01
How would you build a simple financial model in Excel?
Show answer
Separate inputs, calculations and outputs, link all formulas to input cells, add scenarios and checks, and avoid hard-coded numbers inside formulas.
UBS Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About UBS hiring for Business Analytics roles
UBS is a Swiss global financial services firm known for wealth management, investment banking, asset management and Swiss retail banking. It acquired Credit Suisse in 2023. In India it runs large business solutions and technology centres that hire software engineers, data analysts, risk and finance professionals, and operations roles supporting its global businesses.
For Business Analytics roles, this UBS practice set focuses most on Excel for Business Analysts (7), Stakeholder Communication (7), SQL for Business Analysis (6), UAT and BA Documentation (4). It has 9 easy, 26 medium, 5 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
- Company type
- Banking & finance
- Headquarters
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Main India offices
- Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad
UBS Business Analytics interview process
- Online assessment (aptitude + coding)
- Technical interview
- Managerial or business round
- HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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02
What is the difference between a report and a dashboard in Power BI Service?
Show answer
A report is a multi-page, interactive view built in Power BI Desktop from one semantic model, with slicers, drill-through and cross-filtering. A dashboard is a single-page canvas in the Service made of tiles pinned from one or more reports, and is meant for monitoring key numbers at a glance. Dashboards support data alerts on card and KPI tiles, but have limited interactivity; clicking a tile opens the underlying report for detailed exploration.
03
Write a SQL query to find the percentage of orders delivered late in each city.
Show answer
-- late = delivered after the promised date
SELECT
city,
COUNT(*) AS total_orders,
SUM(CASE WHEN delivered_at > promised_at THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS late_orders,
ROUND(100.0 * SUM(CASE WHEN delivered_at > promised_at THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
/ COUNT(*), 2) AS late_pct
FROM orders
WHERE status = 'DELIVERED'
GROUP BY city
ORDER BY late_pct DESC;
04
What are the 4 Ps of marketing?
Show answer
Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the levers a business uses to bring an offering to market.
05
How do you run an effective stakeholder meeting?
Show answer
Send an agenda with the goal and the decisions needed beforehand, along with any pre-read. Invite only people who contribute or decide. Start by restating the goal, keep to time, park off-topic issues and confirm decisions aloud. End by summarising actions with owners and dates. Send minutes within a day. A meeting without a clear decision or output usually could have been an email.
06
What is data storytelling and why does it matter for analysts?
Show answer
Data storytelling combines data, visuals and narrative so the audience understands what happened, why, and what to do. A good story has context, a clear insight, supporting evidence in one or two simple charts and a recommendation. Accurate numbers alone rarely change decisions; people act when they see the implication. Remove chart clutter, highlight the key point with colour and use titles that state the conclusion.
07
How do you influence stakeholders when you have no direct authority?
Show answer
Build credibility with accurate work and by understanding each stakeholder's goals and pressures. Frame proposals in terms of their outcomes, such as cost saved or targets met, and back them with data. Involve them early so ideas feel shared, find allies who already support the change, and pilot small to show results. Be transparent about trade-offs. Influence comes from trust built over time, not one meeting.
08
After a redesign, average time spent in the app increased. Is that good?
Show answer
It depends on the product's goal. For a content or learning app, more time may mean more engagement. For a payments or banking app, more time can mean users struggle to complete tasks. Check task completion rate, time to complete key actions, errors, support tickets and retention. A metric is good only when it moves in line with the value users came for.
09
Tell me about a time you solved an ambiguous problem with limited data.
Show answer
Situation: my manager asked why customer complaints were rising, but complaints were stored as free text with no categories. Task: give an answer within a week. Action: I sampled 300 complaints, created categories, tagged them manually and used keyword rules in Excel to classify the rest, then validated with the support lead. Result: late refunds were 40 percent of complaints, the refund process was fixed, and categorised tagging was added to the support tool.
10
Your TO-BE process cuts the account-opening cycle time by half, but the compliance team rejects it. How do you handle it?
Show answer
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.
11
What is the difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(column)?
Show answer
COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.
12
Tell me about a time you said no to a stakeholder.
Show answer
Situation: a regional manager wanted a custom report changed daily, which would have taken half my week. Task: support him without blocking other priorities. Action: I asked which decisions the report fed and found he needed only four numbers. I said no to the custom version, explained the impact on other work, and added those four metrics with a filter to the existing dashboard. Result: he got his numbers the same day and the team kept its capacity.
13
You added new rows to the source data, but your PivotTable does not show them even after refresh. Why?
