Inside Investment Banking’s Biggest Deals (GS, Citi, UBS & Barclays)

Hello and welcome back to The Deal Room. We have 4 banks, 5 stories. So a very popular format, Stephen. We got GS, 2 stories, but the Citi, UBS, and Barclays. Before we begin, and I'll give you a quick skinny of what you are going to hear over the next half an hour or so. I was looking at the stats and I think our stats on the podcast are the opposite of most other shows whereby nearly everyone is a subscriber who listens to us. And so rather than the usual format of like and subscribe, what I'm going to say is the opposite. I'm going to say you already all subscribe, but could you please just share the pod with at least one other person? And I think, you know, the thing I take great pride out of all the messages I receive that yes, this really helps students. But I've had messages from lawyers, architects, business owners, entrepreneurs, because I think we're talking about something that's very common to all of those. Which is trying to understand the economy overall and how it functions, how it works. You know, the great things that Stephen, you do here is talking about business strategy and decision-making and all that good stuff. So yeah, please do share it far and wide. That would be much appreciated. But in terms of these stories, I know last week we had David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman's complaining a little bit about, look, Donald, we need a little bit of clarity here of what's going on after we've had this big tariff movement and market shakeout at the beginning of last week, but there's a pretty big deal that Goldman's have done so far this year. And I know you're going to unpack that one about the Panama Canal and ports that they've done with a BlackRock-led consortium. And then you're going to find out what's behind, for Goldman's, the code word Project Voyage, which is, uh, an interesting one, but a strategic one for sure on the cost base. And then the third story, uh, Leonardo, an Italian aerospace firm, has hired Deutsche Bank, replacing Bank of America, to advise on potential mergers of Airbus and Thales. And then four, and, um, fourth story, UBS lead financial advisor to Sycamore Partners in a leveraged buyout of Walgreens Boots Alliance. And Stephen, I've got a little, uh, family connection through Walgreens Boots Alliance, uh, which I will explain more when I get there, but I don't like those guys. And so, uh, the reason why that's interesting, um, is it's the largest leveraged buyout of 2025 so far. And so we'll also dig into that one. And then finally, Barclays have made a new appointment, uh, as part of their ECM business. So always interested when you get these big heads moving around as to what does that mean and the implications. So Yeah, Goldman's. Where do you want to start?

What an introduction. Yeah. Again, a lot of these stories, they're fantastic stories and they link so closely to the world of macroeconomics and Trump and tariffs and stock markets. And I can imagine if I was to look at the viewership, the listenership of The Deal Room versus The Market Maker at the moment, I can imagine there's probably a little bit more emphasis on The Market Maker as people are trying to digest these big swings in the market, these big kind of volatility spikes. Um, but we're going to try and bring it back down into the more prosaic and good old-fashioned deals. So this first story is a Goldman Sachs story, one of two Goldman Sachs stories. And this is really interesting. The headline is Goldman wins rare solo role— solo is very important— on blockbuster $19 billion deal. So this is Goldman Sachs acting as the sole investment bank advising the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison on a $19 billion port sale. So shipping, ports, nuts and bolts, real world economy to a BlackRock, world's biggest asset manager-led consortium. And the transactions include over 40 ports, including 2 key ports at each end of the Panama Canal, the Port of Cristobal and the Port of Balboa. Remember CK Hutchison, non-US company, BlackRock, US asset manager. Obviously Panama Canal has been the focus of national security interests. So senior Goldman bankers, I'm just going to give you a little bit of kind of detail on the structure and how this thing worked. So senior Goldman bankers John Waldron and Raghav Malia have led a rapid and confidential sale process. This is often how it works when there is a deal of this size. Goldman contacted a shortlist of potential buyers, including AP Moller, the shipping company, KKR, obviously the private equity firm, Blackstone private equity, and BlackRock. Within weeks, once BlackRock showed interest, CK Hutchison quickly signed a memorandum of understanding. It's remarkable, by the way, in the world of M&A, things can go slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then bam, Everything kicks off and imagine the due diligence and the process by which BlackRock needed to get comfortable with these 40 different assets that it holds. What's really interesting about this in the context of Goldman and in the context of bank strategy is that Goldman had been C.K. Hutchison's main investment banker for the last 20 years. So, this is, you know, it's so important when you are in investment bank, it's so important when you are a banker to build up these long-term relationships. And you might get little bits of business at the beginning. You might lose out on a couple of bits of business. It might be a little bit frustrating because CK Hutchison's doing nothing. And you're thinking, all right, I'm having to meet these guys 2 or 3 times a year and they're just not doing anything.

