How to get a capital markets job in an investment bank

• Capital markets bankers have traditionally helped clients raise money through public markets.
• Capital markets bankers usually specialize in equity or debt. They’re known as Equity Capital Markets (ECM) bankers and Debt Capital Markets (DCM) bankers, respectively.
• Capital markets jobs are well paid. The highest pay goes to people originating deals and bringing in new clients, rather than those just executing the transactions.
• Entry to the best capital markets teams is highly competitive; junior bankers get ahead by impressing bosses with skill and hard work.
• To succeed, you need to be good with people and have a really strong eye for detail.

Capital markets bankers help companies raise money on the public markets. When companies want to make investments and expand, they need money to do so – and while they could usually just take out a bank loan, that isn’t always ideal. If you want to raise a lot of money, or have complex needs, then you might need to go to the global capital markets – and sell debt or equity to investors.

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Investment bankers working in capital markets are responsible for providing advice to companies on this kind of public capital raising and then finding investors to provide the money. To do this, they act as intermediaries between two teams.

On one hand, they talk to client facing advisory bankers to understand corporate clients’ capital raising requirements. On the other, they talk to people in the bank's the sales and trading division to understand what investors are prepared to buy. Additionally, capital markets bankers are responsible for managing the capital raising process, including hiring lawyers, getting the documentation put together and ensuring that everything complies with all of the regulations that cover the act of issuing securities to the public.

What’s a debt capital markets banker? What’s an equity capital markets banker?

Capital markets teams are split into Debt Capital Markets (DCM) and Equity Capital Markets (ECM), specializing in either bond (debt) or equity issuance, respectively. The two areas are quite different from each other, because companies tend to issue bonds much more regularly and as an everyday part of their financial management, while equity issuances are a much rarer and more strategic decision.

Firms expect their DCM advisors to be highly numerate, and to understand the technicalities of company financing. The high-volume nature of debt issuance means DCM bankers must be able to develop relationships with clients over time and provide them with relevant market information at regular intervals.

ECM bankers, on the other hand, have to go out and make each deal happen. The "classic product" of ECM is the Initial Product Offering (IPO). This occurs when a company first floats its stock on a publicly accessible stock exchange. 

IPOs are the element of ECM that everyone's familiar with. "People read about IPOs in the news, and events like the ringing of the bell at stock exchanges make it an exciting and dynamic field," said Craig Coben, former global head of ECM for Bank of America to St. Gallen business review in May.

First, though, senior ECM bankers need to identify clients that might want to IPO and need their services. The co-head of EMEA capital markets at a European bank said this is done by monitoring market news. A good capital markets team will anticipate clients’ needs: if good news drives the share price higher, for example, there might be an opportunity to do a follow-on share offering. 

As the opportunities are identified, the team moves into “pitch” mode, and senior ECM bankers will hop on a plane to try and sell the investment bank to a potential client. This is the “origination” stage of the deal. Although it’s the directors and managing directors who are expected to be the face of the bank, junior employees are engaged in preparing the marketing material required. If they’re successful, the team moves on to the “execution” stage.

“Origination could include preparing or conducting client pitches. Executing would include drafting or structuring work with clients, lawyers, accountants or distribution efforts involving syndicate, sales, and investors,” says one senior banker at a boutique investment bank.

Once an IPO is underway and the new shares are being issued, the bank's own sales and trading team become involved. "We closely coordinate with the sales force and trading teams to facilitate raising capital from public investors. In many ways, we are the glue that holds these transactions together,” Coben said.

ECM bankers also work with the syndicate desk. The “syndicate”, in this context, refers to a specialist team that sits (literally) between the ECM division and the sales and trading floor. If you work in syndicate, your job will be to liaise with the salespeople and traders, and to keep track of investor interest in the products being issued.  During a deal, syndicate is responsible for preparing feedback from the market about how well received the offering is going to be.

ECM jobs are typically divided into three separate areas. Firstly, there will be the industry group or sector that you’re focused on, such as healthcare, industrials, or financial institutions. Then there’s the geographical area you’re covering, and the product type you specialize in.

