Trader

The seat is a book of positions and the discipline that keeps it inside its limits. Most of the risk is not a view on the market but the residual left behind by client business, and the craft is knowing which of it to keep, which to lay off, and at what price.

Almost entirely graduate markets streams and internal moves from sales, structuring or risk; quantitative degrees are common but not a rule.

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 reason under time pressure without either freezing or bluffing — and whether you treat a limit as a discipline rather than an obstacle.

Trading is credit's mirror image and the same discipline: a position you cannot exit is an exposure you did not choose, and the survivors in both seats are the ones who sized it before they liked it.

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.