Industry-Specific Questions and Answers

In this video I'm going to walk you through the industry specific questions on banks and
insurance companies, banks and financial institutions, on oil, gas and mining, so natural
resource companies, real estate and REITs and then also the restructuring and distressed M&A
questions and answers. Those arera not exactly industry specific, but they are still sort of in the
same category in that you're not going to get these questions unless you're interviewing with
one of these groups in question.

With these questions there is, once again, a ton of material as is usually the case with most of
the sections in this guide. There's just a lot in the way of questions and answers and the way
we've divided each section here for the most part is we have the high level questions and
answers in the beginning and then we have specific questions on accounting, three statement
modeling.

[01:00]

Now for the bank section, it's split into commercial banks versus insurance and then we have
regulatory capital. That's a topic specific to banks and then valuation, merger model, LBO model
questions and so on and so forth.

Now here again you can see the page count. You can see the number of words. We're well over
15,000 words, 55 pages. What should you actually focus on here if you're going in for an
interview with a financial institutions group? Well first off, what you should not do is go
through every single point here in-depth.

Ninety nine percent of the time if you're going in for an interview with one of these groups,
they're going to stay very focused on the high level questions and answers. If you just scroll
down here to the high level question section, we have a few questions here just talking about
how banks and insurance firms make money, how they're different from normal companies; a
few different categories in the industry.

They are most likely to ask you questions like these. They're not terribly likely to go and dive
into extremely advanced questions about transaction modeling in the industry or even more
advanced points on valuation.

[02:00]

Most of the time they're going to stay very focused on these. How the financial statements are
different at a high level, for example. How valuation differs at a very high level. You should

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really focus on these questions especially if you do not have prior industry experience in the
industry in question here. It would be a mistake to actually try to go through everything below
this and memorize it in a great amount of detail.

Now if you have actually worked in a financial institutions group in this case or if you have
actually, say worked in a real estate group, then, sure. In that case maybe you can go into some
of these more specific questions and answers but for the most part I would strongly
recommend staying focused on the high level questions and answers in each of these sections.

Now as I was saying, if you've actually had some industry experience here, then you can go
through this in more detail and if you've actually worked with commercial banks, for example,
well then, maybe what you do is you focus on those questions here.

[03:00]

You can ignore the insurance part, especially if you don't have any deals, you have nothing that
indicates that you would know much about it, just know at a high level how insurance is
different but otherwise just spend most of your time reviewing the sections here on
commercial banks. Then conclude, wrap up here with the merger model and buyout model
questions here at the end.

Again, I would really only go through those if you've had significant experience working in a
group like this. You have actual deals that you can point to and you need to refresh your
memory on what you did if it's been awhile since you've worked on a certain deal and you want
to refresh yourself on the basics. Otherwise, definitely stay focused on the high level questions
and answers here.

Now a few other points, looking at some of the other sections here for the natural resource one
on oil, gas, and mining, here, in addition to the high level questions and answers, the net asset
value model in the valuation section is a very common source of questions for these types of
interviews.

[04:00]

In this case, in addition to the high level questions and answers, it is definitely worthwhile to
look at the valuation section as well and especially pay attention to the net asset value model.
These other question categories, you may get some questions on them such as production and
reserves. They could definitely ask about that and ask why they're so important but generally
speaking for this one they're going to stay focused on the high level questions and then maybe
also go into some detail on the net asset value model and the valuation section.

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Now for real estate, for this one it's a little bit different because with the property development
questions here, the property level questions and answers, these are going to be most relevant if
you are interviewing for a commercial real estate firm or maybe a real estate private equity
firm that only does investment and development and acquisition of individual properties. These
are just not going to be as relevant if you're going for, say a real estate group at an investment
bank that mostly works with REITs.

[05:00]

In that case you want to stay focused on the REITs section here and maybe also just pay some
attention to how REITs and properties are actually linked. For this section, bottom line you have
to look at the type of firm that you're interviewing with and if it is a real estate private equity
firm, the part about REITs is not going to be as relevant.

If you're talking to a large group at a bank then the part on REITs will probably be more relevant
and then the rest on individual properties will probably not be quite as relevant in that case. As
usual, the questions you focus on depend on your own background and then the types of roles,
groups and firms that you're going for but that is what I would say, in general, for this section.

Do not make this overly complicated. We include these sections mostly as a reference to you
because we have gotten questions on what to expect in industry specific interviews. We go into
a lot of detail here on all sorts of different topics but the truth is most of the time they're rarely
going to go beyond the high level questions and answers unless you've worked on deals in this
industry and you have a lot of experience specific to this industry on your resume from previous
internships or full time experiences.

[06:00]

That's it for our quick overview. You should now have a better idea of what to focus on given
your experience and the types of groups and firms that you're going for.

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