Does anyone know if they do any surprise phone interviews after the HireVue one-way interview? And what type of questions they usually ask in those phone interviews. Would there be stock pitches or just about financial news.
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Are you in the US? If it’s a summer internship I doubt they’ll ask you to do stock pitches, likely mostly behavioral questions
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when I applied for summer internships back in London, a few years ago, HR would call candidates out-of-the-blue, mostly to tell people they are moving to next round or give them an offer. I think they will probably email to schedule a time for the next phone interview, think it’s worth preparing the following questions:
- why cs and not another bank?
- why equities? why S&T?
- how did you get interested in finance? what would you bring to the team?
- situational questions, ideally prepare 4-5 stories that display your skills such as leadership, teamwork…
- example of situation where you failed/had issues with teammate
- read up on recent markets: inflation concerns, fed policy, covid impact, trade war, oil moves…
- maybe prepare a trade idea: recovery stocks, inflation hedge
Good luck!
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I’m in Australia, but I prepared one pitch just in case though I’m not sure if my pitch is what they’re looking for exactly. For context, I have prepared about a company’s: prospects, industry growth rate, business model, competitive advantages and market share. My valuation is a bit iffy so I don’t know if I should talk about it haha
Thank you for your detailed response! Just one question, what is it like working in S&T? What my interpretation of S&T is that they help clients execute trades on the stock market, but what are the challenges that S&T people face? I appreciate any further detail 
Sure thing, think of an investment bank as a market maker: they literally spend the whole day making markets on products and the firm’s business model is to sell as many products as possible to clients, collect bid/offer and hedge the risk as perfectly as possible. To achieve all of this, you have a dedicated sales, structuring and trading teams, split by asset class, customer type (retail and institutional) and product complexity (D1 and derivatives). A typical day in markets is sth like this: client contacts sales with quote for a product, sales reach out to trading about how much they are willing to charge the client for the product, and basically from that point it’s a negotiation between sales & trading to get a tradable price, because the customer is of course quoting multiple dealers at the same time. This is what we call a reverse inquiry. Additionally, sales & structuring are always trying to stay ahead of clients needs, pitching new ideas, thinking of novel payoffs and indices and constantly jumping on calls with clients to convince them to buy different products. It’s a bit stressful because you always need to perform: people always looking at how much money you bring to the firm and every year is expected to be better than the previous one. As cut-throat as it could be, S&T is still a very collaborative fast-paced environment and it requires strong people’s skills: you can only succeed if you know how to manage complicated relationships and get different stakeholders to help. It is also an operationally heavy job that involves booking trades, doing termsheets/docs, reviewing deals and a lot of button clicking, definitely not the most fun part of the job. Hope this gives a somewhat clear picture of S&T!
I see, is it super competitive in Australia too? I’m not sure how similar it is to the process in the US but I’ve been applying to lots of places. Although I’m not really preparing stock pitches, but it’s always a good idea to be prepared I think! Imo if there’s any part you’re not very certain of, don’t mention it bc they could ask you follow up questions about it.
Thank you so much for putting so much time to describe this to me. I have a few additional questions if you don’t mind:
So the profit essentially comes from the bid/ask spread? Also, what’s the benefit of asking a firm to do this for you, why can’t you just trade on the stock exchange?
So essentially, you have to be the most competitive and offer the lowest price for the client? How can you work out the lowest price?
How do you know what products clients want? Not sure how this works.
Thanks again for giving me so much detail already, and I would really appreciate if you could answer my clarifying questions!
Yeah, unfortunately the demand for grads is low and the supply is super high, so every job is competitive in finance 
good to know this is the case everywhere else lol
of course, happy to answer your questions:
- profit essentially comes from bid/ask spread or fees charged by the bank. Not anyone can’t go and start trading on an exchange, you need certain legal requirements that are satisfied by banks. Also, banks don’t only sell stocks or assets traded on an exchange, but they also do OTC trades, Over-the-counter deals, which are customized transactions with clients. Banks also do complex derivatives, that need teams of Quantitative Researchers and tech to price, model and book them,
- Exactly, clients would usually transact with the bank with the lowest price, but that’s not the only criterion. They also look at the credit of the bank, ie what are the chances that this bank will default, and also it comes down to the relationship that sales people have with clients, they really need to foster a good rapport with their coverage. It’s also a negotiation on the price, client might ask sales if the bank can meet them at this price
- So here it comes to your knowledge of the markets. Banks have research teams and product specialists that spend a lot of time looking at what’s happening in the markets, analyze patterns and try to propose interesting ideas to clients based of that. For instance, trade war US vs China might have an impact on semi-conductor stocks (just an example that might not true), so maybe we need to pitch some puts to hedge their exposures. Maybe sales think implied volatility is too high and therefore it’s time to sell so they wrap that idea in a product. Client can also come with specific asks: they want to receives income every month linked to equity performance, so bankers will use their expertise to provide a solution
let me know if anything unclear and shoot if you have any other questions.
Wow, thank you so much for such detailed answers! These are some really useful insights into S&T and makes me confident about understanding it. I don’t have anymore questions, but thanks a lot and I will keep you updated on my application!
Of course, hope you hear back some good news soon. Make sure you update your application progress on the Application tab as well 