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.

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Question bank

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions
100
Traced to a firm
100
Firms
46
Updated
September 2026
Asked at
All firmsTruist Securities10Rothschild & Co8Centerview Partners7Credit Suisse7Harris Williams6Houlihan Lokey6Lazard6Mizuho6Barclays5Citi5Deutsche Bank5Evercore5Moelis & Company5Morgan Stanley5Piper Sandler5RBC Capital Markets5Goldman Sachs4Nomura4TD Securities4Bank of America3Guggenheim Securities3J.P. Morgan3Jefferies3Moody's3Perella Weinberg Partners3Warburg Pincus3William Blair3HSBC2Lincoln International2Scotiabank2TPG2UBS2Wells Fargo Securities2Advent International1Apollo Global Management1Bain Capital1Balyasny Asset Management1BlackRock1BNP Paribas1General Atlantic1Invesco1Morningstar1PIMCO1Société Générale1State Street1Wellington Management1
Topic
All topicsAccounting14Valuation21M&A10Markets and deals10Capital markets3LBO8Leveraged finance3Restructuring2Credit3Debt capital markets2Capital structure2Case and estimation11Brainteasers6Fit5
Level
AnyCoreIntermediateHard
Type
AnyTechnicalCaseBrainteaserFitMarket view
Showing 1–2 of 2 · filtered from 100Clear filters
  1. 012Do a DuPont analysis for a hospital business.AccountingIntermediatetechnicalCredit 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

    1. ROE equals net margin times asset turnover times the equity multiplier. Three levers, and each one tells a different operating story.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.

  2. 035How would you value a telco versus a software company?ValuationIntermediatetechnicalCredit SuisseInvestment Banking · Sydney · 2020

    Say this

    The telco is a capital-intensive, low-growth cash cow, so you value it on EV/EBITDA and EV/EBITDA less CapEx, and you care about the dividend. The software company is asset-light and growth-driven, so you value it on revenue multiples adjusted for growth and retention.

    Then walk it

    1. For the telco, EBITDA is large but so is CapEx on spectrum and network, so EV/EBITDA alone flatters it. EV/EBITDA less CapEx, or EV/EBIT, is the honest read.
    2. Telco value is also driven by regulation, spectrum holdings and subscriber metrics like ARPU and churn. A DCF works well because the cash flows are predictable.
    3. For the software company, current earnings are suppressed by growth spending, so EV/EBITDA is close to meaningless. EV/revenue against growth rate is the working metric.
    4. The quality tests for software are net revenue retention, gross margin and the rule of forty, growth plus margin. Those determine whether a revenue multiple is deserved.
    5. So both get a DCF, but the telco DCF is credible on near-term cash flows while the software DCF is almost entirely terminal value. That difference is the real answer: you trust the telco's forecast and you stress-test the software company's.

    Where candidates lose it

    Treating it as a list of two metric sets. The interviewer wants you to notice that the DCF is reliable for one and mostly assumption for the other. That structural insight is the answer.

    Expect next

    • What is the rule of forty?
    • What is the formula for net revenue retention, gross retention and churn?
    • Which would you rather own at today's multiples?

    Reported by candidates at Credit Suisse (Investment Banking, Sydney, 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.