Can I just ask the realities of how that works? So let's say I'm a, a revenue generator, I'm an MD, I'm John Waldron. How much of a budget do I get released then? Let's say you're talking about long, long-term relationships, and it might go years where I don't actually do a deal, but I need to keep the team at CK Hutchinson sweet. So do you, do you have an allocation that you're allowed to spend, or how much freedom do you have with that and that interaction the client?

Yeah, well, look, if we, uh, if we cycle back 25 years, I would say lots of freedom and lots of hospitality, and I'll see you on the slopes, or I'll see you in the box at whatever sporting event it might be. Obviously, rules have really, really tightened with regards to client entertainment over the last few years, post-2007, 2008, and rightly so. So yes, there is still, you know, you can still do hospitality. You can still host, you know, the CFO of CK Hutchison at a big event, but it can't be with an explicit mandate to win business. Obviously, the lines there are pretty grey. But if I was a rainmaker at a bank, I would have my list of clients. Let's say I cover shipping. I would have my list of clients, and there might be 2 or 3 that I'm actively doing some interesting business with. But there's probably 20 or 30 that I will have on my spreadsheet and I will say, all right, meet these guys every 3 months for a check-in. And maybe every year I'm going to give a big presentation where I'll get the analysts working on potential acquisition opportunities, potential capital raises, whatever it might be. So you just got to keep that pipeline going, checking in every 3, 6, 12 months.

I had a conversation, so given what you just said, I had a conversation yesterday with someone who works in investment banking and they were talking about a good analyst doesn't necessarily make a good MD. Because what you were just explaining was, it sounds like you're just literally a people's person and you're going around having, establishing, maintaining, developing relationships. So how do you learn? How do you even get to that point where you're transitioning from being deep in models, doing a lot of the grunt number crunching and then transitioning across where now you're this charismatic rainmaker?

It's a really interesting one. I just stretched behind me to get a book that I'm currently reading and I'm just going to show it up to the microphone. M&A Titans from a guy called Brett Cole. It's not a bestseller, funnily enough, but it, it, it documents, I think it's about 10 chapters, 10 different profiles of real 1970s, 1980s M&A rainmakers. And the thing absolutely is, you're right, right to say, thing that they share is extreme Type A personalities that love being around other people and love being extraordinarily competitive. So yes, if you're a really good analyst and you can crunch the numbers, that's absolutely fine, but it's a totally different kettle of fish when you get up into those big leagues. And remember, people do business with people, you know, it's— we cannot stress that enough, how important the personal element of business still is. Behind all of the numbers is that rainmaker that jumps on a plane to Singapore, you know, to have a 1-hour meeting in order to put a name to a face. And maybe that will lead to what I expect, by the way, just going back to this story, what I expect is, I don't know, $100, $200 million payday. It's a $19 billion deal. Sole advisor, sole arranger, whether fees are 1%, 0.5%, whatever it might be. That's a big check, and that will make these two M&A bankers from Goldman, that will make their year. You know, beginning of March, off they go.

I just, a natural question here then is, if I was JP Morgan, a major competitor, Morgan Stanley, of Goldman's in the M&A space or advisory space, you know the percentage of the fee that they're charging. Is it, you can't just come in and undercut because that's just not good business. Is there like a rules of engagement in the community, the advisor community, where you're like, no, you don't do that kind of thing. You don't go that low sort of thing.

That's such a good question. And this applies to business as a whole, right? If you are competing on a tender in business, you will want to make sure that your offer is competitive. But the last thing that you want is a very, very well-funded kind of upstart to come in and basically undercut you. As a loss leader. Say I can deliver this project for half the price and it won't make me any money, but I just want to get in there and get a cred. Now in the storied world of investment banking, that, as you absolutely rightly said, is just not the way to go. And actually, going back to our kind of economics A-level, investment banking is somewhat of a Giffen good. So a Giffen good is, it's more demanded as it gets more expensive. So it's kind of, it defies the laws of economics, right? So, Birkin bag is a giffen good. Investment banking is a giffen good. I would rather pay more to get the best because, you know, if I'm paying out $200 million instead of $150 million, but they've helped me sell my asset for $19 billion instead of $16 billion, well, my upside's $3 billion, you know, and I've only paid $50 million for that. So, I might as well get the best So it's a competition on quality more than it is a competition on price.

