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// ← EVERY SEATTHE FRONT LINE

Transaction Banker

Sells and structures the plumbing a business runs on — accounts, payments, collections, liquidity and trade finance.

// 01 — THE WORK

It is the least glamorous revenue in the bank and among the stickiest: once a company's payroll, receivables and supplier payments run through your systems, it does not move for a basis point. Trade finance sits here too, which puts letters of credit, guarantees and receivables funding in the same conversation as cash management.

// 02 — WHO ARRIVES HERE

Graduate streams, internal moves from business banking or operations, and specialists who come with a trade or payments background.

// 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.

  1. 01Walk me through a client's cash cycle and where we could sit in it.
  2. 02Why would a company pay for a letter of credit rather than trade on open account?
  3. 03What is the difference between a client's liquidity problem and a funding problem?
  4. 04How would you find the transaction banking opportunity in a lending client?
  5. 05A payment file fails on a Friday afternoon. What is your first move?
  6. 06Where does this business actually make money for the bank?

What the panel is listening for. Whether you can see a company as a set of flows rather than a set of products, and whether you understand that operational reliability is the product.

// 04 — WHY CREDIT PAYS IN THIS SEAT

Cash flows through the bank's own systems are the earliest, truest warning a lender gets — a receivables pattern breaking is visible here weeks before it reaches a set of accounts.

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.

// ALSO IN THE FRONT LINE

The whole board, and how the four blocks fit together, is on what jobs banks hire for.