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
084How would you value an insurance brokerage that operates in one country that has just had a coup and writes only one line of coverage?Perella Weinberg PartnersFinancial Institutions Group · New York · 2026
Say this
Start from the normal brokerage framework, which is a commission stream on premium, then attack it with the two facts they gave you: extreme country risk and total product concentration. The answer is a wide range with a real chance of zero.
Then walk it
- The base framework: a broker earns commission on premium and holds no underwriting risk, so it is a capital-light, high-margin, recurring revenue business that normally trades at a premium multiple on EBITDA.
- Now the coup. The currency may be unconvertible, so you may not be able to repatriate cash at all. That alone can make a profitable business worth little to a foreign buyer.
- Country risk enters the discount rate through a sovereign spread, and in a post-coup situation that could be well over 1,000 basis points. It also enters the cash flows, because premium volumes fall when economic activity stops.
- Single line of coverage means no diversification. If that line is motor and vehicle imports halt, or it is trade credit and trade stops, revenue can go to near zero. So I would model scenarios rather than a base case: functioning state, prolonged instability, and asset seizure.
- So: probability-weight the scenarios, discount at a rate that reflects the sovereign, and cross-check against what a local buyer would pay, because a domestic acquirer does not face the repatriation problem and will value it far higher than a foreign one.
- The honest conclusion is that the identity of the buyer determines the value here more than the cash flows do.
Where candidates lose it
Running a standard brokerage multiple and ignoring the two facts in the question. The coup and the single line are the question. And missing the repatriation point, which is the specific insight that makes the foreign buyer's value different from the local buyer's.
Expect next
- Who would actually buy it?
- How would you size the country risk premium?
- What if the currency is pegged but not convertible?
Reported by candidates at Perella Weinberg Partners (Financial Institutions Group, New York, 2026). 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.