ECM isn't just IPOs, though. Coben said ECM teams also handle follow-on offerings, convertible and exchangeable bond offerings, as well as corporate equity derivatives. "Whenever a company, private equity firm, or government seeks to raise funds through the equity markets, that’s where we come into play," he added. 

Convertibles are particularly complicated instruments: these are bonds that can be paid in/as equity, once certain criteria are met. There are also teams that focus on more complex derivative products. In some banks, there are also teams of bankers who focus solely on private placements (targeted stock sales to specific customers, as opposed to the wider public).

By comparison, DCM jobs have a similar split into geographical and sectoral teams, but the financial institutions group (called FIG), which works with banks and other financial clients, is generally much bigger than the rest. This is because financial clients themselves account for nearly half of all bonds issued. There are a number of special types of bonds only issued by banks (such as AT1 bonds) and insurance companies to meet regulatory requirements. DCM bankers working in this space need to have detailed knowledge of the ever-changing world of regulation.

If you work in DCM, you'll probably need to know a lot about private placements, as these are more common in the bond market than in the equity market. DCM bankers will also work closely with experts in interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives, so that clients can borrow efficiently even when the investors want a bond in a different currency.

What do junior capital markets bankers do?

As a junior capital markets banker, you have a pretty similar job to other junior investment bankers – a lot of spreadsheet work, making financial models for client companies.

Virginia Draper, graduate recruitment manager at Deutsche Bank in London, said that “roles in corporate finance can broadly be divided into two categories: origination teams, who work with clients to understand their needs and identify new business opportunities, and product teams, who develop and execute specialist solutions within capital markets or by providing advice they may require."

If you have a job in ECM, the modelling is a little less nitty-gritty and more devoted to the creation of pitchbooks. These pitchbooks are the PowerPoint documents that bankers pore over in order to sell (originate) clients on the merits of a new transaction, and to promote their own skills as the best bank to execute it. As we mentioned above, it is junior bankers who make these marketing materials for director and managing directors to use in their pitches. 

For a DCM role, you’ll need to understand how credit rating agencies model the impact of new bond issuance on a company’s credit rating. You also need to be able to create detailed profiles of interest payments and debt maturities in order to track how a client’s financial structure develops.

When they’re not doing pitchbooks, junior bankers are heavily involved in the execution of deals, something which can require a considerable amount of multitasking. During busy periods, particularly in DCM, you might have as many as half a dozen transactions, all at different stages, with a lot of hard deadlines for things to be completed by.

One of the key skills for a capital markets banker is to be able to keep track of things and prioritize. At VP and director levels, this makes up most of the job – marshalling a small army of analysts and associates to keep everything moving through the pipeline.

“[Clients] understand how investment banks operate, and they know how to push us,” said Coben. “Because of this, everything we presented had to be analytically rigorous, precise, and detailed. These companies scrutinize every presentation with intelligence and insight, so we had to make sure our materials were flawless.”

In the senior ranks, Managing Directors will tend to be either “originators” – the people who bring the deals in and maintain client relationships – or “structurers”, the technical experts who give advice on the right kind of transaction for every client.

As your career develops in capital markets, you might find that you are drawn to one side of this divide or the other, although there is some overlap as structurers are intimately involved in the pitching and origination process while originators have to understand the deal structures relevant to their clients at any given moment.

Are ECM and DCM bankers working in public markets still relevant in 2025?

Private markets are a monster on the hill for capital (often also known as public) markets. There are two main avenues: private equity and private credit.

Private equity is the more well-established of the two. Private equity investments are undertaken by large firms like Apollo and Blackstone, which take ownership stakes in non-public companies in the hope of eventually selling them for a profit. Despite some tough times recently, the private equity industry remains huge: it managed $8.5tn in assets in 2023, up from $2.2tn in the year 2000, according to a Morgan Stanley report from October '24.

Private credit is also well-established, but its emergence onto the global stage is comparatively new. Private credit is the art of lending to private or non-investment grade corporations by a non-bank entity. The "non-bank" part is important - banks have strict rules that non-banks do not have to follow. Private credit is a rapidly growing field: it went from $600bn in AuM in 2014 to $2tn in 2024, according to market intelligence provider BCG Expand.