Right. And just to round off then, just timing-wise with this deal, like I know Trump will probably have had some sort of interest to want to reclaim control of such a strategic asset. So was this all done before Trump, during, and what was this, was that part of the equation of the speed of the deal?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I would assume that most of the ducks were in a row before kind of Trump started doing what Trump does, but maybe there was a, you know, maybe there was some kind of political pressure put to expedite this process. I don't think we really know. And I think that the deal makes sense on a standalone, non kind of geopolitical perspective, so much so that CK Hutchison's shares, I think, popped 22%, its largest one-day gain since 1988. 1998, sorry. So yeah, I mean, the markets love it. It's a good deal. Goldman Sachs loves it. You know, buy a house in Aspen.

Alright, our second Goldman story is one close to your heart, I know, because you're a big fan of the second city of England, which is the fabulous Birmingham. Shout out to the Birmingham Massive. But what have we got here and why are we talking about GS Birmingham amongst other GS locations?

Yeah. So this is, again, this is a little closer to home. We talk about $20 billion deals and Panama Canal and things like that, but this is Project Voyage. And it's a really good representation of, yes, it's important to expand your top line, your revenue as Goldman Sachs, but equally important is you've got to control that, that operating cost line so that your bottom line, your profit continues to grow. So Project Voyage is part of a $1.3 billion cost-cutting exercise, which was announced at Goldman's 2020 Investor Day. And this is all about trying to relocate teams, managers, people from primary hubs, primary hubs being New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, et cetera, to secondary hubs that obviously are a heck of a lot cheaper. So Project Voyage, the headline goes, Goldman gives managers a choice: Dallas, Salt Lake City, or leave. So in the US, the secondary hubs, Dallas is a massive area of investment, especially for Goldman's middle and back office. The cost difference, by the way, between Dallas and Manhattan, $80 a square foot to rent office space in Manhattan, $26 per square foot to rent in Dallas. And obviously, if you step outside these heady metropolises, like, cost of living goes down. You can get more for your money. You can get a bigger house. You can get a lawn, a backyard, whatever it might be. You can send your kids to a nice school. You know, it's not an unattractive option. And so much so that this move in the US has expanded out. And one of the big areas of investment here in the UK is to shift quite a lot of Goldman Sachs' staff from London, extraordinarily expensive, to the centre of Birmingham with a really, really beautiful new office. Now this new office, and I've just put a little picture in my notes just to visualise it for myself, this new office in the heart of Birmingham, by the way, this is so representative of Birmingham that I can, the picture in front of me has the beautiful shiny office and then a boarded up old building right next to it. So, Make of that what you will. It started with 30 people in their office in 2021. They plan to expand Birmingham's office to 1,000 staff. So this is a significant move by Goldman, and I think it's really important from a graduate's perspective to start thinking to yourself, look, finance doesn't live and die in New York and London. Yes, they're very exciting, full throttle places to, to be working. But they're also extremely hard places to live. And actually, you can make an extraordinarily good career out of being based in Warsaw, Dallas, Birmingham, whatever it might be.

Can I just make one thing clear though? So, um, the rainmaker at Goldman's who secured the CK Hutchison deal is not in Birmingham though, right? So what are they doing in Birmingham that makes these other locations a bit different to, say, the central hubs in the capital cities.

Yeah, it's interesting. So the stat that I'll reference is that these locations, these kind of second city locations account for 43% of Goldman's 46,000 employees. So it's almost half. And you could, you can make a very, very simple assumption that that half is the non-client-facing half, maybe the middle office and the back office, the settlement, risk compliance regulation, and then the kind of HR finance accounting functions, et cetera. That's a fair assumption to make, but let's also maybe think a little bit more laterally. You know, stuff goes on, business goes on in Birmingham and in the Midlands and outside of London. And it's quite useful to have a front office hub or a front office, uh, cell outside of these major hubs because you might win business that you wouldn't have otherwise. One. And with the, you know, with the expediency of video conferencing and things like that, it is ever easier to be able to put a front office team in Dallas that can serve Texas and the wider southern region, or put a front office team in Birmingham to service the Midlands and maybe the north. If you go to Manchester, by the way, these days, Manchester and Leeds, there's loads and loads of smaller investment banks doing really, really good mid-market business. It's not the bright lights of the Square Mile, but stuff is still going on and fees are still being generated. So I think it makes sense that we kind of remove ourselves from this London-centric obsession. Because as you know, Ant, as someone that's lived in London and now is based a little bit outside, you know, it's tough to live in London, especially as a new grad. How the heck do you get on the housing ladder? Is that even possible? It's, it's not easy.

