How to talk like a banker

If a random person tunes into a quarterly bank earnings call or stands in line at a coffee shop behind a pair of bankers, it’s likely that half the conversation would be indecipherable to them.

That’s not only because finance is inherently technical. Part of what makes working on Wall Street appear so complicated and mystical to outsiders is the distinct vernacular with which financiers speak — even when discussing everyday topics like bonuses and PowerPoint presentations.

If a CEO says he or she is “exploring strategic alternatives,” it often just means the company is trying to sell an underperforming business line. A “coffee chat” in the finance recruiting world is usually code for a preliminary job interview. And so on.

The use of such a specific, insider-only terminology makes things seem more complicated than they really are. It’s an extension of the industry’s culture as a whole: exclusive, difficult to break into, and designed to weed out anyone who isn’t willing to figure it out and keep up.

B-17 asked industry insiders to weigh in on the most common words and phrases they’ve used and heard around the office. To be sure, Wall Street’s lingo can vary depending on the job at hand, whether advising on deals or helping large investors buy and sell stocks and bonds. These 12 terms, however, appear to be some of the foundational lingo of the investment-banking industry.

Man in a suit exits the Wall Street subway station 

Bake-off

This is banker parlance for when several banks compete to be chosen as an advisor by a client, whether it be for an IPO, a merger, a sale, or a refinancing. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick said he was “seeing bake-offs running at triple-plus the year-over-year rate” during their second-quarter earnings call.

Bespoke

This word just sounds expensive. We point it out less because it’s code for something else and more because of its widespread use in the industry. In the context of finance, this term refers to services that are tailored; customized; made specifically for a client’s individual needs. You’ll find it on a lot of financial firms’ websites, often in a homepage paragraph that boasts all of the company’s “bespoke client offerings.”

Color

“Color” basically means detail and is often used when bankers are asking for more of something. Whether it’s research or an explanation, asking for “more color” means “tell me more.”

“Can you give us some more color on __?” is how many stock analysts begin their questions for CEOs in earnings calls.

Deck

Instead of saying slideshow or PowerPoint, bankers refer to multipage client presentations as “decks.” It’s common for junior bankers to spend hours toiling over edits in decks at the instruction of senior bankers who want to use them in client meetings. A manager might leave a comment on a page telling the junior banker to “kill this,” which just means delete it. A manager might also instruct the junior banker to “take another stab” at it, which means doing the presentation over again and sending it back by email.

Boil the ocean

It’s obviously not possible to boil the ocean’s water, and that’s the idea behind this turn of phrase (though it didn’t originate in banking). If a banker remarks that a junior need not “boil the ocean,” it basically means they’re doing too much or making something more complicated than it needs to be.

A man walks through Wall Street

Capacity

Capacity is another word for bandwidth, and this turn of phrase is often used by associates or VPs who need help from lower-ranking investment-banking analysts. The unspoken rule is that to be a “good” analyst, the only correct answer when a senior asks them if they “have capacity” to edit a 50-page deck in an hour is yes. (Their superiors might also follow up by assuring them that it “won’t be a heavy lift.”)

Exit opps

In private-equity land, making an “exit” usually refers to the sale of a firm’s portfolio company, hopefully at a good return on investment. In the banking world, it’s morphed into another usage: a new job.

“Exit opps,” short for exit opportunities, specifically refers to the job prospects that are reasonably attainable after leaving a given bank or firm. When a college student is deciding on investment-banking internships, for example, he or she might take into consideration whether a specific firm has “good exit opps.” For many junior bankers, good exit opps often refers to the potential to get a job in private equity after the standard two-year analyst program is over. A bank with great exit opps might have a lot of alumni working for top private equity firms, for example.

Staffer

In layman’s terms, “staffer” would usually refer to any person who works at a company or organization. In the investment banking world, “staffer” is very specific job and title referring to a person (usually a VP) who is responsible for allocating work to junior bankers and assigning them to specific deal teams. They have a lot of power over the juniors’ lives, including the quality of deals they work on and their share of the drudge work.

Usually, the staffer role is temporary and just one of the VP’s many responsibilities.

Sweaty

This term refers to how many hours or how hard a particular investment banking group tends to work. You might hear, for example, someone say that the healthcare team at XYZ investment bank is a “particularly sweaty” group to work in. Basically, that means they work really long hours — worse than usual (and the industry-wide norm is already in the 80 to 90-hour-per-week range).

The Street

The Street (often written with a capital “S”) is shorthand for Wall Street — not the literal Manhattan block, but the industry of high finance as a whole and those who work in it.

You might hear someone in banking say, for example, that their firm has the “best culture on the Street” or that a particular group is “top of the Street in deal flow.” A firm that pays fairly offers compensation that’s “in line with the Street.” In stock market talk, “trading with the Street” usually means someone is trading along the lines of majority opinion.

Top-bucket

Bonuses are indicative of one’s performance — or at least some senior bankers’ perception of performance. If you get a “top-bucket” bonus, it means your check was on the high end of the spectrum. Middle-bucket and bottom-bucket bonuses go accordingly. It’s so much a part of the culture that the term is also used by higher-ups to describe their junior bankers professionally.

If a first-year banker consistently pulls all-nighters to perfect client materials like decks and research summaries, their VP might say to the MD: “Wow, Jane is real top-bucket analyst.” Jane might go on to get one of the highest bonuses in her analyst class at the end of the year. Someone might be called a “bottom-bucket analyst” if they aren’t busy or are consistently the first to leave the desk. Bottom-bucket analysts tend to receive the least desirable assignments.

Version up

“Don’t forget to version up so I can see your changes,” an associate might tell a new analyst. Saving documents can get pretty complicated in banking. Each time a banker makes changes to client materials pre-meeting — like a deck — it’s standard practice for every round of edits or changes to be saved as a new file. This is done in case a file crashes or someone needs to refer to an older draft. Bankers “level up” by adding v02, v03, v04, etc., to the end of the file name.