The corporate finance group is usually under the investment banking division umbrella. Often shortened to CorpFin, investment bankers in this group help companies with their capital investment decisions (longer-term decisions) and also working capital financing (shorter-term decisions). Refer to Merrill Lynch (Capital)’s CorpFin group web page for a real-life example.

Perhaps it might also be good now to note now that the term corporate finance itself can differ from region to region. In the US, it generally has a broader scope compared to the UK), where the term normally encompasses only transactions which involve “…some degree of change of ownership in the business…”, i.e. the longer-term decisions made by a company such as equity issues. Nevertheless, the roles played by the corporate finance department are usually the same from bank to bank.

Also, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can fall under CorpFin (and indeed does under the textbook corporate finance definition), but banks usually separate out M&A into a group of its own, with CorpFin being the umbrella group for the remaining corporate finance activites. In both groups, there is usually subdivision into industry subgroups (e.g. healthcare, IT, etc.) and product subgroups (e.g. debt capital markets, equity capital markets, etc.) given the importance of sector or product knowledge.

So, all this means that among the things done by the corporate finance group are:

• Advising companies on their financial needs
• Advising companies on their capital structure and working capital management
• Advising, distributing and underwriting equity offerings, e.g. Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), private placements, etc.
• Advising, distributing and underwriting debt (or more generally, fixed income) offerings