Ben Loper moved from equity research and investment banking into corporate treasury. He discusses the shift in pace and scale between banking roles, his work on bond deals and asset portfolios, and negotiating credit agreements.
Foreign. I realized too quickly that it was like turning a battleship. It's not like, you know, on the street, especially when you're doing equity research or investment banking or a hedge fund where the holding periods are real short. It's easy to tell people do this, do that. Oh, EPS was bad. You should sell this segment. Like, it's really easy. You don't have to do any of the work, you just say it. That's not to say that the bankers, when they actually go to sell it, don't do work, but initially, right. You're just kind of coming up with these, these thesis, particularly on the equity research side. You're looking at 20, 25 companies. It's really hard to execute on some of the things that need to be done. And that's what I like. It's no longer two people, three people, four person teams. It's 50, 60, 500, a thousand people to get all of this stuff in order. And so I really enjoy kind of working for a company and being on the inside there. And at this point I think I'm. That's probably a lifelong career track for me. We were offsetting all the deals we were doing. Our whole asset liability picture was changing. We were doing a lot of that from a size perspective. We did a $500 million bond deal, we did an $850 million bond deal. We would borrow in a day, $2 billion. One time, actually I meant to repay $300 million and I borrowed $300 million. I mean that's, that was the scale at which we were operating. So there's definitely benefits to doing it that way and it's helped to see the other side of it. So we were always dealing with large revolver draws or large customer deposit balances or ecr. And you know, we saw that. And so when you flip to the corporate side and you're trying to negotiate that, you're negotiating credit agreements, you're sort of sitting on the other side. So it's always been beneficial to me to have done that. Just see a different perspective of it, see it from the other side. I know that the knock on it is not corporate treasury, it's bank Treasury. If you're really doing it, there's a lot that you can bring to the table on the corporate side as well. And especially if you're coming from a public bank where you're still doing. There's less activism in banks. But you know, apart from that, you're still doing share repurchases and fixed income investor relations and all that kind of stuff. So we had some bonds that were tied to our spin. We were looking at, do we take these out, do we refinance these? And, you know, having done a lot of bond deals and look and traded a lot of bonds, right. We had about a $14 billion asset portfolio, too, of Treasuries and Sallie Mae's Jennings and all that kind of stuff. I knew a lot about how bonds were priced, how the convexity worked and all this kind of stuff. So that helped, right when we're out there looking at pricing bonds or renegotiating bonds that we had from our spend. So it kind of ended up being the perfect experience. And then I wasn't learning a lot of the things. When I first left Wall street and I came to work for the bank, it was totally different. I mean, it was just a different pace. People weren't working all night. And that's the same thing here, I think, as it should be. But I had already made that adjustment as well.
