Investment Banking Operations

How an investment bank is organised, who hires in India and what the products are, explained from zero.

• What an investment bank does: front office, middle office, back office
• Who hires in India and for what: captives (Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs) vs KPOs (eClerx, Accenture, Capgemini)
• Market participants: exchanges, clearing houses, custodians, depositories (NSDL, CDSL, DTCC, Euroclear), brokers, asset managers
• Products in plain language: equities, bonds and money market, derivatives (futures, options, swaps), FX, loans
• Indian and global market structure, trading hours and shift patterns (APAC, EMEA, NAM)
• Lab: map a trade to the teams and systems it passes through

Follow a trade from the order to the report, and learn the checks that stop it from failing.

• Order, execution, capture, enrichment, confirmation, settlement, reporting
• Confirmation matching: broker and client confirms, affirmation, CTM
• Pre-settlement checks and fails management
• Front-to-back reconciliation of trade positions
• T+1 and T+2 settlement conventions
• Lab: Excel trade blotter with 200 mock trades, match confirmations and find the mismatches

How securities and cash actually move between banks, and the SWIFT messages that move them.

• DVP and FOP settlement, settlement instructions, custody chains, CCPs
• Cash payments: RTGS, NEFT, ACH and wire transfers
• SWIFT messages every operations analyst sees: MT103, MT202, MT540 to MT548
• Nostro and vostro accounts, funding and daily cash projections
• Fails, buy-ins and penalties (CSDR basics)
• Lab: read and route ten SWIFT messages, then build a daily cash projection

The daily bread of operations: find the break, fix it, document it.

• Cash, stock and position, nostro and general-ledger reconciliations
• Ageing of breaks, root-cause categories and break commentary
• Escalation paths, four-eye checks and audit trail
• How reconciliation tools work: SmartStream TLM and Duco demos
• Excel techniques for matching and exception reports
• Lab: three-way reconciliation with planted breaks, write the commentary an operations manager would sign off

Bring an institutional client onto the books with the right documents, data and controls.

• Institutional account opening: CDD, EDD and document checklists
• LEI, standing settlement instructions, security master and static data
• Legal documents at recognition level: ISDA, CSA and account agreements
• Periodic review and offboarding
• Reference data quality and why bad static data causes fails
• Lab: onboard a mock hedge fund client end to end

Dividends, rights issues, splits and custody, plus fund accounting and loans at awareness level.

• Mandatory vs voluntary corporate actions: record and ex dates, entitlements, elections, claims
• Dividend and coupon processing
• Custody functions and safekeeping
• NAV and fund accounting at awareness level
• Loan operations basics: disbursement, rollover, interest and syndicated loans
• Lab: process a rights issue and a stock split across five client accounts

Why operations exists, and how to talk about controls the way an operations manager does.

• SEBI for Indian brokers and custodians
• SEC, FINRA and Dodd-Frank in the US; EMIR and MiFID II in Europe
• Regulatory reporting basics
• Operational risk, controls, SLA and KPI thinking
• Process-improvement language for interviews: Lean, automation and RPA at awareness level
• Lab: map the controls around a settlement process and spot the gaps

The Excel and writing skills every operations analyst uses every single day.

• VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, pivot tables, conditional formatting and data validation
• Text functions and recorded macros for daily tasks
• Daily MIS pack and dashboards
• Writing to a counterparty, to a client and to an internal escalation
• Phone etiquette for US and UK shifts; ticketing and query tracking
• Lab: build the daily operations MIS pack from raw data

Six days of interview practice built around what the hiring banks and KPOs actually ask.

• Resume rewritten in the language of the analyst job description
• eClerx and Accenture style aptitude and financial-markets tests, practised
• Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs operations interview questions
• Three graded mock interviews
• Walk-in strategy for Pune and Navi Mumbai; shift-readiness conversation
• Final assessment: a 60-minute practical (reconciliation plus a settlement scenario) you can show as a work sample