Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
012Do a DuPont analysis for a hospital business.Credit SuisseInvestment Banking · Mumbai · 2020
Say this
DuPont splits return on equity into net margin, asset turnover and leverage. For a hospital the story is almost always thin margins, heavy assets and therefore low turnover, with leverage doing a lot of the work on ROE.
Then walk it
- ROE equals net margin times asset turnover times the equity multiplier. Three levers, and each one tells a different operating story.
- Net margin for a hospital is driven by payer mix and case mix. Private-pay and high-acuity surgical work carry far better margin than government-scheme volume.
- Asset turnover is structurally low, because you have bought land, a building and imaging equipment. The operating metric behind it is occupancy and average revenue per occupied bed.
- That heavy asset base is why leverage matters so much. Hospitals fund expansion with debt, so the equity multiplier is doing real work in the ROE.
- The banker's conclusion: a hospital chain improves ROE mainly by filling existing beds and shifting case mix, not by cutting costs. Incremental occupancy has almost no marginal cost.
Where candidates lose it
Reciting the DuPont formula and stopping. The question names a hospital on purpose. If you cannot say what drives each of the three terms for that specific business, you have shown formula recall and nothing else.
Expect next
- Which of the three levers would you push first?
- What metrics would you ask the CFO for?
- How would this look different for a diagnostics chain?
Reported by candidates at Credit Suisse (Investment Banking, Mumbai, 2020). 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.