Answer: "Sir", and the pity. (Punny choke: it really was serendipity.)
I was in Malaysia for a wedding, and it turned out that except for this banker from London and myself, everyone else in the wedding knew each other through schooling in Oxford. We started talking, hung out, before you know it he gave me his email, and said, "Let me know if you want to talk more about banking."
So one day, I did. And we arranged a phonecall, where we talked for an hour, and he went through my resumé with me. After that, he said, "let me send a few emails and contact people."
He first tried within his group, the Financial Institutions Group (aka "FIG"). In my opinion, FIG bankers have it the toughest, as their clients are ALL bankers or ex-bankers. It's like a law firm that only works for other law firms. Some of the best bankers I've met (including this chap, whom we shall call Lev) have come from FIG, and with good reason.
After his boss shot his idea down ("sorry man, my boss said you have no relevant experience, no internship, no background, he doesn't want to go through the process of trying you out"), Lev next tried to get me into the Singapore branch. An email, an instant reply, and I got a reply from Lev saying, "Fuck, I thought I had more leverage than that in Singapore?! Bloody hell. Let's try Hong Kong, buddy, but if this fails I don't know, we'll need to regroup our thoughts."
He sent it to the FIG team in Hong Kong, but got a reply saying "we don't need a new analyst, but there might be a vacancy in the Industrials group, let me send it to them".
I went through about five rounds of interviews, one of which was conducted in Chinese by the two analysts in the group.
The most brutal was perhaps the psychometric test and presentation, which was conducted in Singapore due to logistics. The psychometric test was about 20 minutes, and was a simple multiple-choice question logical reasoning test, which wasn't a problem.
The presentation then involved a mergers-and-acquisition case study, based on an ACTUAL deal done by the bank. I was due to give a presentation to an actual M&A banker, and was given 30 minutes to prepare my presentation on mahjong-paper and with markers.
There's something about written tests that just screw me over: I spend way too much time trying to make my handwriting legible (which still looks like tapeworm droppings and chicken scratchings). Add the fact that I wasn't from a finance background, so I wasn't able to do any accretion/dilution analysis nor any kind of mergers accounting calculations. Consequently I focused on the strategic rationale: if all else fails, you can always find some flaw in a corporate strategy, since strategy is about as objective as Shakespeare.
The presentation was a complete disaster: the chap came in, and had a look reminiscent of my sergeant-major before a serious punishment-session. "Fuck, I'm so screwed, " and so I was: everything I said was instantly ripped into, torn to shreds, and left to the invisible vultures in the room to feast on. The guy from Human Resource occasionally prodded me with something to say, which gave me something to elaborate on. But overall, it felt like I was standing there butt-naked instead of being dressed in a suit and tie.
I left the place feeling like my stomach had fallen beneath my left sole, and was about to reach home when I got a phonecall from my future boss. Let's call him Boss Vader, since he has the... height.
Vader: "So.... -wheeze-... how did you think you did?"
Me: -hesitant- ".... I think I did ok."
Vader: "Well... -wheeze-... your psychometric test results were excellent, top percentile. Your presentation was... -wheeze-... ok. Now, I need you to give me a firm answer in the next five minutes: would you accept our job offer?"
Me: "er....." -fireworks!- ".... erhmph....."-singing angels!- ".... YES."
Boss Vader then went into a lot of details, which completely zipped past my head as the fireworks and angels continued to sing in my head: I GOT THE JOB!!!
So that's how I got past the Wall, into banking. I imagine Genghis Khan felt the same joy after getting past the historical Great Wall...
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After I got in, when Boss Vader subsequently asked me to vet resumés and CVs, and to conduct phone interviews, I frequently got the question of "how can I get into banking?"
Here are some tips:
- Marry someone rich and/or famous. In which case, you shouldn't even need to get into banking, since bankers work long hours for little joy but much aggravation.
- It helps if you were previously a banking intern (for fresh grad hires). Even better if you know a lot of bankers on a personal basis. Then you know that bankers work long hours.
- Utilize your network. Bankers work long hours, and will usually trust a colleague's judgement and recommendation of a potential colleague over the judgement of someone from the Human Resource Department who goes home at 6pm daily.
-Don't be an ass. Bankers work long hours. If you're insufferable during an interview, you're going to be unbearable in the office. Especially at 3am.
- Don't have ANY typos in your resumé. Bankers are anal, and work long hours, so if you have a typo you just gave a very good excuse for them to NOT interview you and go home to sleep.
- Be yourself. This is a bit of a judgement call: some lies (like "I am not in it for the money") need to be adhered to with certain bankers who are interviewing you. For me, I really wasn't in it for the money (more in future blog posts), and I was far more interested in the person behind the interviewee persona. But I know people got cut for being too honest... it's a fine line. But ultimately, if you are yourself and show yourself to be a decent person, sociable, potentially competent, and (most importantly) willing to work hard (if you weren't, then your work spills back over to others, which defeats the whole purpose of them investing the time and energy to interview you), you stand a pretty decent chance.
- Demonstrate an interest in finance.
- Do your Homework.
Both these points are related. If you're an engineer by training, take the CFA like millions of other engineers. If you took your CFA, make sure you know what's EBIT, EBITDA, and EV, and you know how to calculate ROE, ROA, ROIC, etc. If you write that your Mandarin is "fluent", you better make sure that you know at least how to describe your current/previous job scope in Mandarin. If you know what EBIT, EBITDA and EV are called in Mandarin, your odds of getting in are MUCH higher!
Incidentally, doing your homework also involves trawling through Google News to find out about the deals that your bank did in recent history. For e.g. if you're applying to JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley or UBS, then you should know that recently these three banks were joint sponsors of the Wynns initial public offering worth US$1.6billion.
At the end of this, if you're absolutely sure that you STILL want to go in and be a banker, give it a shot, sell your soul to the Devil, and good luck: don't say I didn't tell you that BANKERS WORK LONG HOURS...
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