Anyone In Corporate Finance? (As In "Industry" Fin

Question

I know this has been discussed a little bit before, but I'm still trying to get my head around corporate finance and what it is like working in "industry."

From what I've read and heard, a job in corporate finance (for instance, working in the finance department of a company like Coca-Cola or Kraft or Hasbro) means you start out around 90K and you're working reasonable hours.

Does anyone know how the heirarchy works in a finance department? What sort of salaries you can work up to, and how competitive it is as you move your way up? Are there bonuses?

I hope I don't sound like a broken record because I think I've asked a couple of these questions before, but I'm hoping someone can enlighten me.

kidderek · Answer

I too am curious about this function. I think it has been stated earlier that the hours are more reasonable, but salaries are lower than IB/MC and promotions are more rare.

Is there a corporate finance division for investment banks; if so, do they get bigger salaries/bonuses?

3underscore · Answer

Well of course there is - but it sits on the other side. Raising the funds on the bond with the Corporate. The return is higher, the hours? You are working in a IB, so back to IB hours.

kidderek · Answer

Can you elaborate.

gmatclb · Answer

What would be job title of one of these positions?

Financial Analyst?

Is it safe to assume that these jobs are not competitive at all? Just saying 'cause these types of jobs don't sound sexy enough for the whole flock to salivate over.

kidderek · Answer

I think the job falls in the category of financial modeling, number crunching and managing risk. But mostly, it's the lack of money that reduces its sex appeal. If cutting grass paid $300,000 bonuses, everyone would consider it sexy.

rhyme · Answer

This is what I imagine corporate finance out of school is like... The position is "Senior Staff Analyst"

Primary Responsibilities:
Provide key reports to senior management analyzing financial, operational, and productivity results affecting the companyâ€™s strategic decisions. Conduct competitive analysis and benchmarking using financial metrics including unit cost/unit revenue, productivity, traffic, capacity, and yield. Responsibilities also include analyzing divisional spending variances to plan and forecast, supporting the public release of quarterly earnings and responding to senior management ad-hoc requests.

REQUIRED EDUCATION: Bachelors degree in Accounting, Finance, Economics or other analytical field or equivalent accounting experience. MBA a plus.

REQUIRED WORK EXPERIENCE: Three years relevant job experience.

REQUIRED SKILLS: Excellent written, oral and interpersonal communication skills, strong organizational and analytical abilities and detail-orientation desired. Knowledge of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, MSA and TSO required.

kidderek · Answer

can someone translate.

gmatclb · Answer

Complete TPS reports on time. And hang out with Michael Bolton.

rhyme · Answer

Call bob in data services and ask him to load in all the data from 2005 and give your query priority. Open up your SAS or SPSS or Excel with some plugin or maybe even Access database file dump and pull data about cost and some other metric like traffic. Don't have traffic figures? Call someone in the right department and ask them for those figures.

Develop model in excel that shows you on a facility basis - maybe this could be by store or something... depends on the firm. Lets pretend this was a McDonalds job.... you'd probably be doing these kinds of reports for groups of stores or something.

Which stores have hte most $ per customer? The lowest? Which have the most amount of customer traffic (volume)? Etc.

Budgets. The store in IL said it would spend $X and it spent $Y. Pull data, discover which stores are projected to go over budget, etc.. develop financial model to predict next years budget based on this years spend and known rent increases / cost increases that vary by state.

"Hey rhyme, you know those reports you gave me on all our stores in IL that serviced more than 50,000 customers last year? I need one for FL and TX too."

EconGirl · Answer

From the little I know about this, I believe you start off as a Financial Analyst/Senior Financial Analyst, with work experience and position openenings you can become a controller (not sure if CPA is needed) and then finance director/CFO. The hours depend by company but generally not much of an issue at least for Fin Analysts. Controllers/directors/CFOs work longer but also make a lot more $$$ and have a pretty cushy life. 

I think that career progression is not structured as with MC/IB which is why it is hard to define. Work environmnet - varies by industry and also by company within the same industry. my friend switched jobs as a sr. cial analyst but stayed in the same industry. He said work is the same but everything else is as night/day - from dress code to hours. There are no recruitment cycles because employee turnover is not high which is good in one sense but also a pain because sometimes to get promoted you just have to wait till someone retires or leaves.

rhyme · Answer

And thats the problem I have with it. I'm not a patient person and I dont deal well with sitting around waiting for someone to die.

3underscore · Answer

If you can try ask a bit more detailed questions, I will try answer them. I have a lot of work to do so I can go drink beer with Rhyme next week, and it isn't going well. So, I kinda wanted to reply, but my mood is a bit cr@p, so sorry about that. I will try to do better a little later.

There is two parts of Corporate Finance in a bank - one is arranging it for others, one if for funding the bank.

Funding the bank isn't client facing, so doesn't cash in as much as others - you aren't generating P&L, in fact although you keep the bank operating you are a cost. 

Doing the financing for a client is IB. You get silly hours for doing the bank work in arranging stuff, get to spend time with lawyers (always feels ten times longer than it is) and you get laminated plastic lumps with a card in the middle to tell you what you did. It's debt finance - it is what it is. If you aren't working daft hours, they'll give you another deal to work on till you are.

rhyme · Answer

Keep in mind that corporate finance doesn't always mean corporate finance for a bank.

3underscore · Answer

Sure - he just asked me about that side upthread. I think it would be easier to seperate this into "Treasury" discussion and "Corp Finance". I consider the latter a bank based client facing role, I consider Treasury a role in any business.

kidderek · Answer

Wow, you just offended me and apologized all in one paragraph. I have conflicting feelings. hahaha

Actually, I don't have much knowledge about corp fin to ask a more detailed question. As I understand it, corp fin are the big boys who decide how to allocate their funds to maximize profits. 

I thought any type of raising funds would be more investment banking.

3underscore · Answer

Sorry kidderek - everything is going crazy here and I am losing my cool a little on things. It isn't anything you ask, but the answer probably involves me taking a lot longer than I have to answer now. that's all.

Every company has to have people doing Corporate Finance - sorting out the liquidity, debt, funding back2back and all things along that way.

Where the confusion often comes from (for me) is that banks have departments that are Corp Finance - providing debt facilities to these companies to meet their above needs (why I said the other side). There are also the bits of banks that you have to work with to do bond issuance, securitise assets and all that jazz - a different bit, and quite a skilled one. This though is client facing banking, and is hard work (pays better, but you will have n customer projects running parallel, rather than being at one company).

the bank side of the business is pretty interesting in part, but pretty dull in another way - lots of it is reissuing similar base documents for things and doing the grunt work of fund raising. at the same time, it would pay well, and probably operate in as a good door into the higher levels of industry side corp finance.

Anyone In Corporate Finance? (As In "Industry" Fin

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