10 Deal Discussion Questions You Will Face in IB Interviews and How to Answer Them

Every candidate walks into a Superday with a memorized DCF. Almost nobody walks in with three deals they can argue about.

That gap is where offers get decided. Technicals are binary and practiced to death. Deal discussion questions test whether you actually follow the industry you claim to want, and interviewers lean on them precisely because they can't be crammed the night before. I run WSG coaching candidates through IB recruiting every cycle, and the pattern holds: the students who convert Superdays into offers are the ones who can hold a ten-minute conversation about a real transaction.

Here are the 10 deal discussion questions you'll face, what each one is testing, and how to answer them using deals from the current cycle.

Interviewers often pivot from deal questions straight into technicals, so it pays to have the 6-step LBO answer down cold, walked through here, alongside the 7-step DCF approach, which you can review here.

What are deal discussion questions in an IB interview?

Deal discussion questions ask you to analyze a real M&A transaction: why it happened, how it was priced and financed, and whether it made sense. They usually start with "tell me about a deal you've been following" and then drill into rationale, valuation, and risks. Unlike accounting questions, there's no answer key. The interviewer is testing judgment and genuine interest.

How many deals should you prepare?

Three. One recent deal you know cold, one deal the firm you're interviewing with advised on, and one backup in a different industry in case your interviewer worked on your first choice and knows it better than you. For each, know the price, the rationale, the advisors, one number nobody else will cite, and your own view.

1. Walk me through a recent deal you've been following.

This is the opening move of every deal discussion, and the first 60 seconds decide whether the interviewer leans in or checks out.

Structure the answer in four beats: the parties and price, the strategic rationale, the financing and status, and your view. For example: Union Pacific agreed to acquire Norfolk Southern for about $85 billion in 2025, a cash and stock deal that would create the first true transcontinental railroad in the US. As of this writing, the Surface Transportation Board's review is still active. The companies refiled a revised application in April 2026 after the STB rejected the original as incomplete, and both sides expect the deal to close in the first half of 2027.Rationale beat: it connects western and eastern rail networks across 43 states. Status beat: shareholders approved, but the Surface Transportation Board review pushes closing to 2027. View beat: the synergy math, roughly $2.75 billion annualized, only works if regulators don't force divestitures.

Sixty seconds, four beats, one number per beat. Practice it out loud until the transitions disappear.

Concrete takeaway: pick one deal announced in the last 12 months and rehearse a 60-second walkthrough with a price, a rationale, a status, and a view.

2. Why did the acquirer do this deal?

Strategic rationale is the beat interviewers care about most, because it's the part juniors usually fake.

"They wanted to grow" is not a rationale. A real answer names the specific capability or market the buyer couldn't build alone. When Alphabet closed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz in March 2026, the rationale was multicloud security: Wiz's product runs across AWS and Azure as well as Google Cloud, which gives Google a security relationship with customers who will never leave Amazon. That's a capability story, not a size story.

Push yourself one level deeper than the press release. If the release says "complementary footprints," explain what the footprints are. Charter and Cox combined their cable systems in a $34.5 billion deal because neither had national scale in broadband while both were losing mobile customers to Verizon and T-Mobile bundles.

Concrete takeaway: your rationale answer should name the thing the buyer couldn't build in-house, with one sentence on why buying beat building.

3. How was the deal financed, and why does the structure matter?

Financing structure tells you what management believes about its own stock, and interviewers use this question to separate readers from thinkers.

Cash deals signal confidence and add leverage. Stock deals share risk with the target's holders and preserve the balance sheet. Devon Energy's merger with Coterra was all stock at a 0.70 exchange ratio, which makes sense for a commodity business where neither side wants to lever up at the top of a cycle. Mars paid $83.50 per share in cash for Kellanova, roughly $36 billion, funded partly with debt underwritten by JPMorgan and Citi, because a private family-owned buyer couldn't issue stock and didn't want to.

If you can explain why the structure fits the situation, you're already ahead of most candidates at the table.

Concrete takeaway: for your prepared deal, know whether it was cash, stock, or mixed, and have one sentence on why that structure fits.

4. What did the buyer pay, and was it a fair price?

Valuation questions in deal discussions are not modeling tests. They're a check on whether you know what the numbers mean.

Anchor on two figures: the premium and the multiple. Charter's merger valued Cox at about 6.4x estimated EBITDA, notably below where large cable deals were priced a decade ago, which tells you something about how the market views the business now. Mars paid roughly a 44 percent premium to Kellanova's undisturbed price, which you can defend by pointing to the scarcity of snacking assets at that scale.

Then take a side. "It looks full but defensible given the synergies" is a fine answer. Refusing to have a view is the only wrong answer.

Concrete takeaway: memorize one multiple and one premium for your deal, and decide in advance whether you'd defend the price.

5. Who advised on the deal, and what did the banks actually do?

Knowing the advisors is table stakes at the firm that worked the deal, and a differentiator everywhere else.

If you're interviewing at Evercore, you should know Evercore advised Cox Communications in the Charter merger and Devon in the Coterra combination. If you're at Goldman Sachs, know that Goldman advised Wiz on the largest deal in Alphabet's history, and Kellanova alongside Lazard on the Mars sale. Then go one step further and explain the work: sell-side advisors run the process, build the defense materials, and negotiate price and terms; financing banks commit the debt.