Yeah, and just to close, a shout out to some of my friends and colleagues in, in Belfast. I know Belfast is a big hub as well for a lot of these, uh, big major financial institutions. Last time I was there, I think I saw HSBC, I saw, I think, UBS, or there was a few others. And Microsoft's got a massive office, uh, on the, on the riverside. So yeah, great to see some regional movement. Um, all right, well, look, let's move the show on and let's talk about a European aerospace firm and a switch of advisors.

Yeah, this is really interesting. And I wanted to bring this up because it's quite important to talk about these defence, European defence and aerospace manufacturers in the context of the wider geopolitical schism that we are experiencing at the moment. And if you follow politics, you'll know that, that many European countries have committed to do whatever it takes, to use Mario Draghi's words, to do whatever it takes to make Europe defence self-sufficient in the wake of the volatility of the US. So I'm just going to give you, before I go into the Leonardo story, year-to-date share prices of some of the US defence, the European defence manufacturers. So Leonardo, up 67.7% year to date. Not bad. BAE Systems in the UK up 38%. Safran in France up 20%. And German Rheinmetall up 110% year to date. So the smart money is not going on the Mag Seven. You know, we can, we can tell you that for sure. The smart money in 2025 is going on European defence. And Leonardo is one of the big players. It's got a relatively colourful CEO who's projecting that their revenue's gonna hit €30 billion by 2029, um, at a market cap at the moment of just over €25 billion. So what has it done? It's dropped Bank of America, ditched them, and replaced Bank of America with Deutsche Bank as it seeks to advise on potential, uh, space and satellite mergers and tie-ups and JVs with Airbus, French company, and Thales, which is also a French company. So what are we saying here? We're saying that Leonardo is desperate to reduce its reliance on the US and reduce its reliance on Wall Street banks when talking about creating something that is going to act as a bit of a reliant, uh, a bit of a rival to Starlink and SpaceX. So, it's all part of this big, almost like a decoupling exercise between the US and Europe, you know, and the kind of realisation, and this is quite a kind of pleasant realisation, I think, for Europe, that good stuff still goes on in Europe, right? So, there's some really, really impressive aerospace companies in Europe and defence companies, and there's also some really, really impressive banks. And we shouldn't forget that Deutsche Bank is a storied investment bank and really, really knows its onions. So as more of a, well, as a strategic move, but also as a bit of a political move, this is Leonardo saying, we are Europe first. We want to create a European, almost SpaceX/Starlink rival, and we're going to employ a European bank to help us do that. Really, really interesting stuff.

It's interesting as well how there's like a second and third order effects of what's happening with Elon and his ties to administration, and actually how he has these other interests like SpaceX and how that's actually negatively impacted because it's boosting his rivals almost as they go back to the European hub, so to speak, and lesser reliance on the US. So yeah, super interesting how it's all interconnected.

Yeah. And, and this is all this concept of soft power. We're not a, we're not a politics podcast, but soft power has been this notion. I think the term was introduced in the early '90s to refer to the US. How do you create influence and power through culture, through society, through markets, through economics, through business? And actually, if you're going to pick a limb of soft power, global banks are definitely one. Right. To have the prevalence of US banks in almost every deal around the world, that is massive, massive soft power. So what is this telling me? Well, the, the height of American soft power probably was a few years ago and it has been ebbing little by little. And now suddenly in a Trumpian world, this soft power, I think Trump only really knows deals, negotiation, and hard power. Doesn't really understand the nuances, and this will come back to bite the US. Just as an aside, year to date, Deutsche Bank shares up 28%. So, a pretty big bump. This is where the growth is, Germany, Europe.

I don't know if you have a— do you know what Deutsche is trading as an actual share price? Because I remember—

€21.

€21. Okay. Yeah, I suppose that's a long, long-term trade. I remember we had an employee at Amplify back in the days when we used to be a proprietary trading firm. And there was a, there was a very symbolic moment. This is probably going back 7, 8 years when Deutsche went under €10 at the time. But yeah, looking at it now, yeah, I suppose it's doubled, but not bad.

Not bad.

Good for Deutsche. All right. Well, let's move the show on and talk a little bit now to a different geographic region, Switzerland and UBS and their role in advising on a leveraged buyout.

Yeah, so I'm kind of shoehorning UBS as a name into what I want to talk about, which is this big private equity transaction. And the reason why we want to talk about it is because you would've heard of Walgreens if you're based in the US, uh, and you would've heard of Boots if you are based in the UK. And before I get going, and what's your beef?

