DEVELOPING BANKING PITCH BOOKS
This week at Launch Module Media, we’ve been hired to develop and upgrade, for an investment group and a hedge fund, short (south of 20 slides) PowerPoint presentations (generally known in banking as ‘Pitch Books,’ or, when I worked for Bear Stearns, ‘coasters’ (you put your drink on them while putting together the deal)).
Most of the time, we work on the shorter, more visually dynamic, presentations that financial companies (especially newer or startup-phase) need to attract institutional or private investors and business in general. These PowerPoint decks tend to have a slightly more sales feel and are not so dry graphically as the big M&A monster books you might see at a major IB.
Thinking over how we can do a better job on finding and serving this very specific market for design product, I did some reading on the Web and found an amazing overview of the structure of banking pitch books. What’s In a Pitch Book? is a 2,622-word post written by Brian DeChesare, founder of Mergers & Inquisitions. A quick, well-documented read — this is the best synopsis/article on the subject I’ve seen. Valuable not just for nascent bankers, but certainly for designers like me as well. I’ll quote the part of the post that refers to the type of presentations we’re working on for our financial Clients this week.
Market Overviews / Bank Introductions
This is the simplest type of pitch book – it’s usually around 10-20 slides that introduce your bank and give an overview of recent market activity to “prove” that your bank knows what it’s talking about.
Common elements:
1. Slides showing your bank’s organization, the different departments, and how “global” you are.
2. Several “tombstone” slides that show recent deals your bank has done in a particular sector. So if you’re presenting to Exxon Mobil, you might show recent energy M&A deals, IPOs, and debt offerings you have advised on.
Along with these, you might create “league table” slides that show how your bank ranks in different areas like tech M&A deals, equity issuances, and so on.
3. “Market overview” slides showing recent trends and deals in the market and data on how similar companies (“comps”) have been performing lately.
These types of pitch books are the least painful for investment banking analysts because you mostly just copy slides from elsewhere and update existing data.
Some banks don’t even use these types of presentations at all – they’re more common at smaller banks where you actually need to introduce yourself.
So, I definitely recommend checking out Mergers & Inquisitions. If you are in banking and need to introduce your fund or group to clients and investors, do feel free to check in with us here at Launch Module, and we’ll help you take your pitches to the next level!
