Financial Analysis interview preparation

The three statements, working capital, ratios, forecasting, variance analysis, costing, capital budgeting, valuation and the modelling and Excel work that fills the day, plus the fit questions about why this seat. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it — we do not invent attributions.

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Question bank

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions
100
Traced to a firm
42
Firms
28
Updated
September 2026
Asked at
All firmsMoody's7Bain Capital3State Street3Ares Management2BlackRock2D.E. Shaw2Morgan Stanley2Oaktree Capital Management2S&P Global2Bridgewater Associates1Citadel1Franklin Templeton1Golub Capital1Harris Williams1Houlihan Lokey1J.P. Morgan1Jane Street1Marshall Wace1Millennium Management1Morningstar1PIMCO1Sycamore Partners1Truist Securities1Two Sigma1Vanguard1Wellington Management1Wells Fargo Securities1Wolverine Trading1
Topic
All topicsThree statements9Accounting policy and standards5Working capital and cash7Ratio analysis8Forecasting and budgeting9Variance and management reporting7Unit economics and costing8Capital budgeting7Cost of capital and valuation7Markets and rates5Modelling, Excel and data8Business partnering6Brainteasers and estimation4Fit and career10
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Type
AnyTechnicalCaseBrainteaserMarket viewFit
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  1. 077What is your favourite Excel function?Modelling, Excel and dataCorephone / first roundState StreetTax · Boston · 2022

    Say this

    INDEX with MATCH, or XLOOKUP if the version supports it, because it looks up in any direction and does not break when a column is inserted. Give an actual function, then say what you built with it, because that is the part they are testing.

    Then walk it

    1. Why INDEX MATCH over VLOOKUP: VLOOKUP only looks right, it breaks silently when columns move, and it is slower on large ranges. That answer alone tells an interviewer you have maintained someone else's file.
    2. Then say where you used it. Something like: I used INDEX MATCH on two axes to map 400 cost centres to a reporting hierarchy, so a change in the hierarchy needed one table update rather than re-pointing 400 formulas.
    3. Have two more ready, because the real question is the breadth of your toolkit. SUMIFS for driver-based aggregation, which is the workhorse of any actuals-versus-budget pack. And a pivot table over a clean flat table, which is still the fastest way to interrogate a ledger extract.
    4. If they push further, the ones worth naming are power query for repeatable data cleaning, dynamic arrays like FILTER and UNIQUE, and OFFSET or CHOOSE for scenario switching, plus goal seek and data tables for sensitivity.
    5. And one thing to volunteer: I avoid volatile and hard-to-audit constructions. Nested IFs five deep, merged cells, and formulas that span sheets in long chains all make a model unmaintainable even when they work.
    6. The habit I would mention is building the data layer as one flat table with one row per transaction and no merged cells, because every reporting problem downstream gets easier if the source is clean.

    Where candidates lose it

    Naming VLOOKUP with no reason, or answering with a life philosophy instead of a function. Name one, say why it beats the obvious alternative, and attach it to something you actually built. That takes 30 seconds and passes the screen.

    Expect next

    • Why not VLOOKUP?
    • Show me how you would build an actuals-versus-budget pack.
    • What Excel habit do you consider bad practice?

    Reported by candidates at State Street (Tax, Boston, 2022). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.