So my beef. So my dad, um, he used to— he's not an optician, but he ran an optician's shop. So he used to have opticians work for him, stuff like that. He sold glasses, essentially. That was his business. He had a shop called, uh, Doland and Aitchinson, which was a— he had a— it was a small franchise that got bought by Boots at the time. So he was a franchisee of the Boots kind of overall infrastructure in the UK. And then Walgreens Boots Alliance came along and overnight they just radically changed the agreements for franchises, which just absolutely destroyed his business basically. Um, and so he had, he had worked that same franchise for I think 25 years, something like that. And it was soon as it then, um, yeah, some of the private equity and other forces came into play, the whole thing just got absolutely stripped down. And, uh, yeah, to, to the, to slow demise of what was it, a 35-year-plus business at the time.

It's, yeah, it's, it's really interesting to get and, and, and a very kind of, unfortunately, a very common story in the world of high finance and cost cutting by spreadsheets trickling down into the real day-to-day economy. And of course, McKinsey, or whoever was advising on that rationalisation or that restructuring of finance, franchise agreements, probably got paid very handsomely and then kind of washed their hands and said, good job. And then, and then it ends up really, really impacting and affecting people that are actually doing the good work. So yeah, I can, I can, I can understand that beef. And you'll be happy to know that Walgreens Boots Alliance has had an absolutely shocking run of it. Their share price is down 90% over the last few years. And by the way, whenever a share price is down almost 90% over a number of years, it becomes a private equity buyout target. What I really want to focus on here, uh, because I think most people probably know the headline story, but what I really want to focus on here is the deal structure and the financing. So this is a $23.7 billion transaction. This is buying the debt and equity, the enterprise value of Boots, uh, sorry, uh, Walgreens Boots Alliance. It is being financed with $18.25 billion worth of debt. So the actual equity slug, the equity check that's going into this $23.7 billion transaction is just over $5 billion. So just over 25% is going to be equity. 75% is going to be debt. And this debt takes lots of different forms. Remember, in a leveraged buyout transaction, you've got multiple different seams of debt that you can tap into with lots of different risk profiles. So obviously the most safe, you know, bank debt, term loan, really boring. You can't lend, you can't borrow that much relative to the profitability of the company. But UBS has also been a lender on the $5.8 billion asset-backed revolving credit facilities. So when I talk about asset-backed, you've got two different types of lending. You've got cash flow lending, which basically I lend you money safe in the knowledge that you are producing enough cash, enough profits to pay the interest and also repay me at the end of the term. That's cash flow lending. Asset-backed lending is I lend you money, but you are putting up a load of your assets as collateral. I don't really care if you don't— your cash flow is important, but it's the fact that I've got security over those assets that makes me secure.

So normal people have this, right? So the cash flow being how much money can I get from a loan from Barclays Bank as a consumer? They will look at my income and just make a judgment on how much they can lend me. Or then separately, I can take, I cannot use my house to underwrite, let's say, a particular amount of debt that I'm getting. So would that be right in terms of bringing it to a normal consumer?

It is exactly that. You're absolutely right. And let's just think about Walgreens and Boots. What do they own a lot of? Property. Lots of assets that they can use as security. Well, or Sycamore. The LBO acquirer, can use a security to finance this transaction. There are also— UBS is also providing bridge loans, which are short-term loans in order for Sycamore to get a load of high-yield bonds out in the market to restructure the Walgreens Boots entity and then get some high-yield bonds out. So there's a kind of bridging period that UBS are covering. But what's quite— yeah, and just to kind of maybe step back, what's quite interesting is just what's going to happen to Walgreens, what's going to happen to Boots. So Walgreens is going to be extremely heavily indebted, and it's already a bit of a flagging company. They're probably the best performer out of Walgreens and Boots is Boots. Boots is performing quite well. Its profitability is growing. So interesting enough, even though you think that the stores look a little bit tired, So what they'll probably do is they'll probably sell Boots to pay down a bunch of that debt, restructure Walgreens to be a little bit leaner and meaner, recapitalise the company, and probably make a load of money. That's the Sycamore playbook, at least.

Yeah. Anyone who listens to our show regularly, to paint a picture, if you're not aware of it, if you're based in the US, so Boots is like the WHSmith, but for cosmetics.

