Every floor · The machinery

Operations Analyst

Runs the processing every product depends on — payments, onboarding, settlements, servicing — at volume.

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

// 01 — WHAT AN OPERATIONS ANALYST DOES

The measure is throughput and accuracy together, and the interesting part of the day is the exception: the item that does not fit the procedure, the file that failed, the customer whose case does not have a code. Operations sees the bank's real mechanics more clearly than most of the front line does.

// 02 — WHO ARRIVES HERE

A genuinely open entry point — school leavers, graduates, career changers — and a common launchpad into risk, product and technology.

// 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.

01Volume doubles tomorrow. What do you do?
02The item does not fit the procedure. Now what?
03Who do you call, and how late is too late?
04Tell me about a break you found and what you did next.
05How would you stop the same error happening twice?
06What part of this process would you automate first, and why?

What the panel is listening for. Judgment at the exception — the seat is not tested on the ninety-nine items that fit, it is tested on the one that does not.

Practise the round in the finance, technology and operations 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

QVolume doubles tomorrow. What do you do?

A strong answer starts with what breaks first rather than with overtime: which step is manual, which check gets skipped when the queue is long, and which items cannot wait a day — payments with a cut-off, settlements with a counterparty on the other side. It protects those, says out loud what will be slower and for whom, and watches the error rate as closely as the backlog, because the cost of a doubled day is rarely the late items. It is the wrong ones.

A weak one promises to work longer and faster, which is the plan that turns a volume problem into an accuracy problem.

The seat is not tested on the ninety-nine items that fit but on the one that does not, and on whether the exception is handled or hidden. The behaviour operations sees first — the payment that fails, the arrangement rescheduled again — is what a portfolio manager is looking for, and a portfolio review is where those signals are read.

START HERE · Issue 09 — the Tuesday list

THE IN-TRAY · ONE MINUTE

Make the call on one file.

A short file on the ground this page covers. Every option opens with how far it sits from a senior banker’s read.

SIGNAL OR NOISE · CHAPTER 6

For five years a borrower's overdraft has swung between US$200k and US$900k every month. For the last three months it has sat between US$850k and US$900k.