The qualifications you need to make it in investment banking now
Investment banks have never been huge on qualifications – although they do have high expectations on what you do study – but that doesn’t mean that (future) bankers don’t tend to congregate in some particular courses.
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In investment banking roles (including M&A and capital markets), we’ve previously noted that current juniors have undergraduate backgrounds in economics, finance, and business management. But credentialism is a relatively new development in investment banking recruitment. Where have bankers historically been recruited from?
Our own 1m+ strong CV database has some answers. Analyzing our database for investment bankers shows a pattern of change over the years – from the decline of the MBA to the rise of the CFA.
Just 11.5% of associates in our database (and 8.5% of analysts, although that’s less relevant) have an MBA, compared to 16% of managing directors.
That shouldn’t be surprising – analysis of Stanford and Wharton’s most recent MBA class shows, private equity and hedge funds can offer better pay out the gate than investment banking can. Accordingly, only 5% of Harvard’s and 2% of Stanford’s 2024 MBA classes went into investment banking at all.
The contrast is with the CFA. It makes sense – investment banks are hiring students earlier and earlier (hence the rise in prominence of spring internships) and there’s more competition than ever – Goldman’s intern acceptance rate went from 1.27% to 0.8% between 2023 and 2024, for example.
The CFA can be started during your school days, and it’s perceived as an excellent way to distinguish yourself in a standardized way if you have a non-target international background. Does it work? It’s hard to say, but it definitely doesn’t hurt applicants, as our data shows.
Accounting qualifications such as the ACA and ACCA, as well as having a master’s degree in finance, are pretty evenly represented across seniorities in our database.
Although a disproportionate number of associate-level bankers have accounting qualifications, this is easily explained as being due to the deal boom of 2021, in which banks were generally short on labor and press-ganged middle-office professionals from each other (oftentimes accountants) to get deals over the line.
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