At a glance
Frontline provides dedicated offshore analyst support to ECM desks – pitch materials, IPO and block comparables, investor targeting, roadshow decks and market monitoring – produced under London leadership and always on the public side of the wall.
What the delivery rests on:
- Oversight from people who were ranked doing this work. Frontline's London team includes senior equity analysts with top-ranked sell-side careers – including Dan Davies, whose Credit Suisse team was top-ranked by Extel and Institutional Investor.
- Analysts who stay. Average tenure of 6.6 years against an industry norm of 2.2 – the same team on your equity raises, mandate after mandate.
- Twenty-one years of production. Founded 2005, serving tier-1 investment banks, global asset managers and advisory firms.
- Built for work inside the wall. Frontline analysts operate within client information barriers as standard – dedicated to one client, never shared, under your compliance procedures. Handling confidential, non-public information is routine to the model, not an exception to it.
- AI-powered execution. Analysts use AI daily for drafting speed, comparable refresh and consistency. The judgement stays human and accountable.
What's included
ECM pitch materials and RFP support. Equity story and valuation work. IPO and block trade comparables. Investor targeting lists. Roadshow and management presentation production. Market monitoring, deal databases and periodic ECM newsletters. All in your templates, under your direction, to your deadlines. Where the work needs market or financial data, we can provide the relevant data feeds.
What's not included, by design: bookbuilding, pricing calls, allocations, and investor conversations. The execution judgement stays with your bankers – the information environment is shared.
Oversight by people who've done the job
ECM desks care about analyst calibre in a way few buyers of outsourced work do, because the output – an equity story, an IPO valuation, an investor list – is visible to institutional investors and marked up by MDs who did the work themselves.
Frontline's answer is oversight from senior practitioners with careers in exactly this work. Dan Davies spent over fifteen years as an equity analyst covering European banks at Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas; his Credit Suisse team was top-ranked by Extel and Institutional Investor. Every Frontline analyst completes the three-month training programme he designed – live coverage initiation, model review, draft iteration – before touching client work. Analysts are recruited from India's top 50 MBA schools (of roughly 1,300); the industry onboarding norm is about a week.
Reliability is a staffing property, not a promise
Equity raises run on deadlines that don't move, so the practical question about any support team is whether the same people will still be there for the next mandate. The industry averages 2.2 years of analyst tenure; Frontline averages 6.6. The analyst who built your comps pages and knows your house style is still on your account when the next IPO window opens – the same continuity that underpins our pitchbook production work, applied to equity transactions.
Working inside the wall
ECM is the most information-sensitive corner of investment banking support, and it is where the difference between a dedicated team and a shared pool stops being a preference and becomes a compliance question.
Frontline analysts sit within Chinese walls as standard. They are dedicated to one client – never shared across banks – so there is no cross-client contamination risk to manage away. They operate under your information-barrier and compliance procedures, exactly as an onshore hire would, within a governance framework built with three former Bank of England supervisors. Handling confidential, non-public information is routine to the model; a 6.6-year average tenure means the person inside your wall is a known individual your compliance function has approved once, not a rotating stranger to be re-vetted every eighteen months.
A shared-pool provider cannot honestly make this offer: an analyst serving five banks is a wall problem by construction. What stays onshore at Frontline is the execution judgement – pricing, allocations, investor dialogue – not the information.
Frequently asked questions
What ECM work can actually be outsourced?
Pre-mandate and production work: pitch materials, RFP support, IPO and block comparables, equity story and valuation drafts, investor targeting, roadshow decks, market monitoring. Execution judgement – pricing, allocations, investor dialogue – stays onshore.
How do you handle confidential information and Chinese walls?
Frontline analysts work within client information barriers as standard – dedicated to one client, never shared, under your compliance procedures. Handling non-public information is routine to the model.
Can you work in our templates and provide data?
Yes – your templates and conventions are the default, and where the work needs market or financial data, we can provide the relevant data feeds.
Do you support US working hours?
Yes. Delivery runs with North American working-hours overlap, and London analyst leads are available across the US business day.
Related pages
Part of
M&A & Investment Banking Outsourcing – the pillar this service sits under: scope, delivery models, and the full article set.
Related services
Pitchbook Production Services – dedicated pitchbook, comps and modelling delivery: the same analysts on your books, deck after deck.
What is Investment Banking Outsourcing? – scope, teams and use cases across M&A, ECM and DCM.
People
Dan Davies – head of training; fifteen years covering European banks; Credit Suisse team top-ranked by Extel and Institutional Investor.