Deal team
M&A / Merger ModelThe bankers staffed on one mandate, usually four or five people, with each rank owning a different question.
Also written: deal teams, transaction team
A deal team is the group actually working a mandate, typically an analyst, an associate, a vice president and a managing director, frequently with a director or executive director between the last two, and drawn from both a coverage team and a product team on a large deal.
The ranks divide by question rather than by task. The analyst owns the files and the numbers. The associate owns how the work is structured and reviews it before it goes anywhere. The vice president owns the day to day running of the transaction and most of the contact with the client's finance team and the other side's advisers. The managing director owns the relationship and the mandate, and is measured on the revenue that relationship generates.
Titles between vice president and managing director are not standardised across European firms, so a director at one house is not doing the same job as a director at another. Ask what a title means at that firm rather than mapping it onto an American chart.
Team size scales with deal size, and that is what determines a junior's experience more than anything else. A very large cross border transaction has several product teams and local coverage in each country, so a junior owns one workstream. A mid market sale may have three people on it, in which case the analyst does associate work and joins the client calls.
Worked example
A mid market sale is staffed with one managing director, one vice president and one analyst.
The analyst builds the model, drafts the information memorandum, runs the buyer list and the question log, and is on every call.
The same person on a large cross border deal would own the comparable companies analysis and little else, because ten other people cover the rest.