Show answer
The PivotTable source is probably a fixed range such as A1:F500, so rows added below 500 are outside it. The fix is to convert the data to an Excel Table with Ctrl+T and change the pivot's data source to the table name, so it expands automatically. Also check for blank header cells, filters on the pivot hiding new items, and whether the new rows are actually text values in a numeric column, which can change grouping.
14
What is a RAID log and how does a BA use it?
Show answer
A RAID log tracks Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies for a project. Each entry has an ID, description, owner, impact, status, mitigation or action, and due date. A risk is something that may happen, an issue is something that has already happened, an assumption is believed true but unverified, and a dependency is something the project needs from others. A BA uses it to record requirement assumptions and dependencies, and reviews it weekly so nothing is silently forgotten.
15
What steps do you follow to plan and run a UAT cycle?
Show answer
Plan: agree scope, entry and exit criteria, testers and schedule with the business owner. Prepare: write scenarios and test cases from requirements, set up the environment and test data, and brief testers. Execute: run test cases in daily sessions, log defects with evidence and hold a daily triage. Monitor: report progress, pass rate and open defects by severity. Close: check exit criteria, get the business sign-off with known issues documented, and hold a short lessons-learned review.
16
How do you adapt your communication for executives versus technical teams?
Show answer
Executives want outcomes, impact, risk and decisions needed, in a one-page summary or a few slides with clear numbers. Technical teams need precise details: data fields, business rules, edge cases, acceptance criteria and dependencies. Operations users need process steps and what changes in their daily work. Same facts, different depth and vocabulary. Ask each group how they prefer to receive updates and adjust.
17
Your LEFT JOIN report should list all customers, but customers without orders are missing. Why?
Show answer
A condition on the right table was probably placed in the WHERE clause, for example WHERE o.order_date >= '2026-01-01'. For customers with no orders, o.order_date is NULL, so WHERE removes them and the query behaves like an INNER JOIN. Move the condition into the ON clause, as in LEFT JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.id AND o.order_date >= '2026-01-01', or explicitly allow NULLs.
18
What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and what is CAC payback period?
Show answer
CAC is total sales and marketing spend in a period divided by new customers acquired in that period. If you spend 10 lakh and gain 2,000 customers, CAC is 500 rupees. CAC payback period is how many months of gross profit from a customer it takes to recover that CAC. A shorter payback means the business can reinvest faster; many subscription businesses aim for under 12 months.
19
Tell me about a time you worked under a tight deadline.
Show answer
Situation: in my final-year project, our client moved the presentation forward by a week. Task: finish the analysis and dashboard in four days instead of eleven. Action: I listed the must-have outputs, split work across the team, cut two nice-to-have charts and checked numbers every evening. Result: we presented on time, the client used our recommendations, and I learned to prioritise ruthlessly and confirm what is truly essential.
20
Write a SQL query for the top 3 products by revenue in each category.
Show answer
WITH ranked AS (
SELECT category, product_id, SUM(amount) AS revenue,
DENSE_RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY category
ORDER BY SUM(amount) DESC) AS rk
FROM sales
GROUP BY category, product_id
)
SELECT category, product_id, revenue
FROM ranked
WHERE rk <= 3
ORDER BY category, rk;
21
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
Show answer
Use FORECAST.ETS or a trendline on monthly history, check seasonality, compare with a simple moving average and present a range, not a single number.
22
How do you find the top 5 customers by revenue?
Show answer
SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS revenue FROM orders GROUP BY customer_id ORDER BY revenue DESC LIMIT 5;
23
What is Power Pivot?
Show answer
An Excel add-in for building data models with relationships and DAX measures over millions of rows, beyond normal worksheet limits.
24
An order has a value of 600 rupees, product cost 360, delivery 60, payment fee 12 and a discount of 50. What is the contribution margin?
Show answer
Net revenue after discount is 600 minus 50, which is 550 rupees. Variable costs are 360 plus 60 plus 12, totalling 432. Contribution margin is 550 minus 432, so 118 rupees per order, or about 21 percent of net revenue. This is what each order contributes towards fixed costs such as salaries and rent. If the discount were raised to 150, the order would contribute only 18 rupees.
25
How do you protect a worksheet or workbook?
Show answer
Review > Protect Sheet or Workbook with a password, lock cells, hide formulas and allow only selected cells to be edited.
26
What are dynamic array functions in Excel and how do they help analysts?
Show answer
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.
27
During UAT, users log 60 defects, but you suspect many are actually new requirements. How do you handle it?
Show answer
Run a joint triage with the business owner, QA and development. Compare each item against the signed-off requirements and acceptance criteria. Real defects stay in the defect log; items not covered by requirements are reclassified as change requests and prioritised separately through change control. Keep the tone neutral so users do not feel dismissed. Also review why the gap happened, for example prototypes were not shown early enough, and fix that for the next release.
28
What is working capital and why does it matter?
