AI for Private Equity and Investment Banking: The Complete Toolkit

The private equity and investment banking workflows that eat the most analyst time are almost always document production and data synthesis — not judgment. Screening a deal against fund criteria, drafting a CIM from a data room, building an IC memo structure from diligence notes, monitoring a portfolio across twelve companies. The judgment calls require senior expertise. The production work mostly requires endurance.

Claude Skills flip that ratio. Because a skill holds your firm's criteria, templates, and context permanently, every document starts from your framework rather than a blank page. The analyst writes the sections that require genuine synthesis; the skill handles the structure, the formatting, and the initial pass that used to take half a day.

This guide covers the full toolkit — organized by deal phase, with separate tracks for IB and PE workflows — and the specific playbooks that support each stage.

Why Claude Skills Beat Financial Templates

Most finance teams have templates — pitch deck shells, CIM structures, IC memo formats inherited from whoever set them up years ago. Templates solve the blank-page problem but create a different one: they produce outputs that are structurally correct but substantively thin. Analysts fill in the boxes without necessarily building the analysis the boxes are supposed to represent.

A Claude Skill is different from a template in three ways that matter for deal work:

Investment Banking Track

Skills for the sell-side deal cycle: new business origination through marketing material production.

Pitch Deck — Win the mandate before the process starts

A pitch deck for a sell-side mandate needs to accomplish three things quickly: demonstrate you understand the business better than the company thinks you do, establish a credible valuation range that passes the smell test, and show a process architecture that gives sellers confidence they'll get the best outcome. Most pitches fail on the first point — the analysis is generic enough that it could apply to any company in the sector.

The IB Pitch Deck skill builds the analytical backbone of a sell-side pitch: market positioning analysis, comparable transaction set with relevant multiples, preliminary valuation range (EV/EBITDA, EV/Revenue, precedent transactions), buyer universe thesis, and process timeline. Feed it the company's public filings or a preliminary data set and it produces a structured first draft calibrated to your bank's format.

The skill is most effective when your CLAUDE.md holds your bank's pitch format preferences, sector coverage focus, and any house views on valuation methodology for specific verticals. A pitch for a healthcare IT company should automatically lead with different framing than one for an industrial services business.

CIM Builder — First-draft the book in hours, not days

The Confidential Information Memorandum is the single most labor-intensive document in a sell-side process. A thorough CIM requires synthesizing management presentations, audited financials, market research, competitive positioning, customer concentration analysis, and growth initiatives into a coherent 40–80 page narrative. Analysts historically spend two to three weeks on a first draft. Partners spend another week rewriting it.

The CIM Builder skill compresses the first-draft timeline by doing the synthesis layer: extracting key facts from data room documents, building the financial summary tables in the right format, drafting the business description and market overview sections, and flagging information gaps that need management follow-up. It produces a structured draft with placeholders clearly marked — not a finished document, but the 60% draft that takes the most time to produce.

Pair the CIM Builder with the IB Teaser skill for the pre-CIM marketing phase — the teaser goes to potential buyers before they sign an NDA and needs to generate interest without disclosing identifying information. Different document, different skill, same underlying company data.

Private Equity Track

Skills for the buy-side deal cycle: proprietary deal origination through portfolio value creation.

Deal Sourcing — Build proprietary pipeline before the bankers call

The best PE deals are the ones where you find the company before it runs a process — where the relationship is established, the founder trusts you, and you're not competing with seventeen other funds in a banker-run auction. Proprietary deal flow requires systematic outreach: identifying targets that fit your thesis, profiling them before first contact, and maintaining relationships across a large network of potential deals over multi-year horizons.

The PE Deal Sourcing skill systematizes this work. Feed it your fund's investment criteria and sector thesis, and it generates a structured target identification framework: the specific company characteristics that signal fit, the data sources for finding them (industry databases, conference attendee lists, trade publication coverage), and outreach sequencing that doesn't feel like cold selling to founder-operators who didn't ask to be acquired.

Deal Screening — Kill bad deals before you build a model

The purpose of deal screening is to fail fast. Most deals that cross a PE firm's desk don't fit the fund's criteria — wrong sector, wrong size, wrong business quality, wrong management team, wrong competitive dynamics. The screening phase should surface these mismatches in hours, not after a week of analyst time building a model on a company that never had a chance.

The PE Deal Screening skill runs a structured first-pass evaluation against your fund's criteria. Feed it a CIM, teaser, or basic company information, and it produces: a criteria match/mismatch table, preliminary business quality assessment across the key dimensions (recurring revenue, customer concentration, competitive moat, management depth), initial red flags with specific evidence, and a recommendation on whether to advance to a full diligence process.

