Corporate Banking redux!

I have an interview in Corporate Banking with a one of the main high street UK banks.

Now, I consider myself an intellectually curious person. I score in top test percentiles, will soon finish the CFA, and am doing a postgrad in finance at a top 5 european university, with a few years of working experience. IB is very unlikely though for personality reasons - I just don't have the authority to pretend to know everything at all times.

Therefore, the type of corporate banking that I would enjoy would involve a lot of on-site discussion with clients, seeking to understand their business, and having an informed discussion about their business model. Effectively, a smidge of consultancy, a lot of reinforcing the mutual good will between a solid business and bank support, informal negotiations between the riskiness of ventures and the credit extended, generally a continuous understanding of how your clients are doing, so they don't value you only for the services you provide, but also the insights about their business and industry. This should give a fundament of understanding for PE (debt/equity structures), VC (the business situation of smaller companies), DCM, indirectly ECM by supporting the business while bankers do the job, and both specific and model/market-based credit modelling. It should also be internationally transferable.

The type of corporate banking I wouldn't enjoy would involve inputting balance sheet data for hundreds of companies into credit models so their limits could be calculated and updated, making cold-calls to recruit clients, having all contact by phone, being under significant pressure to extend credit under all circumstances to avoid losing customers while also being blamed when things go systemically wrong, and generally being considered by clients to perform an administrative role of stamping credit approval at best and being a PITA at worst.

In the former universe, corporate bankers deal with a number of customers small enough to get to know them, and clients tend to be interested in speaking to you about their business as long as what you say is relevant. In the latter universe, corporate bankers need to make decisions about companies they don't know based on published accounts, credit score and whether proposal numbers add up.

Which universe do we tend to live in, especially perhaps in the UK?

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