Investment Banking Slide Examples of Synergy -

Tl;dr: Part of a collection of real examples of M&A investment banking slides. This blog covers Synergy. See the PowerPoint presentations investment bankers are paid millions for. No matter your job, or your aspirations, you can learn from these slides.

This is part of a collection of 67 free M&A presentations from the top 20 banks (based on ranking, and also the quality of presentation for you to learn from).

Collection of M&A slide examples

The main page for all the M&A resources is here.

I have broken out 827 examples of slides across 32 sections. You can click through to the section you want to learn about next here:

Company Overview

Corporate Structure

Management Projections

Research Analyst

Comparison Financial Projections

Analysis At Various Prices

Share Price Analysis

Volume Weighted Average Price

Regression Analysis

Discounted Cash Flow

Weighted Average Cost Of Capital

Comparable Companies

Comparable Transactions

Dividend Discount Model

Exchange Ratio And Contribution Analysis

Transaction Case Study

Is this blog for you?

Why the heck should you care? Investment banks (historically) attracted the best and the brightest.

Slide structure/design: Learn how complicated concepts are structured and designed in PowerPoint
Analysis approach: See exactly how complex financial methods are presented
Strategy and communication: M&A deals are not (normally, other than many Duff and Phelps decks) cookie cutter. There’s a host of topics that need to be dealt with
Morbid interest: I used to do this for a living, but it’s still interesting to see how PPT are made… but then maybe it’s just me and so FML 😉

Who this will help:

You want to work in banking: There’s a lot of applicants. Knowing the job helps you answer questions
You work in banking: Even if you’re an MD, you need to know how the best are structuring their thoughts/analysis
You write presentations: You can’t buy learnings like this. You can learn from the slides
You have a curious mind: Good for you

About Synergy

Synergy means 1+1=3. Normally there are no synergies (there is academic research on this) but that doesn’t stop peopel from thinking there will be.

There are two main types of synergy:

Cost: You can cut costs. For example, remove duplicate HQ costs. I mean there is the hope to fire a lot of people, but the cost of firing people ruins that a bit
Revenue: You hope you can make more money. A good example is a large asset manager buying a small, specialty one so they can ‘distribute more product’ to their client base

Three are of course other ones, such as around NOLs (Net Operating Losses) and depreciation. I’ve never made slides on them, but I presume the client will use an accountant like EY or PWC to write some painful 100-page deck, and you’ll take out a few numbers from it.

The joke about synergies in banking is that you almost always assume 25% synergies.

Why these slides are made

Synergy analysis really comes down to “how much can we afford to pay”? This is especially important in a competitive deal where the client wants to do the deal, but they’re having an issue backing it up with numbers… and they will need to explain this to analysts so they don’t get sell recommendations.

Bankers never come up with the synergies. Someone in corp dev, some consultant etc does the hard work and then gives you the high-level numbers. You then take the numbers, stick it in a model and then make some pretty-looking slides like in these examples.

So as analysis/slides go, these are one of the easiest ones as you don’t have to do all that much. Someone else has to.

Comments on making these slides

I don’t have much wisdom to impart. Someone else is going to do the hard work and you just need to make it look like you did something. Your job will be to update your financial model to incorporate them and create scenario analysis. My guess is you’ll end up writing a 5-10 slide deck for discussion and then in future valuation decks you’ll end up incorporating some of that analysis.