Four banks pitched for the Hinge Health IPO, each bringing a team of senior bankers, a custom valuation framework, and a thesis about how to position the company for public investors. The stakes were a lead role on one of the most successful software IPOs of 2025, and the presentations ran for hours.
Morgan Stanley won, and the outcome had almost nothing to do with what happened in that room.
The relationship that started 15 years before the mandate
Brittany Skoda first met James Budge more than 15 years ago, when he was a finance executive at Genesis and she was building her coverage network in technology banking. There was no deal on the table, no IPO in the forecast, and no reason to expect that this particular relationship would matter more than any other in a banker's expanding contact list.
"Relationships are often multi-pronged and built over many years and in fact decades. I had originally met James back when he was at Genesis... over 15 years ago." — Brittany Skoda, Global Head of AI & Software Banking, Morgan Stanley
Budge moved from Genesis to Pluralsight to Hinge Health. At each stop, the Morgan Stanley team maintained the thread. They did this not because an imminent transaction required it, but because this is how the best coverage bankers operate. They track people across companies, across roles, across years. The relationship compounds even when there's nothing to transact.
But Budge wasn't the only thread. Skoda's former colleague, a woman named Bianca, had become Budge's number two in finance at Hinge Health. That was a second line into the company, independent of the first, built through a different history, carrying its own trust. And then there was a third thread that no competitor could replicate: Morgan Stanley was a Hinge Health customer. The bank understood the product from the inside, well beyond financials.
These three independent relationship lines were 15 years in the making.
Why the bake-off was already decided
The other three banks didn't know any of this. They showed up to what looked like an open competition, prepared their strongest pitch, and presented to a room that had largely made up its mind.
"A lot of times it's the months and the years leading up to the bake-off that are a big determinant of what happens at the bake-off." — Brittany Skoda, Global Head of AI & Software Banking, Morgan Stanley
This is the part of mandate competition that the industry talks about in hallways but rarely publishes. The bake-off is the visible event. The decision is the invisible one, made over years of accumulated trust, institutional knowledge, and relationship depth. When Hinge Health's leadership evaluated their options, they were comparing three pitches from banks they knew professionally against one pitch from a bank that had known their CFO for 15 years, employed someone who used to work with their head of finance, and used their product every day.
The pitch didn't decide the mandate. The pitch confirmed it.
How trust becomes operational infrastructure
A mandate win gets the bank into the deal, but it doesn't guarantee the deal goes well. Every IPO encounters friction. There are regulatory complications, market volatility, last-minute pricing debates, and internal disagreements about timing. The roadshow is a high-pressure execution phase where things go wrong and the team has to work through them together.
"If you have those relationships and established trust, then it's easier to work through whatever those elements are together and get to a good outcome for everybody." — Brittany Skoda, Global Head of AI & Software Banking, Morgan Stanley
Trust built over 15 years operates differently than trust built over 15 months. When a pricing debate gets tense, the banker who has navigated three prior company transitions with the CFO has a shared language for working through disagreement. When the market shifts during the roadshow, the CFO who has watched this banker advise across cycles has a different confidence level than the CFO meeting a banker for the first time under pressure.
This is where trust stops being a relationship quality and starts being operational infrastructure. Yes, the firms that win mandates through deep, long-running relationships generally win more deals. But they also execute those deals differently. There are fewer communication breakdowns, faster decisions during volatile moments, and a shared understanding that both sides are working toward the same outcome.
What systematic sponsor coverage actually looks like
Skoda's description of the Hinge Health mandate sounds like art. A gifted banker who cultivates relationships over decades and intuits when they'll converge. But it's a system.
Tracking a single CFO across three companies over 15 years requires knowing that the person moved, where they went, and what their new context means for future opportunities. Maintaining a second thread through a former colleague requires recording that connection, noting when Bianca joined Hinge Health, and recognizing the emerging multi-threaded access into the company. The institutional-customer angle requires someone connecting the bank's own purchasing decisions to the coverage team's pipeline.
None of this happens reliably in a single banker's memory. It happens in a relationship management system that captures and connects touchpoints across people, firms, and time.
"You meet people along a journey, and it's not necessarily so linear. Sometimes you meet people and then the actual transaction is many, many years later and maybe they're at a different company." — Brittany Skoda, Global Head of AI & Software Banking, Morgan Stanley
The non-linearity is the point. Relationships that lead to mandates follow careers. The banker who met a finance executive at one company in 2010 needs to know, in 2025, that the same person is now the CFO of a company preparing to go public. The technology infrastructure that surfaces this connection—automatically, across years, without depending on any one person's memory—is the difference between sponsor coverage as an aspiration and sponsor coverage as a capability.
What the losing banks never see
The harder lesson in the Hinge Health story belongs to the much larger audience: the bankers who lose mandates.
The other three banks in that bake-off prepared thoroughly. They built the valuation models, rehearsed the pitch, and assembled senior teams. By every visible metric, they competed well. And they never had a real chance. The competition they needed to win wasn't the one happening in the conference room. It was the one that happened across 15 years of relationship building they didn't do, or couldn't see, or didn't track.
Most post-bake-off debriefs focus on the pitch. What could we have said differently? Was our valuation more aggressive? Did we have the right MD in the room? These are reasonable questions. They're also the wrong ones. The answer to why you lost the mandate almost never lives in the pitch deck. It lives in the relationship history you either built or didn't.
Skoda puts it simply: you can't have too many friends. The banker who treats every introduction as a potential 15-year thread, and builds the infrastructure to remember and act on those threads across decades, is the banker who walks into the bake-off with the outcome already decided.
Firms like Morgan Stanley track relationships across decades and thousands of contacts. See how it works with Affinity.
Frequently asked questions
How do investment banks win mandates?
Investment banks win mandates through long-term, multi-threaded relationships with company leadership, not through bake-off pitch performance. The bank that wins a mandate has typically maintained relationships with the company's CFO, board members, and finance team across multiple years and multiple companies. The bake-off confirms the relationship advantage. It rarely overturns it.
What determines who wins an investment banking bake-off?
The primary determinant is the depth and duration of the bank's relationship with the company's decision-makers. In the case of the Hinge Health IPO, Morgan Stanley's Global Head of Software Banking had maintained a relationship with the CFO for more than 15 years across three different companies. The pitch validated an outcome the relationship history had already determined.
How do bankers build relationships that lead to mandates?
Mandate-winning relationships are built by tracking people across companies and roles over years, maintaining contact during non-deal periods, and developing multi-threaded access into organizations. The best bankers invest in the relationship knowing the transaction may come years or decades later at a different company.
What is sponsor coverage in investment banking?
Sponsor coverage is the practice of systematically tracking and maintaining relationships with PE sponsors, their portfolio companies, and the executives who move between them. Effective sponsor coverage maps every touchpoint across individuals, organizations, and years of history, creating the institutional memory that surfaces mandate opportunities before a bake-off is announced.
How long does it take to build a mandate-winning banking relationship?
There is no fixed timeline, but the most consequential relationships span years or decades. Morgan Stanley's mandate-winning relationship with Hinge Health's CFO began more than 15 years before the IPO, when the CFO worked at a different company. Relationships that lead to mandates follow careers.
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