Every deal was justified on savings the bank could not test
A coverage team at an investment bank was advising through a round of telecom consolidation, where mobile and fixed network operators buy each other. Every deal was justified on network synergies: the savings that follow when two networks become one. Whether those savings are real depends on how much of the two networks genuinely overlap, what the site leases say, what spectrum each side holds, and how much of the overlapping equipment can actually be switched off.
Those are engineering questions. The bank could model the synergy; it could not test the assumption underneath it. Hiring that judgment permanently makes little sense for a coverage team, because it is needed intensely during a consolidation cycle and barely at all between them.
We placed former network planners alongside the coverage team
We assembled former network planners, spectrum leads and operations directors. These are the people who decide, inside an operator, which sites can be closed and what closing them costs. The engagement was structured so the coverage team had access to them continuously through the consolidation period, rather than deal by deal.
The same people covered every mandate. Continuity mattered more here than it would on a single deal, because comparing one synergy claim against another is only meaningful if the same judgment is applied to each. Sourcing favored planners who had worked in the market structures in play, since overlap economics differ between markets. Everything went into Nextyn IQ, so the team built a reference on the sector, and every expert cleared the Nextyn compliance framework before engagement.
A view of the sector the desk could defend
The team could interrogate a synergy case rather than accept it or discount it, which is a different position to advise from. Because the same judgment was applied to every transaction, the team could also say how one deal’s claims stood against another’s.
The engagement ran for the length of the consolidation cycle and stopped when the cycle did. That is the shape of capability a coverage team cannot reach by hiring, and it left the desk with a reference on the sector it still had afterwards.
