What BankerNotes is.
BankerNotes is a founder-verified review platform for M&A advisors and investment bankers. Founders who hired a firm as their sell-side advisor write the reviews, whether the deal closed or not. We verify them privately. The public sees ratings and written reviews, but never the reviewer's identity.
Why we built this
The vast majority of M&A advisors are excellent at what they do. They go the extra mile for the founders who hire them. They treat both sides of a transaction, sellers and buyers, with integrity, sharp judgment, and care. They earn their fees by orchestrating one of the most consequential moments in a professional life, and they do it with the seriousness it deserves.
But a handful of rotten apples cast a long shadow. A few advisors damage the reputation of the entire profession, and worse, they damage the founders who trust them. Selling a business is the culmination of years, sometimes decades, of work. It is one of the most important moments in a founder's career. When a bad advisor turns that moment into a horrible experience, through carelessness, dishonesty, poor communication, or simply a lack of effort, the cost is not just financial. It is personal.
Founders rarely talk about these experiences publicly. The reputational risk of speaking up, looking like a sore loser, dragging out an old wound, jeopardizing future relationships, is real, and so the cycle repeats. The next founder hires the same advisor, and learns the same lessons the hard way.
BankerNotes exists to break that cycle. We give founders a place to share their experience honestly, anonymously to the public but verified by us privately. The result, we hope, is a more efficient market for advisory services. One that rewards the bankers who deserve to be rewarded, and helps founders avoid the ones who don't.
How a banker behaves when a deal does not close reveals as much as how they behave when it does. Both are valuable to know.
Why only boutique advisors?
A firm like one of the global investment banks advises on dozens of transactions a year. The largest run hundreds of mandates across many sector teams in offices around the world. At that scale, a handful of reviews would represent a vanishingly small sample. The bankers a founder works with at one of these firms may bear little resemblance to the bankers another founder works with on the same letterhead. A few reviews of a global investment bank would say more about the small number of partners involved than about the firm as a whole.
Boutique advisors are different. A boutique typically completes between one and thirty sell-side processes a year, often with a tight team led by the same two or three senior partners on every mandate. Reviews of a boutique are meaningful precisely because the firm is the partners. Five reviews of a boutique tell you something real about who you would actually work with. Five reviews of a global investment bank would not.
BankerNotes exists to help founders pick the right advisor for one of the most important transactions of their lives. That decision is hardest when the firm is small and the public footprint is thin. That is where independent, verified reviews add the most value, and that is where we focus.
How we protect reviewers
- We verify every reviewer is a real founder who actually worked with the firm. Verification uses work email, LinkedIn, and approximate deal timing.
- Your name, email, company, LinkedIn URL, and exact deal details are stored privately and never published. Not to the firm you reviewed, not to other founders, not to anyone.
- Your published review shows only your three ratings, your written review, fee structure, outcome category, and a generic sector label such as Verified Founder, SaaS.
How reviews unlock
A firm's reviews go live only after five verified founders have rated it. The threshold serves two purposes: it prevents single-voice noise, and it protects early reviewers from being identified by process of elimination.
Until a firm clears five reviews, its profile shows pending placeholders only. The ratings, the written text, and the dates are all redacted. The placeholders exist to show that activity is real and stacking, not to imply specific opinions.
Editorial independence
BankerNotes is independent. We are not affiliated with any firm in our directory. We do not accept payment from firms in exchange for favorable placement. We do not allow firms to remove negative reviews. We will publish a firm's response alongside its reviews when the firm requests it, but the underlying reviews stay.