Investment banking today: less ‘fly me to the moon’, more ‘Zoom and gloom’

Gone are the glory days of jet-setting around the world.

For investment bankers, racking up air miles and slapping down the company credit card at a nice restaurant or hotel are becoming special events — or anxiety-inducing compliance risks — rather than perks of the job or a status symbol.

Now, instead of strutting through airline lounges on the way to a seat in first class, dealmakers are stuck in their own lounges at home, toggling between Webex and Teams, staring forlornly at their wilted desk salads. Zoom has become a four letter word.

Investment bankers have always had a love/hate relationship with business travel.

Let’s be real: travel can be a soul-crushing grind: the early alarm, grim airport terminals, re-heated grub, stiff aeroplane seats, and that horrible moment when you realise you’ve got a four hour layover in a terminal that has all the charm of a KGB interrogation room.

The glamour of hopping from city to city fades fast when you’re bouncing between taxis, trains and a never-ending series of gate changes. The novelty of travel turns quickly into drudgery.

Day trips used to be my personal nightmare. Picture this: a 4.30am wake-up call to be ready for a 5am car to catch a 7am flight out of Heathrow. You shuffle bleary-eyed through security, get crammed into a metal tube with people coughing on you from all angles, and then hit the ground running — literally — for a meeting.

Perform like you’re an over-caffeinated understudy in a West End show who has been given 10 minutes’ notice to get on stage, and then it’s back to the airport to rinse and repeat — only to get home too close to midnight for comfort, drained and wishing you could teleport.

And don’t even get me started on winter travel: leaving home in the dark, coming back in the dark. At some point, you start to question whether you’ve fallen through a wormhole.

Yet travel validates you as a banker; it makes you feel important. If you’re travelling, you’re in the game. You’re out there meeting clients, closing deals, proving that you’re not just counting paper clips back at the office.

The term ‘road warrior’ isn’t just marketing fluff, it’s a badge of honour — one earned through airport delays, lost luggage (if you’re stupid enough to check any in) and way too many nights spent in sterile business hotels.

Plus, travel creates an odd, but very real, kind of team bonding. Many a battle-hardened banker has a story of flying out with a team to some far-flung city, surviving on stale bread rolls and coffee, only to crush a pitch and bag the mandate.

There’s something special about those war stories (real and apocryphal), forged in the trenches of windowless conference rooms, that binds people together.

But the times, they are a-changin’. Thanks to the pandemic, heightened climate change awareness and good ol’-fashioned cost-cutting, the ‘road warrior’ life has lost whatever lustre it may have had.

Business travel isn’t the flex it used to be. It’s now seen as an overpriced, carbon-heavy indulgence, full of externalities as well as banalities. Travel budgets are under growing scrutiny and every flight has to be justified.

In place of travel, Zoom, Webex and Teams have have become as much a part of a banker’s toolkit as Excel or Bloomberg. Pre-pandemic, a video call was the last resort when you couldn’t make the trip. Now it’s often the first option — and guess what? Nobody bats an eyelid.

Video calls are as ubiquitous as deal memos, and you can take them from your living room in your sweatpants, as long as you keep a collared shirt or even blazer handy for your visible half.

Suddenly, the ability to conduct a client meeting on Zoom is as valuable as the skill of navigating a room full of board members with a pitch deck and a toothy smile.

Yet for all that, virtual meetings are no substitute for the real thing. Building a rapport through a screen feels about as natural as moonwalking in stilettos.

Negotiations lose their punch when “You’re on mute” becomes the most common phrase of the day. And trying to gauge a client’s body language isn’t easy when all you can see is their oversized forehead, their cat, or the view up their nostrils if their laptop camera is positioned too low.

A legendary equity capital markets banker I know in New York memorably called Zoom “the digital highway to third place”.

Consider also the obsession with airline loyalty programmes. These are an addiction that runs deeper than most care to admit.

The rise of video conferencing doesn’t just threaten to shrink the vast cache of air miles hitherto hoarded for lavish personal trips. No, the true existential crisis for these erstwhile Masters and Mistresses of the Universe lies in the slow, grinding erosion of their elite status.

Imagine the devastation of watching your precious British Airways Gold card expire, stripping away the right to bypass hoi polloi on the way to the Heathrow Terminal Five lounge.

You think I’m exaggerating? Think again. Joining the regular security queue is a walk of shame for a senior investment banker.

The travel debate has always been circular. On one hand, being there in person shows dedication and helps build those vital relationships that can make or break a deal.

On the other, with tighter budgets and environmental concerns, why fork out for flights and hotels when you can beam in from your living room?

Pre-Covid, it was just about unheard of to suggest skipping a flight. Now passing on that transatlantic red-eye is not only acceptable but borders on the virtuous.

Now, paradoxically, the most efficient travel often looks inefficient on paper.

Bankers today are more likely to plan smarter trips: staying an extra day to make sure they’re well rested for the main event or bundling multiple meetings into one trip. They’ve become more selective, weighing whether a face-to-face meeting is worth the jet lag, the airport misery and the immigration queues.

The shift is forcing a rethink of what really matters when it comes to client relationships. Is it the number of in-person visits? The quality of your advice? Or maybe just the willingness to drop everything and hop on a plane?

The answer, as with most things in banking, is often “it depends”. But it’s a question worth asking.

So where does this leave us? In the same place as a lot of post-pandemic realities: somewhere in the murky middle.

Video conferencing is here to stay, but so is the need for some good old-fashioned face time. Gruelling day trips around Europe aren’t going away, but they’re being scheduled with a lot more thought.

One thing is for sure: the days of reflexively booking a flight for every client meeting are over. Bankers must be more intentional about their travel, balancing the financial cost, environmental impact and personal toll of business travel with the potential pay-off.

For an industry that prides itself on adapting to market shifts, this new culture presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Nail it, and you’ll find yourself with a competitive edge — and possibly even a better work-life balance.

But old habits die hard. I can’t say I miss the aeroplane food or the chronic jet lag, but a tiny part of me does miss the adventure. Just a tiny part.