Over two decades ago, the investment bank where I worked introduced a new rule: pitch books couldn’t exceed 20 pages. Dubbed “Thin to Win,” the goal was to lighten the load for junior bankers and sharpen our client presentations. Our COO explained that studies showed audiences tuned out after 10 pages, remembering only three main points.
Despite sounding like a win-win, the initiative lasted barely a month. “Thin to Win” couldn’t compete when peer banks were presenting 80-page decks with extensive appendices. It didn’t matter that our concise analysis was sharper — clients equated longer presentations with greater commitment. “Thin to Win” was soon consigned to the trash bin.
This episode comes to mind as conversations flare up again about junior banker working hours. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan and Bank of America were taking action to protect their junior bankers from crushing workloads. According to the WSJ:
JPMorgan will now cap junior investment bankers’ hours at 80 a week in most cases, people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, Bank of America is implementing a new timekeeping tool that requires junior bankers to go into more detail about how their time is spent, other people familiar with the matter said.
This isn’t the first time banks have sought to ease working conditions for younger bankers. In 2013, shocked by the death of a summer intern in London from an epileptic seizure, investment banks brought in wide-ranging measures to limit weekend work and rein in hours, and many ramped up hiring to spread work across more analysts.
In recent years the issue has taken on even more urgency. In 2021, Goldman Sachs analysts went viral with a PowerPoint deck complaining of 100-hour work weeks and mental health struggles. Last May, a 35-year-old investment banker died days after closing an M&A deal, sparking unsubstantiated media speculation about the toll of long hours. (The New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said he died of natural causes.) Meanwhile, juniors have claimed to the media that work-hours policies are often ignored. A junior banker strike was widely rumoured, but never materialised.
Long hours have been a perennial feature of investment banking for as long as I can remember. (By “investment banking,” I mean corporate finance work, such as M&A and capital markets origination. Sales and trading operate on market hours — get in early, leave early.) And not just banking: similar pressures apply in BigLaw and other high-stakes, highly paid professional services. I started my career as a corporate lawyer in the mid-1990s, and work-life left me stressed and exhausted. And I had it easy: Some lawyers were billing 400 hours a month. Switching to investment banking actually improved my quality of life.
Everyone knows these long hours aren’t healthy, so why hasn’t anything changed? Are banks indifferent to employee welfare or simply inefficient? The answer is more nuanced. The gruelling hours are tied to the nature of the business: investment banking is a bespoke, service-driven industry where client satisfaction is paramount. Every deal is unique, every client demanding, and every presentation custom-tailored, regardless of whether the content is brilliant or basic.
This isn’t an assembly line. Consider a typical M&A or IPO deal: clients expect in-depth industry knowledge, complex financial modelling, profiles of likely buyers, tailored materials, and constant availability. Now imagine juggling several of those at once, while competing for new business, and you understand why junior bankers’ calendars look like a Tetris game gone haywire.
The bespoke nature of the work adds challenges. First, it’s difficult to standardise. While banks have tried to create templates and streamline processes, each deal still requires serious customisation. The last thing you want in a pitch is for a client to think you recycled slides from another deal. Second, timelines are unpredictable and non-linear. Deals can accelerate or stall at a moment’s notice, wreaking havoc on weekend or vacation plans. No deal ever goes according to plan. Third, clients have great expectations. They’re paying bonanza fees and demand a level of responsiveness and precision that often includes last-minute requests and ridiculous deadlines. Finally, competitive pressure. In a cutthroat industry, there’s always another bank willing to pull an all-nighter to win the business.
“Work smarter, not harder” sounds great in theory, but the reality is that 24/7 availability is non-negotiable.
Juniors aren’t oblivious to this when they join a bank. Top graduates know banking isn’t a 9-to-5 gig. New hires earn nearly $200,000 a year without having the ability or responsibility to originate new business. There’s always a trade-off. And let’s not kid ourselves: many other people work 60-80 hours per week for a fraction of the pay and in much tougher conditions than junior investment bankers.
