// EVERY SEAT34 POSITIONS, FOUR BLOCKS
Bank Jobs
Every position on the board, with what the seat is for, who arrives in it, and the questions its interview asks. The argument for why the board is shaped this way is on what jobs banks hire for.
// THE FRONT LINE
Everyone whose name a customer knows — from a branch counter to an institutional coverage seat.
- Personal bankerThe bank's face in a branch or on a phone: everyday accounts, cards, personal lending and the first conversation about a home loan.
- Business relationship managerCarries a book of trading businesses — wins them, keeps them, and is the bank's voice when the answer is no.
- Corporate coverage bankerOwns the bank's relationship with a large corporate or institutional client and orchestrates everything the bank sells into it.
- Agribusiness managerA relationship and credit seat for farming and food-producing clients, and a discipline of its own in New Zealand and Australia.
- Private bankerLooks after wealthy individuals and families — their banking, their borrowing, and their access to the bank's investment and advisory services.
- Markets salespersonSells the bank's markets products — foreign exchange, interest rate hedging, commodities — to corporate and institutional clients.
- TraderPrices, warehouses and hedges the risk the bank takes on when it deals with clients and with other banks.
- Transaction bankerSells and structures the plumbing a business runs on — accounts, payments, collections, liquidity and trade finance.
- Product managerOwns what the bank sells rather than who it sells to — the design, pricing, terms and lifecycle of a lending, deposit or payments product.
// THE CREDIT LINE
The column this site goes deep on: reading a borrower, deciding, and living with the decision.
- Credit analystReads a borrower and writes the recommendation a decision-maker will act on.
- Credit sanctionerHolds delegated authority and signs — or declines — the lending the front line brings.
- Portfolio managerOwns the credit on a book after the money is out — reviews, covenants, ratings and early warning.
- Workout and recoveries managerTakes the files that have gone wrong and works out how much the bank gets back, and how.
- Lending operations officerTurns an approval into a working facility — documentation, security, drawdown, and the register that says what the bank actually holds.
// RISK · COMPLIANCE · AUDIT
The second and third lines of defence — they set what the first line works to, then check it.
- Credit risk analystSets and monitors the standard the lending line works to — policy, appetite, ratings and the models underneath them.
- Market and liquidity risk analystMeasures and limits what the bank can lose from moving prices, and makes sure it can always fund itself.
- Operational risk analystIdentifies what can go wrong in the bank's own processes, systems and people, and whether the controls around them actually work.
- Model validatorIndependently checks that the bank's models do what they claim, before anyone relies on them.
- Compliance officerTranslates the rules the bank operates under into things the business can actually do, and checks that it does them.
- Financial crime analystDetects and investigates money laundering, sanctions breaches and fraud moving through the bank.
- Internal auditorThe third line: checks independently that the first two did what they said they did, and reports to the board when they did not.
// THE FUNCTIONS
Finance, technology, data, operations and the corporate functions. By headcount, most of the bank.
- Financial accountantProduces and stands behind the bank's own numbers — the ledger, the close, the statutory accounts.
- Product controllerIndependently verifies what the trading and banking books earned, and why.
- Regulatory reporting analystProduces the returns the bank's regulator relies on — capital, liquidity, large exposures, credit quality.
- Treasury analystFunds the bank and manages the interest rate and liquidity risk created by its own balance sheet.
- Software engineerBuilds and runs the systems the bank's money, records and customers move through.
- Cyber security analystDefends the bank and its customers against people who are actively trying to take money or data.
- Data scientistTurns the bank's data into decisions — pricing, targeting, fraud detection, credit scoring, early warning.
- Business analystWorks out what a change actually needs to be, between the people who want it and the people who will build it.
- Operations analystRuns the processing every product depends on — payments, onboarding, settlements, servicing — at volume.
- Legal counselAdvises the bank on what it can do, drafts and negotiates what it signs, and manages what goes wrong.
- People partnerWorks with a business unit on how it hires, pays, develops and manages its people.
- Marketing managerBuilds demand for the bank's products and looks after what the brand promises.
- Procurement managerBuys what the bank runs on, and owns the risk that comes with the suppliers it depends on.