My thoughts are that I don’t want to spend more than 5 seconds per year thinking about crypto at this point.

Thanks. Yes, the return offer rates will likely decrease if the macro environment stays bad by the middle of next year. But it varies so much by bank, group, and location that no one can say for sure. There’s also not much recent precedent for a market completely tanking in the span of 1-2 years (the last time this happened was 2008, and most people from back then are long gone).

All you can do is 1) prepare as best you can or 2) not take the internship too seriously and recruit for other roles afterward. I would recommend #1 because you never know what will happen, and it’s much harder to get an internship than to win a full-time offer from it.

You should ideally learn Excel and PowerPoint fairly well in the ~1 month before you start so you don’t forget anything. I’m not going to say, “Take our courses,” but we do have courses that are specifically geared toward IB and go up to fairly advanced material (Power Pivot and macros/VBA/outside tools in Excel).

If you want other options, it’s important to understand navigation, formatting, and formulas like INDEX/MATCH and XLOOKUP in Excel and related ones like INDIRECT. But I don’t think you need to know VBA, Python, etc. – if you have the time, sure, but they’re unlikely to come up for interns or even full-timers. It’s more important to understand how to use common macros and plugins that banks might have and what their limitations are (e.g., “Undo” is limited or doesn’t work at all).

Thank you so much Brian.All the best!

Great article here. I was wondering if you could address an unrelated concern of mine that I’ve had for a while. I’m currently slated to work as a summer analyst at a BB this summer (GS/MS/JP). Given reports of hiring freezes/layoffs and the horrible economic outlook, do you think I should be worried about return offers being much lower than usual? I’ve gotten conflicting responses from my peers and would love to have your input.

I’ve also read your article about how to best prepare for the summer internship. Do you think that I should complete an excel course before starting, and if so, how advanced should the course be? I just wanted to get a sense of how much ground I need to make up before the summer starts. Thanks as always.

While I agree with your skepticism, I don’t think the fact that crypto “isn’t real” makes it worthless. There are plenty of other digital assets that are worth something (e.g., credits or tokens in online games) because they have specific use cases such as saving people time or allowing them to have more fun while playing. Crypto’s only use case is pure speculation, and it’s backed by nothing and has no cash flow (maybe some exceptions for cases like transferring money out of corrupt 3rd world countries).

Congrats! We don’t have much on corporate banking interviews here aside from the coverage in the corporate banking article and the IB Interview article. I’d say focus on accounting and credit questions and make sure you have a solid story for why you’re moving from operational risk to credit risk (e.g., more modeling or technical exposure, opportunity to work with clients over the long term, etc.). For the AC itself, the biggest point is to keep your arguments in case studies and group exercises very simple, volunteer for the boring-but-necessary tasks like time-keeping, and always have something to present in the allotted time even if you simply or have to skip certain parts.

In ACs, your actual performance tends to matter most because only part of your time there might consist of traditional interviews. So there’s less room to ask people about their qualifications/credentials in quite the same way. I wouldn’t worry about other candidates. Some will have more or less experience than you, but you can always perform better than them and win the offer.

Got a recent update (sorry for off topic once again).
Apparently I am invited to the final assessment center for Corporate-investment banking (credit risk) of a BB bank. I am especially surprised since it is a full-time/graduate position. Any short tips for success there compared to the IB interviews featured in this site? Will I be in a particular disadvantage compared to other more experience candidates or since I came this far, only the interview performance matters?
Thanks in advance Brian.

I am very much against CBDCs because they do absolutely nothing for the average person and are just another way to enslave people and force them into behaving certain ways. Of course, this means that governments will probably try to introduce them, and then it will go poorly and screw up the financial system and economy even more. After the past few years, I’ve given up predicting what will happen because we’ve seen that governments have an infinite capacity for stupidity and self-destruction.

Eliminating all private banks from the system is a terrible idea because then the government becomes responsible for the entire money supply rather than just a good chunk of it (private banks issuing loans are still responsible for most money creation). There’s a case to be made for central banks being the lenders of last resort, but they shouldn’t be doing anything other than that. They’ve vastly overstepped their bounds.

Blockchain mostly falls into the category of “a solution in search of a problem.” Similar to what happened with technologies like mobile, Web 2.0, AI, etc., people assume that everything can/should be on the blockchain, when it’s often a worse solution and it solves only very specific problems. Lawyers and accountants have existed for hundreds/thousands of years and are not going away as long as humans exist.

I can’t find it right now, but there was a good article on Hacker News about a few legitimate use cases for blockchain/crypto and why a lot of the ones people are talking about now aren’t actually viable.