UBS's ex-head of German ECM has a recipe for making MD in 9 years

When you've spent 25 years in banking and run equity capital markets for Germany and Austria at UBS, you can afford to take time out. Armin Heuberger likes to spend time in the mountains, which he says is his version of the pursuit of mindfulness. However, he's also still working, and is still dispensing advice to juniors in the industry. 

Heuberger left UBS in April 2024. In February 2025, he founded 'SuperAnalyst', which he describes as an AI co-pilot to help mid-market corporate finance firms. "We want to augment the processes performed by corporate finance analysts with three to six years' experience," proclaims Heuberger. SuperAnalyst includes an "origination agent" to help decipher news-flow relevant to deals and assemble client lists for key accounts. 

SuperAnalyst is one of many products vying to automate the jobs of junior bankers, but Heuberger thinks it's better than the rest. Because SuperAnalyst has been developed by actual bankers, he says it understands nuances that other AI tools do not. The intention is to use it to automate repetitive processes across mid-market corporate finance firms private equity and family offices. "What's relevant news for the sell-side may not be relevant for the buy-side," says Heuberger; SuperAnalyst gets that. 

This might imply that junior bankers can also head for the mountains, albeit without Heuberger's decades of MD bonuses, but he's insistent that AI will augment rather than entirely automate their jobs. It will make juniors more productive, he says: "You may be able to work on more deals than before, and your skill set will develop more quickly. If you work on four deals simultaneously instead of two, you will have twice as much experience."

This still sounds like fewer junior bankers will be needed, but Heuberger isn't dwelling on that. When he hired juniors at UBS, he says he always chose people with deal experience: "If I had two analysts - one with excellent grades who'd worked on one deal and one with worse grades who'd worked on 10 deals, I'd always choose the one with the 10 deals." 

Heuberger's hypothesis, then, is that because AI will empower junior bankers to do far more deals contemporaneously, it will also make them more employable and speed their way up the promotional ladder. 

"In corporate finance, you typically have a three-year promotion cycle," he says. "Three years as an analyst, three as an associate, three as a vice president, three as an executive director or director and then managing director (MD)." 

Usually, therefore, making MD takes around 12 years. But it can be quicker. "In a bull market, where you're doing a lot of deals, you can make MD in nine years," says Heuberger. If AI enables bankers to work on multiples of current deals, he says nine years to MD could become the norm.

Given the choice, junior bankers should therefore embrace AI tools in a quest to supercharge their productivity and work across a frenzy of simultaneous deals. But what if there are no deals to work on? In this case, Heuberger advocates taking risks and skipping between areas of corporate finance to where the deals are actually taking place. In his own career, he transferred to New York and moved out of ECM syndicate to corporate derivatives and M&A. "I made sure that I moved from department to department and got a better tool set. When I became more senior, I always made sure my own junior guys also got an education across ECM, DCM, M&A and private capital markets."

It's an approach that might backfire if your boss takes your request for a transfer as a form of rejection, but Heuberger says chasing deal flow almost always makes sense early in your career. "You need to control the things you can as a junior, and one of those things is building your own portfolio. When I asked to be moved, my boss said he wouldn't be able to protect me but I decided a broad skill set was more important than sticking with one product. Product areas go through cycles. It will serve you much better in the long term if you're not siloed." 

By transferring in and out of productive teams, you might also expedite your path to managing director. Most banks have a form of Goldman's "cross-ruffing" process in which senior staff are asked for opinions on potential MD promotes. The more divisions you've worked, and the more people you've impressed, the more favourable opinions you will gather. 

"Don't put everything in one basket," says Heuberger as he drives back from the mountains. 

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