What I find weird about Boots, and I think we might have even discussed this before, is how you can't ever find anything. It is the worst laid out store in the history of the world. You go in and all you want is a, you know, some vitamins or deodorant or whatever it might be. And for some reason you end up kind of walking through all of the aisles, but the aisle that you want. I've never experienced anything like it.

Okay. So anything else to close that particular deal, or should we move to Barclays?

Let's move on.

Okay. Barclays then. There, there's been a bit of a change at the helm of the equity capital markets division.

Yeah. Again, the headline is Barclays hires Coats to co-run ECM in investment banking drive. And I wanted to just finish with this story to maybe make a little, little bit of a point of difference between Barclays and HSBC. So Barclays, Up 10% year to date, by the way, uh, £40+ billion market cap company has often been mentioned in the same kind of breath as the other UK banks. HSBC is a high street bank. Barclays is a high street bank. Lloyds is a high street bank, but actually the makeup of these banks are very, very different. We've got HSBC, which is whose main profit centres fall well outside of Europe, in Asia Pacific, global bank, very good at trade, very good at commercial banking, that kind of thing. You've got the likes of Lloyds or NatWest, and they're very much more high street bankers and small business bankers. And then you've got Barclays, which has always been the investment banking focused one of the UK banks. So 43% of its revenue is generated from its investment banking division. Remember we talked on the pod a few weeks ago about the fact that only 6% of HSBC's revenue was generated through investment banking. So it really is the driver of growth within Barclays. And what this headline is saying, John Coates coming from Royal Bank of Canada, co-head of global ECM business. What this headline is saying is, look, This is our strategy. We are going to double down on equity capital markets. So this is new equity issuances, issuances into the private markets and IPOs. We're going to double and triple down on investment banking because we see, and maybe to link this to the Leonardo story, we see there being a bit of an opportunity for a European land grab as the US banks start either to withdraw or become slightly less attractive to European companies. So it's just a very interesting strategic move. And again, in the context of hiring graduate roles, that kind of thing, you would be looking at Barclays as one of the places that is still going to continue hiring a decent number of interns and grads, especially in London.

All right. I've got a quiz question for you about John Colts. I just quickly, as you were talking, then brought up his LinkedIn because in my mind I was like, okay, so who's John Coles? Where did— what's his background? Obviously we know he was the head of US CCM, co-head at RBC Capital Markets. So prior to that, he was an MD at Credit Suisse for 10 years. He was at Lazard as a managing director for 2.5 years. He was a managing director at Goldman's for 12 years.

Oh wow. How old is this bloke?

I was just going to say, hang about, he's been here 12, 10. Um, so he did his MBA at Northwestern, which is obviously a big university, but he went, he did his undergrad at University of Cincinnati. But what did he study? Do you reckon, Stephen?

What do you reckon he studied? You'll be surprised to know that I don't know this one. You know, you assume that I know everything, but I don't know what John Koch—

Well, you're such a fountain of knowledge, so— Um, it's not finance, nothing finance.

I'm gonna go Egyptology.

Oh, do you know what? Good shout, that's a good shout. It's not right. Nuclear engineering.

Uh, okay, with a minor in Egyptology.

Yeah, I mean, he was ahead of the game. He was studying that in the early mid-'80s. He was upskilling in his nuclear engineering. He was thinking strategically as a very young man.

And then, and then unfortunately, as is the way in finance, it sucks the best and the brightest in, and these future nuclear engineers become co-head of equity capital markets, Barclays. So there you go.

Oh yeah. I mean, his first job, it looks like it was Goldman's. So yeah. Okay. Nice. All right. Well, good stuff. Um, just remember that we do also have a mini series. So for all the listeners running at the moment, which is championing women in, in the industry and their stories and their insights and expertise in the areas that they work. The episode we're gonna release on Wednesday this week was a really cool conversation I had a few weeks ago. Uh, and this was a lady who actually started her career in operations but managed to pivot into the front office in investment banking. Not only that, she then after a few years in IBD went into private equity. Then after that, she pivoted again and now she works in neuroscience. And so it's really fascinating. We talk about managing stress. We talk about the realities of that work and transitioning. A lot of questions we get from students about, can you work in an ops role and then pivot into front office? So she explains everything. It's such a cool conversation and scientific as well in some really cool practical tips on how to handle a lot of the things that we talk about in the actual practicalities of living and breathing. What our friend John Colts is going to be doing, um, high-pressure, high-stress job, and how to manage that sort of thing. So yeah, thanks very much, uh, Stephen, as ever. And yeah, look out for that next episode this week.

Thank you so much, Ant.