#1 Resume Award for Investment Banking

July 20, 2025

There was one award on my resume bankers hyped me up for in every interview.

1st Place in an investment banking case comp will automatically gain their respect.

It proves you already impressed a panel of ex-banker judges -

And have all the technical & soft skills needed to be a rockstar investment banking analyst.

Here are examples of the juicy bullet points you’ll be able to add to your resume after winning.

You only have two weeks to crank out a 30pg deck and four massive excel models -

So the last thing you want to do is waste valuable time on formatting.

I’ve done four of these and took home first place in two.

Both my winning teams made Slide Master templates in PowerPoint before the case was released.

Bankers are super picky on formatting and have strict standards different than any other industry.

If your slides are inconsistent or have styles that’re “too creative” - you’ll get dinged big time.

Here was our approach to making these templates to fit the style bankers like to see.

SLIDE MASTER

The “Slide Master” feature in PowerPoint is your new best friend.

It makes it easy to have a clean, consistent layout for each slide in your deck.

Here’s how to set one up to match investment banking standards.

(1) Go to “View” Tab & Select Slide Master

(2) Change Slide Size to “Standard”. PowerPoint default is widescreen but all investment banks use square slides in practice.

(3) Change Font to Garamond. Another investment banking industry standard.

(4) Create Color Scheme. Either (a) Match the color palette of the company you’re analyzing or (b) Pick a conservative set of 2-3 colors for your team’s hypothetical bank. I liked using shades of navy.

(5) Create Base Slide. You first need to setup your base slide. Go to the first slide under the main dropdown on the left and delete everything except page number as shown below.

Then add the following elements.

  • Title & Subtitle - Insert rectangles (NOT textboxes) with no fill & no border. Use italics for the subtitle. Adjust font sizes & alignments. Insert a thin additional rectangle underneath the subtitle as a separator like the tan one in the example below.

  • Hypothetical Bank Logo - Make a hypothetical bank logo for your team on a free logo generator website. Place that fake bank logo in the bottom left corner. The “Empire Capital” example below is one I made in the past.

  • Company Logo - Once the case is released, add the logo of the company you’re analyzing to the top right corner. The example company for this case was “Stormcat”.

  • Page Numbers - The page number will still be in there if you didn’t delete. First, move it around to align with your newer thin margins. Then go to the Home tab and make sure it’s in the font size & color you want.

  • Timeline - First create a timeline with rectangles at the bottom like the example below. Fill in just the “Overview” rectangle in a different color. Then make sure everything else is how you want it (logos, titles, page numbers) and right click to “Duplicate Layout”. From there just make five versions of that initial base slide - each with a new rectangle being shaded a different color to signify you’re in a new section.

THE 23 SLIDES YOU NEED

After finishing our Slide Master - we then sketched rough layouts for each necessary slide.

You shouldn’t re-invent the wheel when it comes to slide design.

My teams first collected examples by asking upperclassmen for old decks and doing google searches.

We took bits and pieces of a bunch of those examples to craft our own unique layouts.

There are also websites like M&I that have templates you can download.

However - the ones you’ll find on there aren’t quite as pretty as some of the decks I’ve seen in the past.

Your deck should have these 23 slides at a minimum broken into six sections.

  • Section 1 - Overview: (1) Title, (2) Team Intro, (3) Agenda, (4) Exec Summary, (5) Industry Overview, (6) Company Overview, (7) Investment Highlights, (8) Key Positioning, (9) Growth Opportunities, (10) Risks & Mitigations

  • Section 2 - Valuation: (11) Valuation Overview / Football Field, (12) Public Comps Rationale / Overview, (13) Public Comps Benchmarking, (14) Precedent Transactions Rationale / Overview, (15) Precedent Transactions Benchmarking, (16) Discounted Cash Flow Analysis, (17) LBO Analysis

  • Section 3 - Buyers: (18) Buyer Universe, (19) Strategic Buyers, (20) Financial Sponsors

  • Section 4 - Process: (21) Process Recommendation / Timeline

  • Section 5 - Conclusion: (22) Final Recommendation

  • Section 6 - Appendix: (23+) Appendix Including Models (Excel Screenshots).

Some of the slides most critical to success include investment highlights, key positioning, growth opportunities, valuation overview / football field and benchmarking.

Here are a few well-done examples for those.

The last slides you should add are titles & transitions.

Just blow up high-quality images you find on google and make them look cool.

You can toy around with format settings in PowerPoint like transparency & color saturation.

Black & white is always a solid approach like the second example below.

After that, just add a rectangle for the title and adjust settings so the image is sent to the back.

Cheers 🥂

- Jack