My experience as a Transaction Services intern at EY
In this article, Louis DETALLE (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2020-2023) interviews a former Transaction Services intern at EY.
First of all, let’s recall what Transaction Services consists in?
The Transaction Services (TS) consultant assists clients and advises them on their financial transactions like disposals, mergers and acquisitions and restructuring. Its clients are generally investment funds, investment banks or very large companies that conduct transactions and require the expertise of Transaction Services teams.
In short, the mission of Transaction Services is to carry out all the analyses to ensure that the client and the parties involved do not make any mistakes on the valuation of the company.
Where had you applied for and what makes EY different from other big 4?
It was my second significant internship in corporate finance, for that matter, I wanted to get into M&A or Private Equity, but both are pretty complicated to get into. For that matter, I figured that it would be easier for me to apply for a Transaction Services internship or in M&A corporate. I quickly got interviews at EY, Deloitte and KPMG.
I chose EY because I really got along with my manager-to-be; he insisted that they would make me work on interesting stuff and they offered be the position first.
What does an intern in TS work on?
As you may know, in TS, there are two types of missions: buy-side and sell-side due diligence. The approach is different depending on whether you are on the buy side or the sell side.
As an intern, my job was to help my team assess the risks inherent in the target company while preparing the due diligence. For that matter, all of the checks are made possible to understand the company’s strategy, to analyse its strengths and weaknesses, and also to have an overview of its accounting, financial, tax, social and environmental situation. I could help them on any of the topics above, although the tax aspect of the company was given to a dedicated department.
In the due diligence, I can assist my team in the reading of documents from the major international institutions for all the data relating to global and entire sectors for the specific sections of the due diligence.
Also, a last type of task that I was given was taking notes about Q&A sessions that occur during the M&A process. I would thereafter write a summary for the team.
What do you plan to do next?
Most former Transaction Services intern go for investment banking, private equity, controlling or M&A internships.
As a consequence, I believe that this is what I will do next, I can wait to be on the banking side of the merger! The advantage of my internship is in fact twofold. On the one hand, it allows me to have EY on my CV and on the other hand, I have experience that finance recruiters describe as “significant finance work experience”. So I can do many things afterwards and that is the strength of my internship.
Overall, would you recommend this experience to younger students? Why?
I would personally recommend this experience to anyone who is interested in corporate finance. Because it is one of the rare fields where you gain a lot of knowledge about financial modelling. When you work in TS, you spend most of your time on Excel and this will be a valuable skill for your following internships.
For that matter, it is an excellent internship, and anyone would be very lucky to do this internship because it would mean great exposure and lots of financial analysis.
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▶ Tanmay DAGA My experience as a sell-side equity research analyst
Resources
Youtube How to nail TS interviews?
About the author
The article was written in December 2022 by Louis DETALLE (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2020-2023).