Internal Auditor

An audit is a scope, a set of tests, a finding and a conversation nobody in the business enjoys. Credit review — re-reading a sample of approved files against the bank's own standard — is the audit that matters most to the lending line, and it is often a separate team with the same reporting independence.

Chartered accountants and audit-practice leavers, technologists into IT audit, and experienced credit people into credit review.

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 be evidenced and unpopular at the same time, and whether you understand why a control exists rather than only that it does.

Credit review is the third line's version of this site's whole exercise — read the file, form your own view, then compare it with the decision that was actually made.

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.