# Fund Investment Criteria

## Hard Criteria (automatic pass if failed)
- Target EBITDA range: $[X]M – $[Y]M
- Revenue model: [recurring % minimum]
- Geography: [restrictions]
- Sector: [focus / exclusions]
- Deal type: [control buyout / growth equity / etc.]

## Soft Criteria (scored, not automatic)
- Customer concentration
- Management quality signals
- Competitive moat assessment
- Growth quality (organic vs. acquired)

## Automatic Red Flags
- [List specific patterns that are instant disqualifiers]

IC Memo — Build the investment case that survives partner scrutiny

The Investment Committee memo is where deals are made or broken internally. An IC memo that presents the thesis clearly, anticipates the objections, and addresses the key risks head-on moves efficiently through approval. One that buries the downside, overweights management optimism, or fails to present the bear case gives the IC committee no choice but to slow the process down with questions that should have been answered in the document.

The PE IC Memo skill builds the full IC memo structure from your diligence notes and financial model: investment thesis (3–4 sentences, not a paragraph), business overview calibrated to what the IC needs to know rather than everything you learned, market and competitive analysis, financial summary with entry assumptions, returns analysis across scenarios, key risks with explicit mitigants, and the monitoring framework for post-close.

The risk section prompt is worth running separately — it's often the weakest part of analyst-drafted memos because analysts are (understandably) invested in the deal advancing. A skill with explicit instructions to "quantify the downside and be specific about mitigants" produces more rigorous risk analysis than most first drafts.

Returns Analysis — Model the full exit spectrum before you commit

Returns analysis in PE is about more than the base case. The base case always looks fine — that's why you're bringing the deal to IC. What matters is the distribution of outcomes: how does the return profile hold up under a revenue miss, a multiple compression, a slower-than-expected exit timeline, or a combination? How much do you need to be right about, and on what dimensions, to generate an acceptable return?

The PE Returns Analysis skill builds the full scenario matrix — base, bull, and bear cases — across the relevant return dimensions: MOIC, IRR, and equity value at exit under each scenario. It flags the specific assumptions the returns are most sensitive to, which tells you where to focus diligence effort and which deal terms matter most in negotiation.

The "flag the two assumptions we should pressure-test hardest" instruction is where the skill earns its keep. A returns model that tells you the bear case IRR is 8% is less useful than one that tells you your returns are almost entirely driven by exit multiple assumptions — and that you should therefore spend diligence time on comparable transaction precedents, not revenue forecasting.

Portfolio Monitoring & Value Creation — Manage the assets, not just the deals

The deal sourcing and execution skills cover origination through close. The work that drives actual fund performance happens after close: identifying value creation opportunities, tracking portco performance against the investment thesis, and escalating problems before they become permanent impairments.

The PE Portfolio Monitoring skill maintains a structured view across all portfolio companies — tracking key KPIs against budget, flagging variances that breach thresholds, and surfacing early warning signals that warrant board attention. The PE Value Creation Plan skill builds the 100-day plan and ongoing value creation roadmap for each portco: the specific operational, commercial, and financial levers mapped against expected EBITDA impact and timeline.

Due Diligence: The Connecting Tissue

Across both the IB and PE workflows, due diligence is the phase where the most document synthesis happens — and where Claude Skills provide the clearest time savings. The Due Diligence Automator skill processes data room documents systematically: extracting key terms from contracts, flagging change-of-control provisions, summarizing customer agreements, identifying representations and warranties exposure, and producing a structured DD findings document mapped to the IC memo risk section.

The specific value here is completeness. Manual data room review is subject to fatigue and attention drift — the clause buried on page 40 of a customer contract that limits assignment rights gets missed. A skill processing documents systematically doesn't get tired of reading the fifteenth contract.

Setting Up Skills at the Firm Level

The highest-leverage implementation is a shared firm CLAUDE.md that every analyst and associate pulls into their project folders. This file holds:

A deal-specific file sits alongside the firm CLAUDE.md: company name, deal stage, entry assumptions, current open questions. The skill reads both — firm context plus deal context — for outputs that are simultaneously on-standard and deal-specific.

The Full PE / IB Toolkit

The skills above are the most frequently used across the deal cycle. The full library also includes PE Deal Sourcing, Due Diligence Automator, PE Value Creation Plan, PE Portfolio Monitoring, and the full IB process toolkit — teasers, process letters, buyer lists, merger models, and deal trackers.