Behavioral - Example of Attention to Detail
- 01:54
Investment Banking Superday interview behavioral question - Can you give an example of attention to detail and accuracy?
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I I wanna focus on a particular skill that is, I would say, extremely important in investment banking and its attention to detail.
So I I, I'd like a good example of where you had to pay extreme attention, uh, to the detail of something.
And how did you make sure that whatever you were working on the output output was accurate? Yeah. Uh, it's, it's a good question.
At 10, like you said, attention to detail is one of the biggest, um, key skill sets in, in investment banking, because imagine you've got these complex models and every single line has hundreds of numbers.
And if there could, there could be a big mistake in that. Like, I remember I was into this podcast with Terry Smith again, he's, he is one of the people I really like.
And he spoke about how when he was, when he was very on and early on in his career, he, he spotted mistakes worth 2 billion in financial records.
And he caught up the company and companies and said, um, have, are you aware of this? So, like, are you aware that there's, there's big mistakes here? And they said, no one else has called us about it.
So, yeah, intention to detail is really important in investment banking.
And going on that note of financial, of financial data and models, when I was doing the stock pitch competition for bearings, I had to produce my model. And it was my first ever DCF. And I was nervous.
And, you know, I was scared that my model was gonna be like rid of mistakes and I was gonna be questioned about it by the judges.
And I had to make sure that every single line was perfect and that there wasn't any mistakes. There wasn't any, 'cause I was transferring data over from financial statements.
I wasn't putting anything in the wrong boxes.
And the day before, when I was checking it for maybe the third or fourth time fully, I realized that I'd messed up the EBITDA and I'd actually put the EBITDA in, in a metric line in the EV slash EBITDA line.
So it was like, that's a big mistake. And if they'd spotted that, it would've been very big.
But I was able to basically maintain that risk.