FO Administrative tasks we love to hate
Frequently we will often hear about the glamorous parts of each profession whether its working on billion dollar acquisitions and modeling in IBD, meeting with management in ER, and underwriting billion dollar acquisition financing in corporate banking. However, each front office group will inherently have a set of mind numbing repetitive tasks that prospective monkeys are unfamiliar with.
What are the most mundane / admin tasks you do as part of your job, how time consuming is it, and how often do you do it?
I'll start. In corporate banking you spend 40-50% of your time underwriting new deals and more so if you are in a group that gets a lot of deal flow (HC, sponsors, etc.). The other ~40% of your time is spent monitoring existing exposure to clients and doing annual/interim reviews.
Now for the less fun part, the other 10-20% is driven by internal processes.
- Internal risk ratings: Essentially all banks have a proprietary internal rating system on a numerical scale for determining how risky a company is which is calculated by a probability of default of the obligor over a period of time. Depending on risk of obligor and specific bank policy, these internal ratings will need to be refreshed quarterly - annually.
- Moody's Risk Analyst / Hyperion Financial Statement "input" - Most bank's use software created by Moody's to enter company financial statement line items into a program which then can be used to feed into other bank systems, create ratios / other financial analysis outputs, etc. This data dump can be quite tedious.
- Answering questions from product partners, canceling existing facilities, responding to requests - Lots of little admin / adhoc stuff here and there from documenting the cancelation of a trading limit to running profitability returns for a new deal (estimating revolver utilization, etc.)
-Compliance training (enough said)