RETAIL BANKING PRACTICE INTERVIEW
Try a practice interview for retail banking, answering typical questions and also getting tips on how you should answer. There are also other questions students have been asked at banking interviews. Retail banking is also know as high street banking and is largely about managing customers accounts, sellling loans and mortgages etc. It differs from investment banking: see our separate interview on this
RETAIL BANK MANAGERS need good WRITING skills , for example when drafting a letter to reply to the complaint of a customer. They need to be good LISTENERS to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff when a customer is asking for a large loan. They have to be PERSUASIVE when trying to persuade a local company to bank with them rather than a competitor bank, and to be able to both DIRECT and CO-OPERATE with their staff. They need to be good at ANALYSING information and MAKING DECISIONS when, as above, deciding whether or not to make a loan, and of course they need to be NUMERATE, but GCSE maths is probably sufficient here. Employers will be looking to see how you can talk about and demonstrate these skills at your interview. The sort of evidence you could offer includes:
- CO-OPERATING - planning the schedule for Film Society screenings
- LEADING - chairperson of a student society.
- SPOKEN COMMUNICATION - debating society.
- NUMERACY - budgeting your expenses over the year.
- MAKING DECISIONS - selecting the appropriate modules for the next academic year.
Before you arrive ...
Before your interview research the company and the banking industry: see our banking careers page. You may get verbal and numerical reasoning tests see www.kent.ac.uk/careers/psychotests.htm for examples.
Also see our Interview Reports for banking interviews.
There follow some of the questions that might be specifically asked of students at interviews for retail banking jobs. General interview questions are not asked here, so you might also like to try the general or multiple choice interviews as well for standard interview questions that can be thrown at any candidate. Click on "First Question" to begin. Think carefully about how you would answer, then click on "Show Answer Tips" to get an idea of how you should be answering.
Other questions students have been asked at banking interviews:
About yourself: your study, work experience and skills
- Tell me about a time when you introduced a new concept/idea at work (Lloyds TSB)
- Think of a time when you made a mistake. What did you do? What was the result? What did you learn from this experience? (Lloyds TSB)
- Tell me about a time when you have dealt with a difficult situation/a difficult customer at work (Lloyds TSB)
- Tell me about a time when you worked in a team. How did you delegate what each person had to do? (Lloyds TSB)
- Describe a time at school when you showed leadership/took control of a situation (Barclays)
- Describe a time at work when you coped with a difficult problem (Barclays)
- Tell me about a time where you had to collaborate with others towards success. How did you contribute? What was your role? What problems did you encounter? What would you do differently if you had to do this again? What did you learn? (Royal Bank of Scotland)
- Where do you see yourself in five to ten years? (HSBC)
- I was asked quite a lot about my experience of data analysis- I talked about my dissertation and university projects I had done (Royal Bank of Scotland)
Questions about the organisation. See our commercial awareness page
- Tell me three things about RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland)
- What attracted you to our graduate training programme? (Royal Bank of Scotland)
GROUP EXERCISES AND OTHER COMPONENTS. See our teamworking page
- 6 people each given a role as a manager of a branch in a fictional town. Have to decide on a policy for how to develop business in this town, in line with priorities explained in a presentation to the group beforehand.
- One hour to prepare a 10 minute presentation on why the bank should hire you, with 10 mins of questions afterwards.
- Presentation to just one assessor, who said they were looking for presentation skills rather than content.
Back to the practice interviews menu or Answers to 150 common interview questions