Business Analytics Interview Questions for Banking & finance Companies
40 questions weighted to the interview style of banking & finance companies — 7 easy, 28 medium, 5 hard.
How banking & finance companies interview for Business Analytics
Banks and financial-services firms hire for technology, analytics and QA in their global capability centres. Interviews mix technical rounds with domain questions on banking products, regulation, data quality and risk, and they value process discipline.
This set focuses on Case Studies and Guesstimates (7), Requirements and Agile (7), Excel for Business Analysts (6), Financial and Business Analysis (5).
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01
A bank's mobile app logins increased, but digital transactions fell. What could explain this?
Users are coming but not completing transactions, so look at the gap. Possible causes: a release that broke a payment flow, new security steps like extra OTPs adding friction, logins driven by balance checks or offers, or transactions shifting to another channel. Compare the funnel from login to transaction by app version and device, check failure and error rates, and review support complaints before recommending fixes.
02
Write a SQL query to find requirements that have no linked UAT test case.
SELECT r.req_id, r.title, r.priority
FROM requirements r
LEFT JOIN test_case_links l ON l.req_id = r.req_id
WHERE l.req_id IS NULL
AND r.status = 'APPROVED'
ORDER BY r.priority;
-- Run this before UAT starts: every approved requirement
-- should trace to at least one test case.
03
Write a SQL query to list customers who have never placed an order.
SELECT c.customer_id, c.name
FROM customers c
LEFT JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.customer_id
WHERE o.order_id IS NULL;
-- alternative
SELECT customer_id, name FROM customers c
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1 FROM orders o WHERE o.customer_id = c.customer_id
);
04
How would you build a simple financial model in Excel?
MRR is monthly recurring revenue from active subscriptions; ARR is the annualised figure, usually MRR times 12. Net revenue retention measures revenue kept from an existing customer cohort over 12 months: (starting MRR + expansion - contraction - churned MRR) / starting MRR. Example: 100 lakh start, plus 15 expansion, minus 5 contraction, minus 8 churn gives 102 percent. Above 100 percent means existing customers grow revenue even without new sales.
Talk to them one-to-one to understand why they skip, such as timing, relevance or workload. Offer shorter reviews, asynchronous reviews with a clear deadline, or a delegate with decision rights. Record sign-offs at each stage in writing so late changes become formal change requests. Share early drafts and mock-ups, because people react better to something visible. Escalate to the sponsor if the pattern risks the timeline.
09
In the middle of a sprint, a senior stakeholder asks to add an urgent feature. What do you do?
Understand the urgency and the business impact of waiting until the next sprint. Bring it to the product owner, who decides. If it truly cannot wait, the team agrees to swap out work of similar size so the sprint goal stays realistic, and the trade-off is made visible to the stakeholder. If it can wait, add it to the top of the backlog for the next sprint. Avoid silently adding scope.
10
Write a SQL query that shows revenue, cost and gross margin percent by product category.
SELECT
p.category,
SUM(oi.quantity * oi.unit_price) AS revenue,
SUM(oi.quantity * p.unit_cost) AS cost,
ROUND(100.0 * (SUM(oi.quantity * oi.unit_price)
- SUM(oi.quantity * p.unit_cost))
/ NULLIF(SUM(oi.quantity * oi.unit_price), 0), 2) AS gross_margin_pct
FROM order_items oi
JOIN products p ON p.product_id = oi.product_id
GROUP BY p.category
ORDER BY gross_margin_pct DESC;
A short requirement written as 'As a user, I want X so that Y', backed by acceptance criteria. Good stories follow INVEST: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable.
12
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS) and what are its limitations?
NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend you on a 0 to 10 scale. Scores of 9 to 10 are promoters, 7 to 8 passives and 0 to 6 detractors. NPS equals percent promoters minus percent detractors, ranging from minus 100 to plus 100. Limitations: it is one question, sensitive to survey timing and sample bias, and does not explain why. Pair it with open-text reasons and behavioural metrics like retention.
13
Inventory days rose from 45 to 70 over two quarters. What could be the causes and what would you recommend?
