Six resources from my investment banking internship

Background

In May 2019, I was working in a 'Wework' office as an intern for an E-commerce firm. The Wework office was located in Zone 1 in Central London. This type of office is shared between hundreds of companies, called an office sharing building. It was a vibrant work place with many different shared facilities such as bookable meeting rooms, rentable office pods and open office spaces that anyone could use. In the building, there would be regular social events in order to create a community amongst professionals, which was one of the major perks for people working in Wework. I would regularly attend these social events and introduce myself to different professionals. I met several interesting people who worked in various fields including digital marketing, social media, advertising, PR and insurance. This was a great place to work and the environment would always stimulate interesting conversations on lunch breaks etc.

One person I met was a man who was a former investment banker and offered to take me on as an intern for his company. His company had several different branches; specialized software recruitment, google events, creating funds, and working with start-ups. He wanted me to work with start-up companies and learn the basics of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

To build an initial base of financial and investment banking knowledge I used several resources. I would have to take on extra responsibilities while balancing my current part-time internship in an e-commerce firm. The next months were a busy few months for me, through working in 2 internships at the same time, but it was a great experience. Before joining my second internship, I had to make sure I understood the basics of finance, accounting, financial modeling, and M&A.

Here are the resources I used before and during the internship

1) The Corporate Finance Institute (www.corporatefinanceinstitute.com/).

This is the place where I took several free online courses including basics in accounting, Excel advanced course, mergers and acquisitions courses, etc. This site helped me develop an initial understanding of the field and I found all of the courses very helpful.

The free course portfolio has increased since I used it in 2019.

2) Udemy (www.udemy.com)

I used Udemy for a specific financial modeling course for free, I used the Corporate Finance Institute website more though. The course I used was the "Introduction to Financial modeling" course.

3) Investopedia (www.investopedia.com)

This website was important for me to understand foundational banking concepts and new terminology throughout my internship. The website does a great job at describing each concept in a written and video format. Youtube.com was also useful with learning key terminology in the field.

Investopedia has brilliant animated videos that explain complex financial concepts in a straightforward way.

3) Crunchbase (www.crunchbase.com) & Owler (https://www.owler.com) websites.

These websites are the best website for gathering market information and individual companies. these websites helped me significantly in creating my presentations to other companies. the data on these sites gave me enough data to make suitable estimates of whole markets. Crunchbase Premium was vital in more finding of company and acquisition information and was worth the monthly charge for the information they were providing.

4) Companies house UK (https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company) & Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com)

These websites were essential in finding out accurate financial records. The companies house should show financial records for companies that need to upload these records yearly. If I was researching a public limited company it would easier to use Bloomberg or Google to search for annual or quarterly reports.

Public companies’ annual reports should be published yearly, so it will be easy to find their financial records on the internet.

5) Lusha (https://www.lusha.com/) & Skrapp ( https://skrapp.io/) Google chrome extensions

There were two Google chrome extensions that were surprisingly accurate in finding accurate email addresses of people from the internet or LinkedIn account. I used press articles & LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com) to search for the people that were responsible for M&A decisions in the company.

Skrapp and Lusha are straightforward email finder extensions

6) Trello (www.Trello.com)

Trello was a significant tool that I used to collaborate with my colleagues, it is a great tool that uses cards on a shared system to show what you are doing and what you have completed. I still use Trello today for myself to store creative ideas I have for myself.

Trello example of project management with multiple people on the website.

Overall

I really enjoyed working in this field because of the constant learning required in different markets, companies, and other start-up companies. This was a fast-paced job and one that I managed to successfully balance alongside my other marketing internship. I enjoyed learning about examples like Disney acquiring Pixar to utilise their superior animation technology, studio, and staff. This was a mutually beneficial partnership since future Disney films can be improved with Pixar’s technology. In addition to Pixar’s films and products getting an extra financial push from Disney’s superior distribution channels and financial position.

On CrunchBase Premium I looked at Amazon’s previous acquisitions, this means the previous companies amazon bought and usually absorbed entirely. I noticed the sheer number of companies they had bought, which was over 120 companies at the time. I found this interesting since the companies that they were absorbing were businesses with unique technologies. For example, robotics & AI companies were bought by Amazon perhaps in order to improve the efficiency of their warehouses and their speed of delivery.