Once In a Litetime Lateral chance - What Value WOULD I bring to a firm?

I've been networking my ass off over the last few months trying to lateral into banking from tech consulting, and wasn't having much luck. Last week I had coffee with a VP that I really clicked with. He wants me to drop by again on Friday, but he told me to "think about how you feel transitioning career fields would benefit the firm."

I'm honestly not sure what to say to that, it threw me for a loop.

I'm a fast learner, I work hard, I'm driven to succeed and handle stress extremely well (the intelligence world is not a low-stress environment), I maintain a positive attitude, I am a deeply analytical and logic driven person, and I'm 1,000% sure I could excel at this work if given the chance, but that just sounds so cookie cutter.

The opportunity:

  • Bank of America's Veterans Associate Program:

Veterans Associate Program (VAP) is an elite 12-week rotational program designed for recently transitioned Veterans. The VAP offers Veterans the opportunity to rotate through multiple desks and groups across our Global Banking & Markets (GBAM) and Business Support divisions. Historical VAP Rotational Placements have included: Investment Banking, Capital Markets, Commercial Banking, Global Transaction Services (GTS), Sales & Trading, Research, Public Finance, Prime Brokerage, Municipal Banking & Markets, Global Wealth Investment Management (GWIM) and Global Risk.

My background:

  • 6 Years in the military, as an intelligence analyst (enlisted)

  • Got an information systems degree from a VERY non-target school

  • Went to a Fortune 100 company as an experienced hire and managed the support team for the executive suite (this job was super easy people management, but I did get to sit in on a lot of management lead team meetings, CFO and CEO lead team meetings, analyst day prep, board prep, etc. because they needed someone to run slides and I was trustworthy. This gave me great visibility into how executives consider options and make decisions to steer the company and I learned a lot there).

  • Moved over to a Big 4 firm, where I'm in the Strategy & Analytics practice, and have spent most of my time here building our financial modelling automation tools for a major firm.

Why I want to Lateral:

  • Even though my job in the executive suite wasn't very technical, it gave me great exposure to the inner workings of the highest echelons of management, and how they made decisions. The thing that became abundantly clear to me was that finance drove everything as either number one or number two. If brand or R&D or tech came up with something revolutionary, finance (and usually external bankers) were the very next people to get involved and usually steered the conversation. In one particular case, one deal knocked off another deal because there wasn't enough capital available to make both investments work (one was an M&A activity the other was a new product innovation.) It became clear to me that if I want to become one of the drivers of those decisions one day, banking is where I needed to go (tech wasn't going to cut it)

  • In my current role as a Tech consultant, I am in project management. This means that I am neither the do'er or the decision maker. I'm in this no-man's land in between doing and driving where I "herd cats" all day. Any promotions I receive won't move me out of the cat herding business, it will just lead to me either herding more cats or herding more important cats, but the core job won't change - that's not a place I want to be long term.

My best friend is in IBD at a BB, and my fiancee is in Equity Research at another BB, so I'm acutely aware of the work and the lifestyle, and that I'm going to spend a lot of hours working my ass off and learning everything there is to learn, but there's nothing in my life I've wanted more than to lateral into banking.

How do I answer this question?

 
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