How to answer this question

I cold messaged a director at another bank in a product group I’m interested in joining. The call was going well, until he asked me why I wanted to join his bank, as opposed to lateraling to the same group at my current bank. Both of our institutions are top ten in this particular product on the league tables and I didn’t know how candid to be. How should I have answered?

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Even if both product groups could be top 10 on league tables, is there still an improvement in metrics like deal vol, val, or avg deal size from one group to the other? This way you could have at least 1-3 different reasons for wanting to move beyond the other good point mentioned - which is that you may not be able to internally lateral groups either

Random example:
EVR is #7 in M&A, and has 294bn in ttv from 173 deals
CVP is #8 in M&A, and has 280bn in ttv from 78 deals

So if you were at evr, it would still make sense to want to move to cvp bc of larger avg deal sizes there. You could also mention how CVP often prefers people move up while EVR often encourages people leave to pe after 2 yr of analyst. Or if you're at cvp you may want to go to evr to have more deal reps or something.

 

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