>> My name is Andrew Nichol [phonetic spelling], and I'm an investment banker by training.
Well, investment banking is a very finance-heavy role.
You typically get to it by doing an MBA at one
of the prestigious schools usually in the US or Europe.
And it involves mergers and acquisitions and financings.
And mergers and acquisitions, it involves the buying and selling of companies,
so you represent to your client either on the sell side or the buy side.
And on financings it represents raising money in the public markets
for companies, either debt or equity.
So you can take a company public raising -- doing an IPO for them raising equity,
or you can take them through a debt offering raising a bond for them
for a specific corporate purpose for which, you know,
they need money for expansion or some sort of strategy growth.
Investment banking is a little bit more ordered.
It's a little bit more professional, a little bit more organized.
There is quite a lot of analysis that needs to get done, and we call that valuation analysis.
And what that essentially means is a lot of work goes into valuing companies trying to figure
out how much they're worth in the public market, how much somebody would be willing to pay
for them and how much something would be willing to sell them for.
So it involves a lot of Excel crunching and a lot of number crunching sitting at the computer
and working with a lot of data systems like Capital IQ and other data systems
that feed into your valuation models.
And then it involves a lot of putting together presentations to talk about valuation
and to talk about positioning and to talk about where your company sits within the rubric
of its peers and where it's valuation sits within the rubric of its peers.