Operational Risk Analyst

Identifies what can go wrong in the bank's own processes, systems and people, and whether the controls around them actually work.

BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED 2026-10-11

// 01 — WHAT AN OPERATIONAL RISK ANALYST DOES

The material is incidents, near misses, process maps and control tests: a payment sent twice, an access right nobody removed, a manual workaround that became permanent. The seat is judged on whether it can tell the difference between the failures that are annoying and the ones that lose money or licences.

// 02 — WHO ARRIVES HERE

From operations, technology and audit, and from outside banking through risk and assurance practices.

// 03 — WHAT THE INTERVIEW ASKS

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

01Take a process you know and tell me where it fails.
02How would you tell whether a control is real or decorative?
03An incident happens twice. What does that mean?
04Which failure would you escalate to the board, and which would you not?
05How do you get a business to own a risk it did not raise?
06What does a good near-miss report look like?

What the panel is listening for. Whether you rank by consequence rather than by frequency, and whether you can be inconvenient to a business without becoming an obstacle.

Practise the round in the risk, compliance and audit quiz: one of its five questions is this seat's own, and every answer has the senior interviewer's read.

Take the quiz →

// 04 — ONE QUESTION, WORKED

QAn incident happens twice. What does that mean?

A strong answer reads the second occurrence as a finding about the first fix, not as bad luck: the remediation either treated a symptom or was never tested. It goes back to what was changed last time, asks whether one cause is producing both, and looks for the near-misses in between that nobody logged. Then it says what would have to be true for a third to be caught before it costs anything, and who owns making it so.

A weak one logs it as a repeat, raises the rating and asks the business for a new action plan — the same step that followed the first one.

The seat earns its place by ranking failures by consequence rather than frequency, and by being inconvenient to a business without becoming an obstacle. The controls that matter most in lending sit between an approval and the money going out — security taken, limits loaded, conditions met — and a credit paper shows what an approval assumes, which is what those controls exist to protect.

START HERE · How to write a credit paper

THE IN-TRAY · ONE MINUTE