If you value your sanity as a junior banker, one of the things that you must never do is to calculate what your compensation might look like if expressed as an hourly wage. If you’re working 100-hour weeks as a first year analyst, for example, then even at the new and improved salary of $100k, you’re making $19.23 an hour. That’s not exactly minimum wage, but it’s comfortably beaten by a lot of jobs which have the word “warehouse” in the title.
Once they’ve done this terrible piece of division, bankers often move on to asking the logical next questions – what would the hourly rate be for this job, if bankers were charged out like lawyers or consultants? And, indeed, is there some way to get that sort of deal? It’s now possible to get answers to these sorts of questions, because in the current M&A boom and labour shortage, banks have been driven to hiring contractors to work alongside their own staff on deals.
According to Ömer Güven, the founder of “Fintalent”, a clearing house for banks to find freelancers, the going rate for analysts is between $60 and $100 an hour – three to five times the compensation of an overworked junior. And it’s possible to choose your hours to a much greater extent – while many of the freelance contracts being offered are for crunch time on private equity deals requiring 60-70 hours of work in a short period of time, there are some senior bankers (who can charge up to $250 an hour) doing a steady fifteen hours a week helping out in advisory...
By Dean Aubrey Caratiquet As part of an intensified campaign against the spread of falsehoods that continue to undermine the integrity of the government and pose a threat to national security, PCO...