Investment banking · Alternative equity

You help companies raise money by selling stakes or special kinds of bonds to a chosen group of investors, rather than through an ordinary share sale on the stock market. This is an associate or analyst seat in the Alternative Equity Products team at Goldman Sachs in London. The team sits inside Equity Capital Markets, the part of the bank that helps companies raise money by selling shares, within the Capital Solutions Group for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The team does three kinds of deal. In an equity private placement a private company sells a minority stake, meaning less than half, to a mix of strategic investors such as other companies and financial investors such as funds, often as a step before listing on a stock market. The stake can be ordinary shares or convertible preference shares, which rank ahead of ordinary shares and can later be swapped into them.

In equity-linked financing a company issues bonds that can be turned into shares later, either its own shares, which makes a convertible bond, or another company's, which makes an exchangeable bond, so investors are exposed to both the debt and the share price. In a private investment in a public entity, a listed company raises committed money from a small group of private investors.