Show answer
Working capital is current assets minus current liabilities, mainly receivables plus inventory minus payables. It is the money tied up in running daily operations. Too little means the company may struggle to pay suppliers and salaries; too much means cash is locked in slow inventory or unpaid customer invoices. Analysts track it because a growing business often needs more working capital, so fast growth can create cash shortages even when the business is profitable.
29
How would you analyse the declining sales of a retail store?
Show answer
Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.
30
Write an Excel formula for the weighted average selling price across orders.
Show answer
// B2:B200 = price per unit, C2:C200 = units sold
=SUMPRODUCT(B2:B200, C2:C200) / SUM(C2:C200)
// a simple AVERAGE(B2:B200) would wrongly give a small order
// the same weight as a large one
31
What is a power-interest grid and how do you use it?
Show answer
A power-interest grid maps stakeholders by how much influence they have over the project and how interested or affected they are. High power and high interest: manage closely with regular involvement. High power, low interest: keep satisfied with concise updates. Low power, high interest: keep informed, for example end users. Low power, low interest: monitor. It helps a BA decide who to consult, how often and in what format.
32
How do you calculate cycle time, touch time and process efficiency? Give an example.
Show answer
Cycle time (lead time) is the total elapsed time from the start to the end of a case. Touch time is the time someone actually works on it. Process cycle efficiency is touch time divided by cycle time. Example: a refund takes 5 working days (40 working hours) end to end, but the agents spend only 2 hours in total working on it. Efficiency is 2 / 40 = 5 percent, so 95 percent of the time is waiting, and queues are the main target.
33
What is DMN and how does it relate to BPMN?
Show answer
DMN (Decision Model and Notation) is an OMG standard for modelling business decisions, mainly through decision tables that list input conditions, outputs and a hit policy. BPMN shows the flow of work, while DMN holds the decision logic. Instead of drawing ten nested gateways for loan eligibility, you place one business rule task in BPMN that calls a DMN table. This keeps diagrams clean and lets business users change rules without redrawing the process.
34
What is user story mapping and how does it help plan releases?
Show answer
User story mapping arranges stories in two dimensions. Across the top is the user journey as a sequence of activities, for example search, compare, buy and track. Below each activity, stories are stacked by priority. Drawing horizontal lines across the map creates release slices, where the first slice is a thin end-to-end MVP that covers every step at a basic level. It prevents a flat backlog where teams build one area deeply while the journey stays incomplete.
35
How do you find duplicate customers?
Show answer
SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM customers GROUP BY email HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
36
How do you prioritise requirements?
Show answer
Use MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't), value versus effort scoring or the Kano model, agreed with stakeholders based on business value and risk.
37
Write an Excel formula to count the number of unique customers in a column.
Show answer
// Excel 365
=COUNTA(UNIQUE(A2:A500))
// unique customers in the North region only
=COUNTA(UNIQUE(FILTER(A2:A500, B2:B500="North")))
// older versions (no blanks in range)
=SUMPRODUCT(1/COUNTIF(A2:A500, A2:A500))
38
Write a DAX measure to count distinct active customers in the last 30 days.
Show answer
Active Customers 30D =
CALCULATE(
DISTINCTCOUNT(Sales[CustomerID]),
DATESINPERIOD('Date'[Date], MAX('Date'[Date]), -30, DAY)
)
-- MAX('Date'[Date]) makes it relative to the date in the current filter
39
What is the difference between release notes and a user manual?
Show answer
Release notes describe what changed in a specific release: new features, enhancements, fixed defects, known issues and any actions users must take. They are short and version-specific. A user manual or user guide explains how to use the whole system to complete tasks, with step-by-step instructions and screenshots, and is updated as the product evolves. BAs often review both, because users rely on them in the first weeks after go-live.
40
How would you measure the success of a new feature?
Show answer
Define a goal metric, a baseline and guardrail metrics, run an experiment or before-after comparison and review adoption, retention and revenue impact.
Tips to crack the UBS Business Analytics interview
- Revise DSA, Java or Python, SQL and OOP concepts, and be ready to explain your code clearly in interviews.
- Learn basics of wealth management, investment banking and financial markets to show interest in the business side.
- Prepare examples of attention to detail and handling pressure, since banking technology roles demand reliability and accuracy.
- Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
- Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; UBS interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the UBS Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + coding); Technical interview; Managerial or business round; HR round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the UBS Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on Excel for Business Analysts (7), Stakeholder Communication (7), SQL for Business Analysis (6), UAT and BA Documentation (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most UBS interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at UBS?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in banking & finance interviews like UBS's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does UBS hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
UBS has large teams in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad. Openings and locations change often, so check the UBS careers page and filter by city and experience.
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