M&A · Exclusive
Banker models his love life. The model works perfectly.
A Vice President at an American bank in Canary Wharf applies funnel analysis, due diligence and post-merger integration to dating. Analysts agree the model is not the solution. It is the problem.
Our narrator is thirty-five, British, read Economics at Durham and carries an internal credit rating of B-plus, outlook stable. He keeps a pivot table of his past dates. His best friend Felix, a strategy consultant, answers every crisis with a two-by-two matrix. His mentor Alex, a Managing Director in Leveraged Finance, runs his love life as a portfolio of mandates.
Then Hannah Ashworth, Year 3 teacher in Hackney, lends him a pen in a café on Broadway Market. She finds his jargon hilarious and fits into none of his models. She also keeps a tally of his red flags. It is longer than his.
Sixteen of the seventeen chapters each define one metric, from Romantic Return on Invested Time to the Ghosting Index, applies it to a story with real numbers, and ends with three management learnings at the narrator's expense. Chapter 16 wires everything into a three-statement model you can run yourself.
The jargon is not explained. It is deployed. The joke is always on the narrator, his industry and his spreadsheet, never on the women, who are invariably a step ahead.
