Investment banks help by helping companies achieve one of their number one objectives, which is to maximize profit for shareholders. There are, of course, other objectives that are just as important, managing stakeholders in particular but we'll focus on shareholders for now. So how can investment bank maximize the profits for the shareholders of their clients? Well, first of all, by taking their clients return on capital and making it as high as possible when compared to that company's cost of capital. Investment banks can help to widen this gap. If we look at return on capital first, we can improve these by internal and external methods. Firstly, internal efficiencies, try to get things as lean as possible, and secondly, through external acquisitions and disposals. The department within an investment bank that helps here is going to be financial advisory or M&A, mergers and acquisitions. Next, an investment bank tries to help its clients by lowering their cost of capital. We can do this by trying to source cheap debt and helping our clients manage their equity to keep their cost of equity down. The departments that are going to help here are often called Equity, Debt and Credit and these often commands of the umbrella name of capital markets. Lastly, an investment bank can help a client with managing their risk. If the client is worried about volatility in commodity prices and volatility in foreign exchange rates investment banks can help them here, often through the use of derivatives.