How to Choose the Right Deal to Walk Through in an IB Interview

Picture the moment. You're deep into a banking interview, and the person across the table leans back and asks the question you knew was coming: "Could you tell me about an M&A deal our team has worked on?"

Most candidates have a single deal half-memorized and quietly hope it holds up. The prepared candidate does something different. They say:

…and then walk straight into it.

That one sentence does a lot of work. It tells the interviewer you didn't cram the night before. You researched their team, found more than one live deal, formed a preference, and have a reason for that preference. You sound like someone who already works there.

Here is what almost everyone gets backwards. They pour their prep time into how to deliver the walkthrough: the script, the flow, the polish. But delivery is the easy part. Most of what you will say is lifted straight from the deal's press release and its definitive proxy statement. The hard part, the part that gets quietly decided before you open your mouth, is which deal you pick. A rich, well-documented deal makes the walkthrough almost write itself. A thin one leaves you scrambling for substance the moment the interviewer pushes.

What interviewers actually expect you to bring

Deal walkthroughs are a staple of IB interviews. (They show up in PE interviews too, where the question usually centers on an LBO rather than an M&A deal.) You should walk in with one to two deals prepared, and you should expect to be asked about at least one deal completed by the team or firm you're sitting in front of.

That last part is what candidates underweight. It is not enough to know a deal. You want to know a deal their specific team advised on. Anyone can read up on the megadeal that was all over the news. Knowing a transaction this group actually ran signals something a generic answer never can: that you researched them, not "investment banking" in the abstract. It is the difference between "I'm interested in M&A" and "I'm interested in what you do." Interviewers feel that difference immediately, and it is most of the reason the question exists.

What makes a good candidate deal

You're filling two slots, and they do different jobs.

The first and most important is a deal the team you're interviewing with actually worked on. This is the one most likely to be asked, and it is where all the signaling value lives. Spend your best research here. To make it concrete: when I was preparing for Moelis, the team-advised deal I chose was Boyd Gaming's acquisition of Pala Interactive. Moelis had advised Boyd; Goldman Sachs advised Pala. That was a deal their team had genuinely run, which is exactly what makes it the right kind of first pick.

The second slot is a deal that fits the group's industry or product vertical, even if a different bank advised on it. If you're interviewing with a healthcare team, bring a healthcare deal. If it's a sponsors or leveraged finance group, bring something that fits their world. This second deal is your proof that you understand the group's mandate, the kind of work they do all day, not just one transaction you happened to memorize.

For IB, both of these will be M&A deals, since that is the currency of the conversation. If you're also recruiting for private equity, the same logic applies with one swap: you're choosing an LBO that fits the firm's investment strategy rather than an M&A deal that fits an industry group.

Where to find deals without burning yourself out

The logic is efficiency. Once you genuinely know a company, the incremental effort required to prepare a walkthrough on one of its deals is fairly minimal. You already understand the business, the strategy, and the management team, so when one of its acquisitions becomes your candidate deal, you're filling in details rather than starting from scratch. Pick a serial acquirer, keep loose tabs on it week to week, and you will always have a deal ready to go.

My recommendation is to start now rather than waiting. That said, if following a company on an ongoing basis isn't realistic for you, that's completely fine. You can always prepare these deals once you receive notice of an interview. The habit is the efficient path, not the only path.

Vetting a deal before you commit to it

This is where selection is actually won or lost, so slow down here.

Once you have a candidate deal in mind, go pull its two source documents. They are easy to find:

Now run the deal through one test. A good walkthrough has to support two key parts. The first is the Strategic Rationale: the reasons the deal happened, laid out from both the buyer's and the seller's point of view. The second is Your Perspective: your own read on whether the deal made sense and what the combined company looks like going forward. Your Perspective is the most important part of the whole walkthrough, because it is where you show you can think like a banker. The vetting question is simply: can the public documents give you enough raw material to fill both?

In choosing your deal, ensure the press release or proxy statement contains sufficient points to address both these key sections adequately.

The cleanest way to apply that test is to count reasons. Two to three reasons per party is enough to carry the rationale. If you find more, the extras aren't wasted: they become ammunition for Your Perspective, where a less-obvious reason makes you look like you dug deeper than the next candidate. But there is a floor:

If you can't find at least 4 reasons for the acquisition, and unless there is a strong reason to stick with the current deal, I'd choose a different one.

L3Harris's acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne is a perfect cautionary example. It is a major defense deal, the kind of name that sounds impressive in an answer, but its "Reasons for the Merger" on page 36 lean process-y rather than strategic. There simply isn't much there to build a rich walkthrough on. Contrast that with AMD's merger with Xilinx, where pages 89 to 97 of the proxy give you plenty of substantive material for both the Strategic Rationale and Your Perspective. Same task, two very different starting hands. The lesson is to vet the documents before you fall for the name.

If the press release and proxy both come up short, you have one more move before you abandon the deal. Go dig on SeekingAlpha or the major news outlets, the WSJ, FT, NYT, and Bloomberg, and see whether you can assemble the rationale from there. If you still can't get to four solid reasons, choose a different deal. A deal you can't substantiate is worse than no deal at all.

The two-deal power move

Now back to that opening line. If you have the extra time, prepare two deals for every interview instead of one. Then, when they ask you to talk about a deal the team worked on, you get to say it:

"…the one that really piqued my interest was ____."

This is a genuine differentiator. It tells the interviewer you went beyond what was asked, looked into the team's deal flow broadly, and made a deliberate, reasoned choice. That is exactly the posture of someone who is already doing the job.

Don't overlook the deals on your own resume

One last selection target that's easy to forget: if you have genuine deal experience on your resume, those deals are fair game too. An interviewer can point at any line of your resume and ask you to walk through it, and a deal you personally touched is exactly the kind of thing they'll want to hear about.

So treat your resume deals the same way you treat the team's deals. Decide in advance which one you'd most want to be asked about, and prepare it with the same rigor: pull the documents, line up the rationale, form your own view. The one added wrinkle is that for a deal you worked on, you'll also be expected to speak to your own role in it, and that opens the door to detailed follow-ups about what you actually did. How to narrate that part well is its own skill, worth practicing separately. For selection, the point is simpler: your own deals are on the menu whether you plan for them or not, so choose and prep them on purpose rather than getting caught flat-footed.

The bottom line

Everything downstream of selection is mostly mechanical. The background, the financials, the rationale: all of it is sitting in the press release and the proxy, waiting to be read into the record. What you actually control, weeks before you sit down, is which deal you carry in. Choose a deal the team ran, in an area that fits the group, with documents deep enough to fill both the rationale and your own perspective, and you will never run dry mid-answer. Do that, and you earn the right to deliver the line that makes an interviewer sit up: there were a couple of deals you looked into, but here's the one that really piqued your interest.