Private equity and private credit act as alternatives to ECM and DCM, respectively. 

Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon said in January that going public through an IPO, or selling debt on public markets is a hassle compared with private options. “Today you can get capital privately, at scale... You can also get liquidity in the private markets.” Running a public company is also much, much more annoying than running a private one.

Coben, however, is still a believer in public markets, although he admits that the momentum is with private capital these days. “Over time, the pendulum will likely swing back in favour of public markets for various reasons,” he predicted in his piece for the St. Gallen Business Review, noting that private equity firms have a big backlog of companies to sell on the public markets. “Policymakers are now recognizing the importance of having more companies listed on stock exchanges. For years, they created incentives for companies to remain private - some of which may not have been in the public interest.”

Skills you’ll need for jobs in ECM or DCM

Capital markets bankers sit between advisory bankers in areas like M&A and people working in sales and trading. Therefore, if you work in capital markets, you’ll need some of both skillsets. 

Capital markets is a job in which long hours are constant; if you aren’t rushed off your feet with deals to execute, you’re expected to fill in the gaps by working on pitches. Even a relatively simple capital markets transaction will call for many different skillsets as it moves through the pipeline, from pitching to modelling to legal and compliance to project management. An ECM or DCM banker is expected to stay with the transaction and to liaise with the clients all through the process, and to retain grace under pressure.

Your personality and your soft skills are therefore vital. “Being likable, cooperative, and a good team player are crucial skills – far more important than many people outside the industry might realize. Nobody wants to work with someone who is difficult or unreliable. You want to work with people who are not only hardworking but also strong team players,” Coben said.

But it’s not just about the gift of the gab. Coben said it's not unusual for senior bankers to lose deals by talking for too long. “The ability to summarize and get to the point is essential. A significant part of investment banking is about convincing people to take a course of action – not ordering them but persuading them. This requires strong communication skills: knowing how to speak clearly, concisely, and convincingly,” Coben added.

At the junior end, you'll need a different set of skills again. Capital markets bankers are also famous for their attention to detail. Since the actual service is something of a commodity, banks try to differentiate themselves by reassuring the client that they will be able to make the transaction go without a hitch, so any tiny mistake in a pitchbook or model will tend to undermine the overall branding. Even so, Coben says it will help to know how to pitch. "If I had one piece of advice for business students today, it would be to refine their oral presentation skills," he added.

Qualifications you’ll need for a capital markets job

Capital markets roles have a similar skillset to M&A advisory ones – there’s a reason that the phrase “investment banking” applies to them as a collective. That means, much like in M&A roles, getting a finance or STEM degree is probably the best bet, although neither are (strictly) necessary. Recent ECM hires that we observed at Citi, much like M&A bankers, came from finance, economics, and business degrees. DCM bankers at Deutsche Bank had similar profiles when we looked.

Away from your degree, you could, like M&A, study for the CFA Charter, or a good MBA a few years after you graduate. There’s also the Diploma in Capital Markets by CISI, which gives you an idea of how capital markets operate; the level of knowledge is probably not worth a week of work experience, but it could make the difference in an interview.

Salaries & bonuses for capital markets jobs

Capital markets jobs pay really well. Banks take a percentage of each “deal” they complete in fees. The amount they take varies – in an IPO, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK estimated that around 1.7 to 5% of a deal’s value would be taken as a fee, with variations based on size of the deal (bigger deals took less). PwC in the USA estimated that it was 4 to 7%, again depending on deal size. That can easily make up tens of millions of dollars. DCM deals charge much smaller percentages, but the deals are bigger, which balances the two out.

Our 2025 salary and bonus report found that DCM bankers averaged $178k salaries in 2024, while ECM bankers averaged $210k salaries. Bonuses also made up a significant portion of compensation, and DCM and ECM bankers averaged bonuses of $129k and $122k, respectively. Those were for a blockbuster 2024, however – market intelligence provider BCG Expand estimated that DCM and ECM revenue went up by 54% and 39%, respectively.

Our salary & bonus survey suggests that investment bankers, which capital markets professionals are considered to be, can earn over $306k in total compensation around five years into their career at VP level.

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