The beginner's guide to Corporate Finance 

Stephen Barrett ― Global Head of Corporate Finance

The job of corporate finance is to take an aspiration or a dream of a client and to help them turn it into a tangible reality. Fundamentally the work of Corporate Finance is to assist clients with momentous transactions. Most transactions are out of the ordinary, in other words a corporation has it’s normal day to day business, an acquisition, a re-financing, a divestiture, a joint venture, is something that’s out of the norm and so it requires an awful lot of extra effort and from a number of people and that can actually be quite pressurised, particularly when you are on a tight time scale. So you need to have an advisor with you who can work sympathetically with you, can provide you with support, can provide you with the resource to fill the gaps that perhaps you have yourself.

Within the world of investment banking, KPMG does more deals than any other firm. And we have the most extensive global resource and the best footprint across the world. KPMG distinguishes itself from the competition in that we actually don’t lend any money, we don’t invest any money and we don’t broker any securities nor are we publishing research reports on our clients. So the difference is this, that we are providing ruthlessly objective counsel to our clients on deals. In our 1800 bankers, we have a very diverse bunch of people who have different skills and different backgrounds and so the ideas they bring to a transaction can really add value.

We act for all types of clients, they’ll be corporations, they’ll be in the mid market global corporates; we also act for governments and sub-sovereign entities, as well as for entrepreneurs and financial institutions such as private equity firms. So it is a real mixture. It’s always great seeing any client through a complex and taxing deal. The best bit is picking up a newspaper or watching a news report on the TV about a deal that a client has just closed successfully and I know that KPMG bankers have helped that client through to a successful closing.

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