Business Analyst

Process mapping, requirements, edge cases and the unglamorous discovery that the current process is not what the documentation says. In a bank the edge cases are the job: the exception, the exception's exception, and what the regulator will expect to see afterwards.

One of the widest doors in the bank — operations staff, front-line bankers, consultants and technologists all move into it.

These are the shapes the round takes, not a question bank — banks phrase them differently and the wording is never the point.

What the panel is listening for. Whether you go and look rather than asking for a description, and whether you can hold detail without losing the point of the change.

Most of the processes worth changing in a bank are lending processes; understanding what a credit decision needs is what turns a requirements document into a design.

That is the general case as well as this one. A bank's technology is not ordinary technology and its finance is not ordinary finance, and the second and third lines of defence — risk, compliance, financial crime, model validation and internal audit — recruit heavily out of the functions, taking the people who can already read a business. The case drills are free and are the cheapest way to build that, whichever column you sit in.