Would this be a good investment move?

Should I make the move from healthcare management consulting to healthcare investment banking?

• I am curious about what healthcare iBanking is like. Currently, at my firm I deal with a variety of projects (from biotech, medtech, healthIT) and get to do a lot of different projects. If I move from here to iBanking, will my workstream be very routine? Can someone walk me through the daily routine for an analyst at a healthcare iBank and give me some color around how routine each day is to each other. I am interested in gaining more financial experience, but still want to ultimately end up at a VC firm or in-house strategy development at a healthcare company. I am thinking of iBanks like Leerink, Jeffries, Piper, and Cowen.

• Answer:

  I was a healthcare investment banking analyst for three years. I think moving from healthcare consulting to healthcare investment banking is a great move if you want to end up in an investing role or another finance position, but a potentially unnecessary move if your end-game is working at a healthcare company. This assumes that you're moving to a bank of equal tier to the consulting firm you're already at.Here are a few observations: If you're a generalist within healthcare investment banking, you'll work on a lot of different types of projects. Healthcare is obviously a broad industry -- as a junior banker, you can be working on anything from a pre-revenue biotech IPO to a high-yield deal for a hospital to an investment grade bond deal for a managed care company to a sell-side for a healthcare IT company. Because there's such a wide range of growth stages and financial profiles across the subsectors, you get to work on lots of different types of transactions. That said, some banks focus on certain subsectors within healthcare. So do your research, because your experience working in a biotech-only office will be very different from working at a middle-market shop that does mostly leveraged finance deals for sponsor-backed services companies. A healthcare consulting background will help you in healthcare investment banking in some ways but not others: How it will help: Healthcare consultants tend to have a good understanding of the industry, which is obviously important. I've noticed that some consultants have more technical experience than others, though, so that aspect will be situation-dependent. How it won't help: Healthcare investment banking is still investment banking. A lot of the work will be finance/accounting, which consultants have less experience in. If you want to learn finance, moving into banking is probably the right thing, but you'll have a lot to learn. There are some interesting exit opportunities from investment banking that might be less available to a consultant. A lot of junior bankers move into investing roles (PE or hedge funds; generalist or healthcare-specific). Many private equity firms also hire consultants, but I think you're generally better positioned for investing roles coming out of banking (obviously depends on the bank, your performance etc.). However, there are some opportunities that might be more available to a consultant than to a banker. A lot of bankers leave to go in-house at a healthcare company. A lot of consultants follow that path too, though, and I think some of the more strategic roles might be better suited for a consultant than a banker (this is obviously a total generalization). Healthcare consultants often have way more interaction with clients than junior bankers do, and are often more involved on the strategic/qualitative side. And if you're moving from consulting to banking, you might have to "repeat a year" depending on the firm. So if going in-house at a company is your end-game, I'm not sure you need to move to investment banking depending on the type of role you're looking for. Whether you should move from healthcare consulting to healthcare banking depends on a) how motivated you are to learn finance and deal with the pressures of investment banking and b) what your exact end-game is -- if it's investing, then I think the move makes a lot of sense.