I have started to learn more about investment banking careers recently, and I wanted to ask if anyone here has both experience on the front office AND back office side.
Are there any front office positions that don’t require stellar sales/marketing skills?
Trading is FO. So is an analyst (investment, sell side, etc).
These terms are pretty ancient .
Back Office = Reporting, Performance Analysis, Accounting, etc.
Mid Office = Risk Management, Portfolio Construction, Legal.
Front Office = Baller Shot Callers, Research Analysts, Portfolio Managers, etc.
Most front office jobs have client interaction requiring some sort of crass sales spinning.
Respectfully, why are you looking at IB careers?
Personal reasons that I shouldn’t talk about in public - I sent you a PM
So
does front office automatically equal “revenue generating”
Does revenue-generating equal “sales”? Because i can’t imagine an analyst who writes reports all day or does Excel modeling is always the same guy trying to pitch it over the phone.
Do “sales” necesarily mean outbound sales?
Revenue generation typically means sales, client acquisition, or closing contracts. I don’t work in FO so this is the blind advising the blind.
But those written reports go to outside clients who subscribe to the service. The analyst is likely not the business developer, yet still delivers a product as part of the contractual obligations. In IB, the analyst will write a report which contains the business case, valuation, and scenarios of a private business sale. The MD/Business Developer will then present to the client.
In any case, it’s not a rocket science job that only the elite few can get. People who work hard (very very fuggin hard like 80 hour weeks), demonstrate excellence, and compose themselves professionally can/will do well in this job.
what do u do? Assuming middle given FRM?
I do what I gotta do to make that paper
Yes, back office is records keeping and recording kinds of things. IT generally falls into this, unless your IT is designing trading and/or quant systems.
Front office is stuff that gets put in front of clients, either sales people, portfolio managers, research analysis and writeup. Equity research on the buy side is effectively an extension of the portfolio manager’s task, so gets lumped in with front-office (deservedly, in my opinion) even if the analysts don’t actualy see clients.
Middle office terminology developed because certain functions seemed to fall in the middle of the spectrum; not quite one, not quite the other. Risk management was the main one, because it required front-office like training, was a critical input for firm decision-making, but seldom involved client interaction. Once risk management became middle office, legal seemed to be similar.
The issue is that if you cut front office people, you cut your capacity to generate revenue directly. If you cut back or middle office people, you often can try to coast a bit before trouble catches up with you. So guess who gets more prestige and pay? Guess who likes to lord it over the others?
^ Not sure about that, if they got rid of back office who would tell me to turn my PC on and off again? Who would help me log in when I forget my password for the 10th time, or set up conference calls etc for us. back office is vital to front office making money. Without support, front office are less efficient at what they were hired to do. That coasting period wouldn’t be very long!
“back office is vital to front office making money.” that’s pretty much what all the banks say to their BO employees to keep up morale in doing their jobs. its not as great as it sounds since you can use the same argument for workers at the power plant who supply electricity, or the janitor who scrubs the toilets and takes out the garbage. its not untrue, but really not as “vital” as the quote makes it sound.
^tbh most decent FO guys these days are probably tech savvy enough to do all these things themselves, it’s just time consuming. “Vital” may be the wrong word but not having to deal with all the admin crap certainly gives you more time to focus on making money or delivering on projects.
From my experience, about 85% of back/middle office staff spend about hmmmm 85% of their time dreaming about a front office role. Quite a miserable bunch IMHO…
Yeah. It’s like, the sh*t has to get done, but frankly it doesn’t matter who does it. Support staff come and go, life still moves on. A good analyst moves on, that matters a ton more.
Also to comment on the next post, I mess around in access occasionally but its because it would take longer to explain to the data analyst what I want done than to just do it myself. Plus he saves me a lot of time on other tasks, so it works out.
The BS that really annoys me is zero value add things, such as expense reports and having to collate and explain what everything is because my team admin doesn’t want to spend the brain power to associate a 9am Starbucks charge with breakfast. It aint that hard! She also doesn’t read emails. I’ll clearly state in my first email the correct expense code, then she’ll reply hours later asking which code to put it to. It takes literally ALL of my self control to not reply and say “read the original email” and bold it. But I do need her to be somewhat happy with me, so I don’t.
Seems like sellside and buyside have different definitions of bo and fo.
on the buyside, having a lot of client interaction doesn’t necessarily make you front office as you have teams and teams of people managing relationships and selling to institutional investors and retail distributors without really having anything to do with investing
The difference between BS and SS is that on the BS you can say FU before hanging up the phone.