First floor · The lending desk
Reads a borrower and writes the recommendation a decision-maker will act on.
BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED
The day is files: spreading financials, testing a forecast, drafting the annual review, writing the paper a senior will rewrite until it says one thing clearly. The technical floor — ratios, statements, the vocabulary of a facility — is assumed; the seat is decided above it, on whether your recommendation is one a committee could act on.
The most common graduate and career-change entry into the credit line: commerce and accounting degrees, accountants moving out of practice, and branch bankers stepping across.
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 reach a conclusion — including an uncomfortable one — and defend it without either collapsing or digging in.
Practise the round in the credit and lending quiz: five questions these panels ask, with the senior interviewer's read on every answer.
Take the quiz →The full question set for this seat, with what the panel listens for under each, is on Credit Analyst Interview Questions.
This is the seat the rest of the site is written for: the case drills are exactly the file question, asked before the senior banker's read is shown.
Everything on this site can be used in this seat, but the fastest way to build the read is the way the seat itself works: make the call on a file before you see anyone else's. Below: a day in the seat, what the first year tests, and three issues to start with.
START HERE · How to write a credit paper
The shape of a day, not a rota — banks and books differ. A relationship manager's day is on what a commercial banker does.
More files than anyone else in the bank, across more industries, at the moment each decision is made. The seat is the bank's reading room: it sees what the front line brings, what credit approves, and — when the reviews come round a year later — which of its own recommendations were right.
Most of the credit line starts here. Analysts move into portfolio management once they can hold a book, into sanctioning once their standard is trusted, across to the front line as relationship managers who can already read a file, or into risk, where the portfolio view begins. What carries into every one of them is the seat's first habit: a recommendation, first, that someone can act on.
The statements and ratios the seat assumes you already have.
The seat's main output, section by section, with a whole paper.
The ratio a recommendation leans on, and how its definition moves it.
The same three statements, read the opposite way round.
THE IN-TRAY · ONE MINUTE
A short file on the ground this page covers. Every option opens with how far it sits from a senior banker’s read.
On a growing distributor all three tests come back clean: sales driven by volume, debtors moving with sales, cash flow tracking profit, and a revolving line for a revolving need. The relationship manager wants one more month of data, to be safe.
1 FILES · PICK A CALL ON ANY OF THEM
5 MORE ON CHAPTER 3 · THE THREE DIAGNOSTICS →WHERE DO YOU READ FROM? THE PLACEMENT →
The whole board, and how the four blocks fit together, is on what jobs banks hire for.
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