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
083How would a college increase its revenue?Harris WilliamsInvestment Banking · Richmond · 2018
Say this
Price, volume, mix, and new revenue lines. Raise net tuition by discounting less, grow enrolment, shift mix toward full-fee and postgraduate students, and monetise the assets that sit idle.
Then walk it
- Price: the lever is usually the discount rate, not the headline tuition. Most institutions discount heavily; recovering a few points of net tuition is worth more than a sticker price rise and is less visible.
- Volume: more students, but constrained by capacity and by admissions standards, since taking weaker students damages the brand that supports the price.
- Mix is the highest-return lever. International and out-of-state students pay multiples of the domestic rate. Postgraduate and professional programmes carry better margins. Executive education has almost no marginal cost against existing faculty.
- New lines: online programmes that break the capacity constraint entirely, summer and short courses that use the campus in the off-season, conference and event hire, and licensing the brand.
- And the asset side: parking, retail on campus, research commercialisation and licensing, plus the fundraising engine, since alumni giving is a genuine revenue line that responds to investment.
- The reason mix beats price and volume: operating leverage. Faculty cost is already committed, so an incremental full-fee student in an existing class is almost entirely margin.
Where candidates lose it
Listing ideas without ranking them by margin impact. The interviewer wants commercial prioritisation. Naming operating leverage as the reason mix wins turns a brainstorm into an analysis.
Expect next
- Which would you do first?
- What is the risk of the online strategy?
- How would you value the business after those changes?
Reported by candidates at Harris Williams (Investment Banking, Richmond, 2018). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
087How would you verify the validity of a client's sales pipeline in order to forecast revenue?Harris WilliamsInvestment Banking · Richmond · 2025
Say this
Test it historically before you believe it prospectively. Take last year's pipeline, see what actually converted by stage, and apply those real conversion rates rather than management's assumed ones.
Then walk it
- Back-test first. Pull the pipeline as it stood 12 months ago and compare it to what closed. If management said 60 percent of late-stage would convert and 30 percent did, you now have the real number and the size of their optimism.
- Test the stage definitions. A verbal indication is not a late-stage opportunity. Ask what evidence is required to move a deal between stages, and whether that discipline is enforced in the CRM.
- Check the vintage of each opportunity. Deals sitting in the pipeline for three times the average sales cycle are usually dead and not yet marked dead. They inflate the total.
- Check concentration. If three opportunities are half the pipeline, the forecast is not a probability distribution, it is three binary bets. Diligence those three individually and talk to those customers if the process allows.
- Cross-check against capacity. Does the forecast require more closed deals per salesperson than the team has ever achieved? And check whether headcount to deliver it is actually in the plan.
- Then rebuild the forecast bottom-up with your own conversion rates, and present it as a range against management's case. The gap between the two is one of the most valuable things you can hand a buyer.
Where candidates lose it
Accepting the pipeline and only sanity-checking the arithmetic. The technique is historical back-testing of conversion by stage. If you do not say that, you have not answered it.
Expect next
- What if they have no historical pipeline data?
- How would that change your valuation?
- What would you do if the top three opportunities were all with one customer?
Reported by candidates at Harris Williams (Investment Banking, Richmond, 2025). 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.