This is also where firm-specific prep pays off. Pull the firm's recent deal announcements from its own press page the week before your interview.

Concrete takeaway: before every interview, find two deals the firm advised on in the past year and know which side it sat on.

6. What are the risks to this deal closing?

Regulatory risk is the defining deal variable of this cycle, and interviewers expect you to know it.

The 2026 market makes this easy to discuss with real examples. The DOJ cleared Alphabet's Wiz acquisition in late 2025 after a year of review. The Paramount Skydance agreement to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for roughly $110 billion cleared the DOJ in June 2026, but a coalition of 12 state attorneys general, led by California, sued in July 2026 to block it. A federal judge paused the deal, and Paramount has since agreed to hold off closing until the case resolves or its merger agreement expires in June 2027, whichever comes first.  Same year, two very different outcomes.

Beyond antitrust, mention financing risk on leveraged deals and shareholder approval on stock deals. Naming two risk types with one example each beats listing five vaguely.

Concrete takeaway: for your deal, know its current status, the approval it still needs, and the one condition most likely to break it.

7. Would you have advised the target's board to accept?

This question flips you from reporter to advisor, which is the whole job.

Answer it like a banker: weigh the certainty of cash today against the upside of staying independent. For Kellanova's board, $83.50 in cash at a 44 percent premium against a standalone plan in a slow-growth category is a defensible yes. For Norfolk Southern's board, taking Union Pacific stock means shareholders keep exposure to the combined railroad's upside but also carry two years of regulatory risk before closing.

There's no graded answer here. What's graded is whether you reason about price, certainty, and alternatives instead of restating the press release.

Concrete takeaway: rehearse one sentence that starts "I would have advised them to accept because" and one that starts "the case against was."

8. Tell me about a deal our firm worked on.

Skipping firm-specific deal prep is the most common deal discussion mistake, and the easiest one to avoid.

Interviewers at elite boutiques ask this constantly because deal work is their entire identity. Centerview advised Paramount Skydance on the Warner Bros. Discovery agreement. Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo advised Union Pacific while BofA Securities advised Norfolk Southern. A candidate who walks into any of those firms without knowing their marquee 2025 or 2026 mandate looks unserious, whatever their GPA says.

You don't need the full four-beat walkthrough here. Two minutes on the firm's role, the client, and why the mandate mattered is enough.

Concrete takeaway: search "[firm name] advised" plus the current year the week before your interview, and prep the two largest mandates you find.

9. Which recent deal would you have advised against, and why?

The contrarian question exists to see whether you have opinions or just summaries.

Pick a deal where you can argue the price or the logic, not one you'd mock. A defensible version: arguing Union Pacific is paying $85 billion and accepting years of regulatory limbo for synergies that merger history suggests are hard to realize. Another: questioning whether a 44 percent premium on Kellanova leaves any value for Mars, given synergies in packaged food are mostly cost cuts with execution risk.

Deliver it with respect. You're showing you can hold a view under pushback, not that you're smarter than the deal teams.

Concrete takeaway: prepare one deal you'd defend and one you'd push back on, so you can take either side on command.

10. If you'd been the analyst on this deal, what would you have worked on?

This closing question tests whether you understand what the job actually is, and most candidates have never thought about it.

Tie the deal to the analyst tasks: the merger model measuring accretion and dilution, the contribution analysis behind an exchange ratio like Devon and Coterra's 0.70, the premiums-paid comparables supporting a fairness opinion, and the management presentation pages that go to the board. For a cash deal with committed financing, mention the debt capacity analysis. You're not claiming you could build all of it today. You're showing you know what gets built.

Interviewers remember this answer because so few candidates connect the transaction to the work.

Concrete takeaway: learn the four analyst deliverables on an M&A mandate: merger model, comps and premiums analysis, fairness materials, and board pages.

How to answer deal discussion questions under pressure

Three callouts worth taping to your monitor before a Superday.

Walk me through a deal you've been following.

Don't say: "There's been a lot of M&A activity in tech recently."

Say: "Alphabet closed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz in March. I'll walk through the rationale, the financing, and where I'd push back."

Was it a fair price?

Don't say: "It's hard to say without doing the full model."

Say: "At roughly 6.4x EBITDA, Charter paid below where cable traded a decade ago. I think the price reflects cord-cutting risk, and I'd defend it."

Why this deal and not a bigger one?

Don't say: "It was the first one I found."

Say: "I picked it because your firm advised the target, and I wanted to understand how you positioned the defense."

One warning on freshness. Deal discussions age fast. An interview in early 2027 should not lean on a deal that closed in 2025 unless the question invites it. Global M&A ran at $2.8 trillion in the first half of 2026, up 48 percent year over year and the highest first-half total LSEG has recorded since it started tracking data in 1980, so there will always be a fresher transaction to pick up the week before you interview.

The work here is a Saturday afternoon, not a semester. Pick your three deals, build the four-beat walkthrough for each, pull one multiple and one premium, and form a view you can defend. Then find a friend, hand them this list, and make them grill you. The candidates who win deal discussions aren't the ones who read the most news. They're the ones who rehearsed saying it out loud.