Barcelona/Milan Exchange Programme: Translink Corporate Finance Associate Highlights

In summer 2026, Associates Alejandro Cabré and Matteo Buttinelli took part in a three-month exchange between Barcelona and Milan. In this blog post, both team members share their highlights and key takeaways.

Alejandro Cabré, Associate, Translink Corporate Finance Spain

Between mid-May and the end of July I worked from Translink Corporate Finance’s Milan office via Translink’s exchange programme between our Italian and Spanish teams.

Milan team culture

From the first day, the Milan team brought me into live deals and took the time to show me how things work there. I worked on several mandates and pitches, mainly in industrials, food and healthcare.

Culture is a key strength of the Italian office: people are easy to approach at any level, communication moves quickly, and they make time to spend together outside work.

AI and driving efficiencies

The office embeds AI and language models into its wider day-to-day operations, writing code in house where it would otherwise license software, and its bankers build their own tools, apps and dashboards.

On the mandates I worked on, that meant:

• Recurring processes are built once in code and reused across mandates.
• Internal proprietary applications are developed in house: the automation of the Group’s international research desk, and continuous work on the office’s own CRM.
• Dashboards with live data are built for clients, instead of a static document.

In every case the gain is the same: the office runs more efficiently, answers come back faster, and more of our time goes into business judgement.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

During the exchange I built an origination platform for the office, Quantovale (quantovale.translink.it). It gives a business owner an indicative valuation of their company and M&A intelligence on their sector, drawing on Translink Corporate Finance’s own proprietary transaction database, and puts them in contact with the Translink Corporate Finance specialist for their sector and country. The premise is that someone who wants to know what their company is worth is often someone starting to think about a sale.

What I take home is knowing how those tools are built, what it takes to run them, and a clearer sense of where process automation fits into the way an office works. Every office in the Group has built an edge somewhere. Moving those between offices is what the Group gains from the programme, and it works in both directions.

My thanks to the Translink Corporate Finance Milan and Barcelona teams for the opportunity.

Matteo Buttinelli, Associate, Translink Corporate Finance Italy

This summer I worked from Translink Corporate Finance’s Barcelona office, on Translink Corporate Finance’s exchange programme between our Italian and Spanish teams. Over three months I was involved mainly in live sell-side mandates, where I saw how the office builds, from day one, the material a company will need once it goes to market. I also saw the later phases of a process and the way the team approaches each of them.

Barcelona team culture

The Barcelona team made me one of their own from the first day. Breaks in the working day are spent together, and both the junior team and the partners involved me in what they were doing from the start. This was my first time working abroad, and neither the distance nor the language differences ever became a barrier.

Taking an in-depth view

The Barcelona team is fantastic at deep analysis into businesses before forming a view. That work begins well before a mandate is signed: the pitches I worked on taught me about the importance of identifying a company’s ownership and transaction history, rebuilding its financials from public sources and mapping the buyer or target universe. Once a mandate is live, that same work is what assembles, from day one, everything a company needs when it goes to market. That depth is the standard I was also used to in Milan; what this experience gave me was the chance to see another team reach it through a new lens.

I worked with the team on revenue build, customer base, cost structure, workforce data, the contractual and regulatory positions a buyer will inevitably test. I learned how they run each of those pieces, and from there, combine that approach with what I had brought with me from Milan.

Why the people programme works

I am grateful for this exchange, professionally and personally. Seeing how another office runs, where its strengths lie and where it works differently from your own, is the whole point of the programme. It has been a growth opportunity for me and for Alejandro, but also for our two offices. It is also what makes Translink Corporate Finance function as a genuine Group rather than a set of separate offices: everyone is expected to feel part of it, whatever the distance between the desks.

Thank you to both teams for the opportunity, I am already planning my next trip to Barcelona, and my first stop will be the office to reunite with the whole team!

If you would like to learn more about the Translink Corporate Finance Group, visit our teams and offices page.