Possible causes include falling sales against unchanged purchasing, poor demand forecasts, bulk buying for discounts, slow-moving or obsolete SKUs, or deliberate stock-building ahead of a festive season or expected price rise. Analyse by SKU, warehouse and age bucket to find where stock is stuck. Recommend clearing aged items, adjusting reorder points using recent demand, and reviewing supplier minimum order quantities. Also quantify the cash locked up and the carrying cost to show urgency.
A BA bridges business and technology: gathers requirements, analyses data and processes, documents BRD/FRD and makes sure the final solution actually solves the business problem.
Waterfall runs fixed phases one after another with requirements frozen early. Agile delivers in short sprints with continuous feedback, so requirements can change. In Agile, BAs maintain the backlog and user stories.
16
Tell me about a time careful listening helped you uncover a hidden requirement.
Situation: during interviews for a new order system, a warehouse supervisor kept mentioning that Friday evenings were chaotic. Task: understand whether this mattered for the requirements. Action: instead of moving on, I asked what happened on Fridays and learned that bulk orders were split manually because of truck capacity limits. Result: we added an automatic order-splitting rule that nobody had listed, which saved the team about four hours a week and avoided a likely UAT failure.
17
How do you build a PivotTable to analyse sales by region and product?
The time value of money means a rupee today is worth more than a rupee in the future, because today's rupee can be invested to earn a return and future money carries inflation and risk. Future cash is converted to present value using PV = FV / (1 + r)^n. At a 10 percent discount rate, 1,10,000 rupees received after one year is worth 1,00,000 rupees today. It is the basis of NPV, IRR, loan EMIs and valuation.
19
How do you write a query to find users active in consecutive months?
Stakeholders and the sponsor review the Business Requirements Document for completeness and accuracy, and the business owner gives formal sign-off before design begins.
21
You receive two customer lists from sales and billing and must reconcile them. How do you do it?
Standardise both first: trim spaces, fix case, convert IDs to the same type and remove duplicates. Use a unique key like customer ID, or a combined key of phone and email if IDs differ. Then use XLOOKUP or COUNTIFS to mark each record as matched, only in sales or only in billing, or a Power Query merge with anti joins. Summarise mismatches by type and share the exception list with both owners.
22
A quick-commerce company wants to expand into Tier-2 cities. What would you analyse before recommending it?
Demand: population density, smartphone and digital payment penetration, average basket size and how often people buy groceries. Supply: dark store rent, rider availability and local sourcing. Unit economics: orders per store per day needed to break even, given lower average order values. Competition: local kirana delivery and other apps. Then propose a pilot in two or three cities with clear success metrics such as orders per day, contribution margin per order and repeat rate before scaling.
23
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
A UAT test plan defines how acceptance testing will be run. It covers scope and out-of-scope items, business processes to be tested, entry and exit criteria, roles such as testers, UAT lead and sign-off authority, test environment and test data, schedule and cycles, defect management process with severity definitions, communication and reporting, and risks. The BA usually drafts it with business owners so testers know exactly what they are accepting and when.
Start with the main conclusion or recommendation, then give the two or three supporting reasons, and only then the detailed data. Senior stakeholders have little time, so a summary like 'Churn rose because of payment failures; fixing retries can save 4 lakh a month' should come first. Detail goes in the appendix. It is the opposite of a chronological walk through every step of the analysis.
27
A new TO-BE process went live three months ago. How do you prove that the improvement actually worked?
Compare against the baseline you measured before the change, using the same definitions: cycle time, first-time-right rate, cost per case, backlog and customer complaints. Pull data from system timestamps rather than surveys. Check that the gain is not explained by lower volumes or seasonality, ideally by comparing similar periods. Also check for side effects, such as faster processing but more rework downstream. Present the before-and-after with the business owner, and note where adoption is still incomplete.
Ask compliance which specific controls they believe are weakened, and map each regulatory requirement to steps in the old and new flows. Often the control can be kept in a different form, such as automated checks, risk-based sampling or a post-approval audit instead of a manual pre-check. Bring compliance into the redesign rather than presenting a finished model. Document the agreed controls in the TO-BE diagram so audit can trace them. Speed never overrides a mandatory control.