It would be interesting as an experiment to see what would happen if you offered an investment banking analyst half hours at half pay (eg a 40-hour week for $100,000 total comp). My strong hunch from nearly three decades in investment banking is that the vast majority would opt for full pay.
That said, hiring twice the number of bankers on half the pay would probably create more problems than it solves. Investment banking is a labour-intensive business; junior staff handle detailed, deal-specific tasks that require attention to detail, familiarity with context, and an ability to manage uneven work flow punctuated by intense spikes. Throwing extra hands on deck doesn’t reduce the workload. In fact, it can muddle coordination, dilute institutional knowledge, and water down accountability. Indeed, one of the first questions you ask when preparing a presentation is “who is holding the pen?”. Generally speaking, projects are fully staffed, but if you add even more people, you can easily make things worse.
In any case, not all juniors are equally burdened. Like any organisation, there are workers and shirkers, workhorses and show horses. Most juniors are diligent, and some even work extra hours as a badge of honour; meanwhile, others dodge the heavy lifting and milk the perks like free dinners and nighttime car service. A few years back, some banks cracked down on rampant abuse of Seamless and Deliveroo food delivery services, punishing the worst offenders. Not everyone carries their weight.
Generational differences have also created a hornet’s nest. Younger employees who prioritise work-life balance and mental health more than previous generations can amplify complaints via social and mainstream media. Grievances that used to stay within the company now spread rapidly on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, with financial journalists a click away through encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought other challenges. Banks offered permanent positions to nearly all summer interns, rather than the usual 60-70 per cent, for compassionate reasons. This, combined with private equity firms poaching the best talent, meant weaker juniors were slipping through. Due to legal and organisational constraints, it’s complicated to fire underperformers, even in the US, and senior bankers end up piling more work on trusted juniors, breeding resentment.
The revealed preference for private equity also explains some of the frustration. Many juniors don’t mind hard work — private equity firms jobs are anything but cushy — but they want to see a payoff. In banking they often end up burning time on low-probability pitches, adjusting logos, fixing formatting, and wading through compliance red tape that is a feature of post-financial crisis banking. (At one investment bank, several junior bankers recently got “letters of education” — a kind of admonishment that falls short of formal disciplinary action — for using the wrong disclaimer in the pitch book!)
While some juniors stick around, many view the buyside as an escape to focus on the aspects of finance they find meaningful. One former investment banker told me recently that she was working just as hard at an infrastructure fund — but she appreciated being able to focus on the substantive work of financial modelling and investment evaluation, not on the “Mickey Mouse stuff,” as she put it.
Even senior bankers feel the pinch. While junior pay has skyrocketed, mid- and senior-level compensation has plateaued, squeezed by shrinking returns on equity. This creates tension, with senior bankers managing an often less motivated, less capable junior workforce.
Many people wonder whether advances in artificial intelligence and automation can offer a technological solution, freeing junior bankers from pitch book purgatory. It’s a tempting thought. Indeed, investment banks have made strides in automating certain processes, such as pitch book generation, financial modelling, and data aggregation.
But here’s the paradox: every time technology makes things more efficient, it also raises client expectations for more analysis and faster turnaround times. The core value of investment banking — strategic advice, relationship management, and nuts-and-bolts deal execution — still requires significant human judgement and input. Automation can’t fully handle the bespoke nature of deals, and it has often made things worse by enabling endless revisions and iterations. Finally, banks have to be conservative: human error is in some ways more tolerable than a Hal 9000 error. For now, it’s hard to see how tech will cut down the workload.
Where does that leave us? Investment banking is at a crossroads, facing pressure from employees, regulators, and the media to address its workaholic culture. Banks have tried various fixes — protected weekends, wellness programs, hiring sprees, offshore teams, prohibitions on changing pitch books 12 hours before the deadline — but these feel like Band-Aids on a gushing wound. They don’t address the fundamental misalignment between the demands of the job and the expectations of a new generation of workers.
The real question is whether there is any scope for a more radical rethink by, for example, moving away from the “always-on” client-centric service offering to establish more clearly defined boundaries or setting realistic expectations with clients for turnaround times and availability. For now, it feels like a long shot.