Attio for Investment Banking
A boutique or middle-market bank sells two things: the mandate you have live right now and the next one you want to win. Both run on relationships. On a live sell-side, an associate builds and works a buyer list of fifty to two hundred strategics and sponsors, tracks NDA status, CIM sent, IOI received, and management meeting scheduled, and reports stage to the client every Friday. Off the deal, the coverage team keeps in front of sponsors, corporates, and lenders so the next pitch lands warm. Affinity fits this relationship-heavy work, which is why banks adopt it. The strain is that one platform has to serve both the per-deal process and the firm-wide coverage map, and the Scale plan costs about $1,917 a month to do it.
What a banking CRM actually tracks
Mandates sit at the center. Each engagement has a client, a deal type, a target close, and a status, and it spawns a buyer or seller list that lives or dies on freshness. A buyer list is not static. NDA out to twelve parties, CIM sent to nine, three IOIs in, two to management meetings: the list is a pipeline inside a pipeline, and the client wants it accurate every week. Coverage runs underneath all of it. A managing director needs to know which sponsors the firm has touched this quarter, who got shown the last three deals, and which relationships have gone cold.
Affinity's relationship intelligence reads the team's email and calendar to keep coverage current without manual logging, and it auto-enriches buyer records so an analyst does not retype a fund's AUM. Those are real advantages for a lean deal team. The limit is the fixed model. A bank wants the same buyer to appear across every deal it touched, with deal-specific status on each one, and that many-to-many shape is exactly where a rigid schema fights you.
How Attio handles mandates and buyer lists
You build a Mandates list for live engagements, a Companies object for clients and buyers, and a People object for the bankers, sponsors, and executives behind them. The buyer list for a given deal becomes its own list where each buyer carries a deal-specific status: NDA, CIM, IOI, management meeting, LOI, dropped. Because People and Companies are shared objects, one sponsor record links to every deal you have ever shown it, so coverage and process live in the same place. A managing director opens the sponsor and sees both the firm-wide relationship and every deal status in one view.
Attio's connection strength tells you which banker has the warmest tie to a buyer before you make the outreach call. The API and webhooks let you push a buyer list into a weekly client update or pull enrichment from your data provider, so the Friday status report builds itself off live records. Coverage views slice the People object by sector or relationship owner so each MD sees their book without scrolling past everyone else's.
The cost difference
| Item | Affinity Scale | Attio Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | ~$1,917 | ~$690 |
| Monthly saved | ~$1,227 | |
| Annual saved | ~$14,720 | |
Annual billing trims roughly another 20%, and Dialed adds 10% off your Attio plan. The migration runs about 15 hours of work, near $3,000 at $200 an hour, so payback lands around 2.4 months and the 12-month ROI sits near 391%. Put your seat count into the migration calculator for a number specific to your bank.
What Dialed migrates
A free test migration goes first so the deal team sees real buyers and mandates in a sandbox Attio workspace before sign-off. Dialed maps People, Companies, Lists and saved views, Notes, Opportunities, and Files. Your Affinity buyer and seller lists become Attio lists with each contact's deal status mapped to a status attribute, Organizations become Companies, Persons become People, and call notes keep their authors and timestamps. Engagement files reattach to the parent mandate or deal record. Affinity's relationship-strength score does not export cleanly, so Attio rebuilds it once you reconnect the team's inboxes and calendars.
Banks that work the buy side alongside sponsors will recognize the sourcing motion in Attio for private equity, and advisors who serve wealthy individuals and their entities should read Attio for family offices.
See what your firm saves switching to Attio →FAQ
- Can one buyer appear across multiple deals in Attio?
- Yes. People and Companies are shared objects, so a single sponsor links to every deal you have shown it, each with its own deal-specific status, while the firm-wide coverage record stays in one place.
- How do we track NDA, CIM, and IOI status on a buyer list?
- Each buyer list is an Attio list where every contact carries a status attribute you move from NDA through CIM, IOI, management meeting, and LOI, so the weekly client report reflects live stages.
- Does Attio keep our coverage relationships current?
- Yes. Email and calendar sync logs every touch automatically, and connection strength shows which banker has the closest tie to a sponsor or executive before you reach out.
- What happens to old deal notes and engagement files?
- Notes migrate with their authors and timestamps, and files reattach as record attachments on the parent mandate or deal, so prior engagement history stays intact.
- How much does a bank save switching from Affinity?
- About $1,227 a month, near $14,720 a year, comparing Affinity Scale at roughly $1,917 with Attio Pro at roughly $690, before the 20% annual discount and Dialed's extra 10% off.