Corporate Coverage Banker

Fewer clients, larger and slower: a listed company or a large private group, banked by a club of lenders rather than one, on facilities negotiated line by line. The work is as much internal as external — assembling markets, transaction banking, and structured or project finance around a client whose treasurer already knows exactly what a facility should cost.

Rarely a first seat. Most arrive from commercial banking, from a structuring or credit team, or from a corporate finance background.

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 can hold a whole institution's economics in view — not one facility's margin — and still be specific about what you would do on Monday.

Large exposures concentrate risk rather than removing it; the read is the same read, with more zeroes and a committee that will ask harder questions about downside.

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.