How to Research a Bank's TMT Practice

Introduction

Researching a bank's TMT practice before interviews is one of the highest-ROI preparation activities, yet most candidates skip it in favor of additional technical preparation. When an interviewer asks "Why this bank?" or "Why our TMT group specifically?", candidates who can reference the bank's recent deals, organizational structure, and coverage strengths make a dramatically stronger impression than those who give generic answers about the bank's "strong TMT franchise." The research also helps you make better career decisions: different banks organize TMT coverage differently, focus on different sub-sectors, and offer different deal experiences, and understanding these differences helps you target the right opportunities.

Five Research Dimensions

Organizational structure: Banks organize TMT coverage in different ways. Some maintain unified TMT groups that cover technology, media, and telecom under a single leadership structure. Others separate technology coverage from media and telecom coverage, often with further sub-specialization (software vs. hardware vs. internet within technology). Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley maintain large, integrated TMT groups. Some boutiques like Qatalyst focus exclusively on technology M&A. Understanding the structure tells you what type of deal experience you will get: a unified group offers broader sub-sector exposure, while a specialized team offers deeper expertise in a narrower area. Recent deal activity: Review the bank's TMT deal tombstones from the past 12-18 months. Which sub-sectors appear most frequently? Is the bank primarily advising on software M&A, media transactions, telecom deals, or a mix? Does it work primarily on sell-side or buy-side mandates? Are the deals strategic transactions, PE-led deals, or capital markets transactions? This tells you what your daily work would look like as an analyst. League table positioning: Check Dealogic, Bloomberg, or publicly available league table data to see where the bank ranks in TMT M&A (by deal value and volume), technology IPOs, and leveraged finance for TMT sponsors. A bank that ranks highly in software M&A but lower in telecom may not be the best fit if you are interested in telecom infrastructure deals. Team composition: Review LinkedIn profiles and the bank's website for TMT team MDs. What are their backgrounds? What sub-sectors do they cover? Are there senior bankers with expertise in the specific TMT area you are interested in? A group with three MDs focused on SaaS and one covering telecom signals that the group's deal flow is heavily weighted toward software. Geographic focus: Does the TMT group primarily advise US-based companies, or does it have significant cross-border deal activity? Banks with strong European or Asian TMT practices offer different deal experiences than US-focused groups. For candidates interested in international TMT transactions, this distinction matters.