What Jobs Do Banks Hire For?

Almost everything written for people trying to get into banking is written about three seats: the credit analyst, the graduate, and the relationship manager. This site is no exception, and there is a reason for it — those are the seats where lending judgment is made, which is what the site is about. But they are a minority of the people a bank employs, and a candidate who has read only that material can walk into an interview for a job that is nothing like the one they prepared for.

Open the careers page of any large bank and you will find fifteen to twenty job families grouped into four broad blocks. The names differ; the shape does not. Broken back down into the positions those families actually advertise, the board looks like this — every line is one seat, and every line opens: what the work is, who arrives in it, and the questions its interview asks.

The same 34 seats are listed in one place on bank jobs, if you already know which one you are looking for. The rest of this page is the argument for why the board is shaped this way, and what changes depending on which block you are applying to.

The front line is everyone whose name a client knows. At the retail end it is branch and personal banking — tellers, personal bankers, mobile mortgage managers, branch management. In the middle sit business and commercial banking, where a relationship manager carries a book of trading companies and the associates and analysts around them do the file work. At the top sit corporate and institutional coverage, structured and project finance, and property.

Two families surprise people. Agribusiness is a discipline of its own in New Zealand and Australia, with its own graduate stream and its own seasonality, and a farming background can be worth more in it than a finance one. And markets — rates, foreign exchange, credit and commodities, sold and traded — sits inside the same bank as commercial lending while being a different profession entirely. Alongside them: private banking and wealth, transaction banking and payments, and product management, which owns what the bank sells rather than who it sells to.

This is the column this site prepares you for, and it is wider than the two titles usually named. A credit analyst or assessor reads the file and writes the recommendation. A sanctioner holds delegated authority and signs — or declines. Portfolio and asset quality watch the book after the money is out: covenant tests, annual reviews, rating migration. Workout and recoveries take the files that go wrong. Lending operations, securities and settlements execute all of it, and see more of how a bank actually works than most of the front line does.

Every one of these seats does the same thing in a different posture: decides, on incomplete information, what the bank should do about a borrower — and is answerable for the call afterwards. That is the discipline the case drills rehearse, and the career path page walks the ladder through it.

Banks describe themselves in lines of defence, and the phrase turns up in interviews. The front line takes the risk. The second line — credit risk policy and modelling, market and liquidity risk, operational and model risk, compliance and conduct, and financial crime with its anti-money-laundering, sanctions and fraud teams — sets the standard the first line works to and polices it independently. The third line, internal audit and credit review, checks that the first two did what they said.

These are large, growing, and much easier to enter from outside banking than the front line is: accountants, lawyers, ex-regulators and analysts of every kind end up here. The interview is looking for a specific temperament — independence without obstruction, and the ability to say no with a reason a business person can act on.

Finance measures the bank: financial and product control, regulatory reporting, planning and analysis, capital and risk-weighted assets, tax. Technology builds and runs it — software engineering, platform and reliability, cyber security, architecture, testing, business analysis. Data sits beside it: engineering, decision science, model validation. Operations runs the machinery at volume — payments, onboarding and know-your-customer, contact centres, remediation. Then legal, people, marketing, communications, procurement and property.

Together these are the largest part of a bank by headcount, and they are the part the interview literature ignores almost completely. They also hire on their own discipline first: an engineer is interviewed as an engineer, an accountant as an accountant. Banking is the second question, not the first.

The single most useful thing to know before an application is what the seat does all day, because the interview is built backwards from it.

Each of the other columns has a round of its own that the lending interview never runs, and candidates who have only read commercial banking material walk into them cold. What follows names them so you know they are coming. It does not teach them — each is a discipline with its own literature, and a page written by a credit banker is not where you should learn to price an option or shard a ledger.

Two things are worth noticing about that plate. The first is that none of these rounds is really testing recall — the arithmetic, the design pattern and the accounting standard are the floor, and clearing the floor earns nothing, exactly as it does in a credit analyst interview. The second is that the last line in every panel is the same line: something has gone wrong, and the panel wants to hear what you would do about it.

The obvious reading of this page is that if you are not applying to the credit column, the rest of this site is not for you. That reading is wrong, and the reason matters more than anything else here.

A bank's technology is not ordinary technology. Its finance is not ordinary finance. Its people function, its procurement, its contact centre are not ordinary versions of those things. The systems move other people's money under a regulator's eye. The accounting carries a line — expected credit loss — that is nothing but credit judgment expressed as a number. The operations exception you are triaging is somebody's facility, and the reason there is a control around it is a loss that happened to some bank once. In every one of these seats the distance between competent and valuable is whether you understand what the bank is actually exposed to.

It is also the most common route into the second and third lines of defence. Risk, compliance, financial crime, model validation and internal audit recruit heavily out of technology, operations and finance — and they recruit the people who can already read a business. A model validator has to know what a credit model is claiming. An operational risk analyst has to know which failure actually loses money rather than which one is most annoying. An IT auditor has to know why a control exists, not merely that it does. A financial crime analyst reads a company's cash flows for reasons that look a great deal like a credit read.

So the free material here is not off-topic if you sit in a function. The case drills and how a bank works are the cheapest way to stop being an engineer who happens to work at a bank and start being a bank's engineer — and that is the difference the second line is screening for when it opens a role to internal applicants.

A bank is in the business of taking risk it can survive. Every seat on the board is a different vocabulary for the same question, and every panel is listening for the same thing: what could go wrong here, and what would you do about it. In credit it is a borrower. In markets it is a position. In operations it is an item that does not fit the procedure. In technology it is a failure mode and who is hurt by it. In finance it is a number somebody is about to act on.

Candidates who answer those questions with process — here is what the policy says, here is who I would escalate to — sound safe and interview poorly. Candidates who reach a judgment, name its consequence, and hold it under a follow-up do well, in every column. That is the capacity this site exists to build, and it is the one part of the preparation that travels across the whole board.