Common Investment Banking Reports (For Records / Lists)
In addition to our default reports, our reporting suite is built to be flexible and support a number of other use cases. We've curated some potential reports you and your team might find useful below. If you need any help configuring these reports, feel free to reach out to us or review some of the related articles to this one!
Business development status
One of the most common reports investment banks run in 4Degrees is the business development status report. This report gives an overview of all the potential client mandates the team is currently pursuing, grouped by the stage of the client development process they are in.
Our default "Record Report" is meant to provide a simple version of this report in practice, which your team can modify further by editing columns and / or filtering out record types that aren't typically discussed in your team's weekly meeting.
One common variant of this report is looking at the same pipeline, but by dollar amount (instead of count of prospective mandates).
Note: this default report may be called something different (e.g., Opportunity Report, Record Report) depending on the naming conventions in use by your team in 4Degrees.
Transaction status reports
By changing the list you're reporting on to an ongoing project, you can also generate a quick overview of any record you're actively marketing and managing. By doing so, this report gives an overview of all the targets (investors / buyers in the case of a sell-side or private placement, companies in the case of a buy-side) you've reached out to for this record, and where they currently are in the process of a decision.
Similar to the above, you can modify the default version of this report further by editing columns and / or filtering out record types that aren't typically discussed in your team's weekly meeting.
Business development analysis
Outside of status, you might also want to evaluate how that pipeline is evolving, and how those mandates align with your areas of focus. Some examples of this would include:
- Sourcing volume reports - which would help your team evaluate top of funnel sourcing + origination activity, and if that's increasing or decreasing over time
- Category reports - assuming you're collecting this data, you may also want to report on how your business development pipeline looks across different categories such as:
- Which industries are we generating the most potential mandates in?
- What types of transactions are driving most of our activity (e.g., buy-side, sell-side, private placement, consulting)
- What geographies represent most of the opportunities we're getting?
Resource allocation reports
Another set of reports we've seen people build center around resource allocation - which relationships are worth re-investing in, which people on the team are overloaded (or more productive) vs. less so, and how efficient your process is at converting top of funnel activity to mandates secured.
Some examples:
- Where are we getting most of our opportunities from - and what marketing activities are working the best?
- Who is referring us clients (and as a result, who should be spending more time with)? More importantly - who is sending us the clients that we actually end up winning?
- Which people on the team are leading or running point on a lot of prospects or ongoing mandates?
- Of the client conversations we started this year, how many got to the engagement letter stage of our process? How many did we end up working with?