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How to get a capital markets job in an investment bank

19 August 2026

15 minute read

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 that originate deals and bring 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 through the public markets. When companies want to make investments and expand, they need money to do so – and while they could just take out a bank loan, that isn’t always ideal. If a company wants to raise a lot of money, or has complex needs, then they might need to go to the global capital markets – and sell debt or equity to investors.

Investment bankers that work 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 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, more strategic, and more extravagant 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 Public 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 last May.

First, though, senior ECM bankers need to identify clients that might want to IPO and need their services. A co-head of EMEA capital markets at a European bank told us that this is done by monitoring market news. And 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 materials – the pitchbooks – 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,” one senior banker at a boutique investment bank told us.

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 the 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.

Are ECM and DCM bankers working in public markets still relevant in 2026?

There are two main types of private capital: private equity and private credit. Both are well-placed to eat the lunches of ECM and DCM, respectively.

Private equity is the more well-established of the two. Private equity investments are undertaken by large firms like KKR and Blackstone, which take ownership stakes in non-public companies in the hope of eventually selling them on for a profit.

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.

A year ago, it seemed that the fundraising potential of private capital was closing in on capital markets in an unassailable way. Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon said at the beginning of that year 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.

That hasn’t quite come to pass. “Over time, the pendulum will likely swing back in favour of public markets for various reasons,” Coben predicted, and noted 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.”

The amount of money raised by IPOs bounced in 2025, up 15% on 2024, according to market intelligence provider LSEG, and on par with the unforgettable year 2021. 2026 is shaping up to be an even bigger monster; H1 proceeds raised so far this year are 72% up on H1 of 2025. DCM proceeds are also up, although not quite as dramatically.

Private credit isn't doing so well. PwC's Global Private Credit Survey 2026 found that 93% of private credit managers expect flat or lower returns this year, with 64% pointing to defaults and credit losses as the cause for why. Private credit has spent a decade lending in benign conditions. And while it also existed before then, this is a new challenge for its new, more globally prominent chapter.

It’s important to note that private capital and capital markets are deeply interlinked, especially ECM and private equity. Financial sponsor (private equity) activity was seen as a significant canary in the coalmine back when investment banking was slow – banks expected the private equity industry to lead the way when things came roaring back. They form a huge part of global IPO fees generated, too.

Even during private equity's tough times, when firms were struggling to exit investments and were turning to the secondaries market, they were relying on banking private capital advisory (PCA) teams to execute those deals. PCA teams have many of the same roles and responsibilities as capital markets teams.

What do junior capital markets bankers do?

As a junior capital markets banker, you have a similar job to other junior investment bankers, such as those in M&A – a lot of work in PowerPoint and Excel. In PowerPoint you pitch deals to client companies; in Excel you deliver that work.

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, there’s less of a focus on modelling, and more time 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. Junior bankers make (or sometimes enlist an AI to generate) 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.

Skills you’ll need for jobs in ECM or DCM

Because capital markets bankers sit between M&A-style advisory and sales & trading, you'll need some skills from both, in proportions that depend on whether you go into ECM or DCM.

Early on, the key thing is accuracy and product knowledge. You'll build pricing models and documentation that must be right from the get-go. Coben said that clients "scrutinize every presentation with intelligence and insight." You'll also need to know the instruments: things like IPOs, secondary offerings and SPACs on the equity side; and bonds from secured to unsecured, sovereign to corporate, plus private placements, over on the debt side.

Later, it becomes about judgement, trust, and connections. In ECM, this means you must read where investor appetite sits and what the market will pay. In DCM, clients come back year after year for funding, so the relationship is what wins deals for a relatively commoditized product.

How is AI impacting capital markets?

AI is doing two very different things to capital markets. For one, it is creating an enormous amount of work and money. SpaceX's $75bn IPO earlier this year paid its bankers around $500m, with lead bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley earning roughly $100m each. Meta raised $30bn in bonds last October, and Morgan Stanley expects over $500bn of AI-related debt to be issued, in total, across 2026.

It is also automating the work that bankers do. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said as far back as January 2025 that AI could draft 95% of an IPO prospectus, with only the final 5% really mattering now. DCM is arguably more exposed than ECM, as bonds are far more templated than IPOs, and clients issue repeatedly, rather than just once.

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, after all. That means, like in M&A roles, getting a finance or STEM degree is probably the best bet, although neither are strictly necessary. When we analyzed recent ECM hires at Citi, many came from finance, economics and business degrees, much like M&A bankers. DCM bankers at Deutsche Bank had similar profiles when we looked.

Away from your degree you could 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 a difference in an interview.

Salaries & bonuses for capital markets jobs

Capital markets jobs pay well. Our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle report found that DCM bankers averaged $426k in total compensation (salaries+bonuses) across 2025, while ECM bankers averaged $251k in total compensation. They did, however, work a lot of hours, especially DCM bankers, who averaged more than 60 hours a week. This was comparable to, but a step behind, M&A professionals, who earned average compensations of $518k while working over 67 hours a week.

Bonuses are closely related to how much you and your team bring in via fees. Banks take a percentage of each “deal” they complete in fees. The amount they take varies on what exactly they did – 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). That can easily make up tens of millions of dollars. A megadeal like SpaceX’s IPO generated just 0.7% of its raised value in fees. DCM deals charge much smaller percentages, but the deals and volume are bigger, which balances the two out.

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