投行的VP and IB Ranking Titles

VP in Investment Banks (IB) is a mid level position. A typical IB structure is as follows

1: Fresh out of school undergraduate enters into Analyst program for 1-3 yrs

2: MBA graduates or fresh out of school PhDs enter the business as Asscociate

3: In 1-3 years, good Associates get promoted to VP - a mid level position

4: Going above VP then depends on many factors such as how much business one brings in, which clients  or IPO deals one works on, which Merger & Aquisition deals are high on the so called League Table, or whether a trader can make good P/L. Any way, the next level above VP has many names but are roughly equal. Such as Senior VP (Lehman and Barc), Director (JPM, BoA, CS, DB), Director/Executive Director (MS). There are 2 outliers on Wall Street. UBS's director is really a VP, and executive director is really a SVP/director. The other outlier is Goldman where in US, it often does not have an explicit SVP/director level. Outside US, GS does have executive director title such as in HK.

5: The top of the food chain is Managing Director (MD).  Most of the banks have the same title. The busted Bear Stein used to have a Senior Managing Director title that is equivalent to a MD in other banks.  Goldman still has managing partner structure that every other year, some top MDs are elected to become managing partner of the now public GS. GS probably has around 300 managing partners and aims to keep that number steady. This means some old timer big shots will fall out favor every other year too. Those falling out of this elite circle often leave the firm soon.  The average MD bonus for 2012 is estimated to be 930K which is lower than the 1.2 mm paid in 2010. Let alone there are fewer Wall St MDs around in 2012. 

The struture above is a typical one to understand at the 90-10 level of a large bank's IB division. Smaller banks may be slightly different.  More importantly, remember that for monster sized banks such as BoA, JPM and Citi, their number of employees are in the neighborhood of 300K and only a fraction of those employees are in IB.  Other divisions such as Risk, Product Control, Commercial Banking, IT, etc will follow similar ranking but are often paid from less or lest. 

In contrast, a VP in a big drug or IT company is a very senior position often leads hundrends or even thousands of employees and in charge of important and significant functions.  That is very different than a mid level IB VP who often may not have any management responsibility.  However, in terms of the money made, a bank VP in a good year can match or beat a drug company VP handsomely. 

Hope this helps. 

所有跟帖： 

• 解釋很詳細，謝謝信息 -花上善若水卷簾- ♀ (0 bytes) () 11/10/2012 postreply 08:26:10

• 其實VP也還是不能說是mid level, 一個兵的沒有 -laborlaw- ♂ (0 bytes) () 11/10/2012 postreply 12:29:09