30
Gross margin fell from 38 percent to 34 percent in one quarter. How do you investigate?
Break the change into drivers. Price: were discounts or promotions deeper? Mix: did sales shift towards lower-margin products, channels or regions? Cost: did raw material, freight or supplier prices rise, or did currency movements raise import costs? Also check one-offs like inventory write-offs and accounting reclassifications. Build a margin bridge showing how many percentage points each driver contributed, then take the biggest driver to the business owner with a specific action.
31
How would you size the market for IT courses in Delhi NCR?
Top-down: NCR population aged 18–30 × share of graduates × share wanting paid upskilling × average fee. Cross-check bottom-up with institutes × batches × students × fees. State your assumptions.
32
A release passed all system testing, but business users reject it during UAT. What went wrong and what do you do?
The team built what was written, but not what users needed, which points to gaps in elicitation, missing real-world scenarios or users not involved early. Capture each rejection and classify it as a defect, a missed requirement or a new request. Prioritise blockers with the product owner and agree on a fix plan and date. Going forward, involve users in demos every sprint and base UAT scenarios on real workflows.
33
What are dynamic array functions in Excel and how do they help analysts?
Dynamic array functions return several values that spill into neighbouring cells. UNIQUE lists distinct values, SORT and SORTBY order data, FILTER returns rows meeting conditions, SEQUENCE builds number series, and XLOOKUP can return whole rows. For example =SORT(UNIQUE(FILTER(Sales[Region], Sales[Year]=2026))) builds a live region list. They replace many helper columns and Ctrl+Shift+Enter array formulas, and the # operator references a full spill range.
34
What is user activation and what is an 'aha moment'?
Activation is the point at which a new user first experiences the product's core value, such as completing a first lesson, sending a first payment or creating a first project. The aha moment is the specific early action that strongly predicts long-term retention, found by comparing retained and churned users. Teams then design onboarding to get more new users to that action quickly and track the activation rate.
35
Write a SQL query for a 7-day rolling average of daily revenue.
WITH daily AS (
SELECT order_date, SUM(amount) AS revenue
FROM orders
GROUP BY order_date
)
SELECT order_date, revenue,
AVG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY order_date
ROWS BETWEEN 6 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW) AS rolling_7d
FROM daily
ORDER BY order_date;
-- fill missing dates from a calendar table first, or gaps skew the average
36
How do you estimate the annual revenue of a coffee shop chain?
Costs: software 12 lakh in year 1 plus 3 lakh per year support, and 4 lakh for implementation and training. Benefits: 60,000 invoices a year at 10 minutes saved each is 10,000 hours; at 400 rupees per hour that is 40 lakh, plus around 5 lakh from fewer late-payment penalties. Year-1 net benefit is 45 - 16 = 29 lakh and payback is under six months. Then test sensitivity, for example if only half the time saving is realised.
40
A ride-hailing app's ride cancellation rate rose from 8 to 14 percent. How would you structure the problem?
First split by who cancels: riders or drivers. For rider cancellations, check wait times, pickup accuracy, price surges and changes in ETA. For driver cancellations, check trip distance, payment mode, low fares, destination visibility and incentive changes. Then segment by city, time of day and area. Link to recent changes like a new pricing rule. Recommend fixes for the largest driver, such as better matching or adjusted incentives.
How are Business Analytics interviews at banking & finance companies different?
Banks and financial-services firms hire for technology, analytics and QA in their global capability centres. Interviews mix technical rounds with domain questions on banking products, regulation, data quality and risk, and they value process discipline.
Which banking & finance companies are covered?
This page links to 18 banking & finance companies, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, HSBC, American Express, Wells Fargo, Citi. Each has its own page with rounds and a separate practice set.
What rounds should I expect?
Common rounds at these companies include: HR round; Managerial round; Technical round; Hiring manager round; Online assessment (aptitude + technical). The exact process varies by company and role.