A Friday afternoon call from SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund to Lazard led it to urgently assemble a group of bankers who worked through the weekend to review the rescue package for WeWork, the property start-up.

A core team of 16 Lazard investment bankers in London and New York was pulled together within two hours on October 18 as WeWork weighed up competing multibillion-dollar funding offers from JPMorgan and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, according to a person familiar with the talks. The timeframe for the independent investment bank was unusually short because of a planned WeWork directors’ meeting on October 22 to decide between the two deals.