given the responsibility to bring to life the MDs/Ds vision of a transaction perimeter, IMs, milestones etc. Basically, VP’s responsibilities span across the Business Development as well as Deal Execution
4) Associate: They have relatively less client facing time then the senior bankers. Associates play a supporting role when traveling. Senior Bankers are busy with client relationship management. Associates are busy with presenting the analysis and documents
5) Analysts: They spend most of their time in the office with limited client face time. Its simply because analyst need to spend more time in the eco-system to get more polished and deal with clients. Client-facing skills aren’t taught in colleges and a certain degree of maturity is required to develop these skills.
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