Howden

Two questions, and the industry half is the one almost everybody skips. Most candidates can produce a reason for a firm and have nothing at all for why insurance, so splitting your time deliberately between the two is most of the work. Take the industry first, because it is the harder half and the one that will separate you. Insurance is one of the few places where the product is a promise priced under uncertainty, so the balance sheet is not supporting the business, it is the business. Reinsurance is the layer above that, insurance bought by insurers, and it turns the whole thing into a capital question: how much capital has to be held against a risk, what that capital costs, and who is willing to hold it. That is precisely why an advisory business exists here at all, and why HCMA's work runs from M&A through capital raising to insurance-linked securities, where catastrophe risk is packaged and sold to pension funds and hedge funds rather than carried by an insurer. Say which part of that you find interesting and why, with one concrete thing you have actually read or followed, whether that is a catastrophe bond, a Lloyd's story or a reinsurance renewal that repriced. Then Howden. The answer is the structure: this is an investment bank sitting inside an insurance intermediary rather than inside a bank, so the sector knowledge and the relationships come from a group that is in the market every day placing risk, which a generalist financial institutions team at a bulge bracket does not have. Add the independence, which is the thing Howden itself talks about most: founded in 1994 in a one-room office with three brokers, now around 24,000 people, and deliberately employee owned, with roughly 4,500 employee shareholders forming its largest shareholder group, built by a founder who has said openly he wanted a business that would never be sold. Run the swap test on your draft. If you can put Aon or Marsh into the sentence and it still reads, cut it. If you can put a bulge bracket into it and it still reads, cut that too. Avoid fast-paced, entrepreneurial culture and an interest in financial services, which are the three things everybody else will say.

Again two halves, and here the failure is arithmetic: people spend everything on why banking and arrive at strengths with twenty seconds left, which is the half that is actually about them. Decide the split before you start and hold to it, roughly even, strengths last so you finish on yourself. On why banking, remember who is asking. This programme states that no investment banking experience is needed, so nobody expects a story about having wanted this since you were fifteen, and the valuation question later in the set is where your technical knowledge gets tested, not here. What reads as credible is knowing what the job is on an ordinary Tuesday rather than what it looks like in a film: building and checking models, assembling the materials that go in front of a board, and being the person in the room who knows where every number came from. Say what attracts you with that reality in view. There is also a Howden specific reason available to you that most candidates will miss: this is sector specialist banking, so an analyst here gets depth in insurance rather than a tour through every industry, and if you would rather know one market properly than sample ten, that is a real and checkable reason to prefer it. On strengths, pick two and only two, because three becomes a list and a list sounds rehearsed. Choose ones that map to the actual work. Accuracy when there is a lot of it to get through, evidenced by something you checked and caught rather than by the word meticulous. Being able to explain a number to somebody who does not want the method, evidenced by a time you did it. Each one gets a single short instance attached, one or two sentences, because an unevidenced strength is just an adjective. Last thing, and it costs people marks every year: do not spend either of your good examples here. Questions four and five are both asking for stories, so keep your strongest two for those and use something smaller and different in this answer.

A valuation technical in a recorded video interview is rare, and it is being asked by a programme that says you need no banking experience, so read the bar correctly: they want the standard framework delivered cleanly and in order, not something clever. Open by naming the families before you go into any of them, so whoever is marking knows within fifteen seconds that you have the whole map. There are three. Intrinsic valuation, meaning a discounted cash flow. Relative valuation, meaning trading comparables and precedent transactions. And the situational methods, meaning a leveraged buyout analysis used as a floor on price, a sum of the parts for a group of unlike businesses, and an asset or liquidation value when the business is worth more broken up. Then spend the middle of your answer on the DCF, because that is the one they are checking you can actually walk. Project unlevered free cash flow over an explicit forecast period, usually five to ten years. Discount it back at the weighted average cost of capital. Add a terminal value, either a perpetuity growth from the final year or an exit multiple applied to terminal EBITDA. That sum is enterprise value, and then you bridge: subtract net debt to get to equity value, and divide by diluted shares for a per share number. Say the honest thing about it too, that it is the most theoretically correct and the most sensitive to its own assumptions, which is why it is presented as a range from a sensitivity table rather than as a number. On comparables, say how you build the set, companies alike in sector, size, growth and margin, and the usual multiples of EV to EBITDA, EV to sales and price to earnings. On precedents, the same idea applied to completed deals, and add the reason they come in higher, which is the control premium a buyer pays for the whole company. Now the move that will put you in the top handful of answers at this firm specifically. Say that the right method depends on what you are valuing, and that financial institutions are the classic exception. For an insurer or a reinsurer, debt is part of operations rather than financing, so enterprise value is not a meaningful number, and you value the equity directly: price to book and price to tangible book, return on equity set against cost of equity, a dividend discount model, and for life insurers embedded value. Then draw the line that an insurance banker actually lives on, which is that a broker is not a risk carrier. A broker earns fees, takes no underwriting risk onto its own balance sheet, and is therefore valued like any other services business on EV to EBITDA. Howden is a broker. The companies HCMA advises are both. If you get that distinction out in one clean sentence, you have answered a question about valuation and demonstrated sector knowledge at the same time, which is the entire point of asking it here. Finish on judgment rather than on a list: you would not pick one method, you would triangulate, and where they disagree the disagreement is itself the finding.

This question is asking for a method, not for stamina, and the standard answer misses that completely: a description of a busy term, followed by the claim that you managed your time well, which is not evidence of anything. Start by choosing a window where the clash was genuine, meaning something actually had to give. A fortnight where three things landed on the same days is a far better story than a whole year of being generally busy, because a specific window forces specifics out of you. Name the competing commitments plainly and attach dates or deadlines to each, since vagueness is what kills this answer more than anything else. Then give them the part they are marking, which is how you decided the order. Do not say you prioritised. Say what you prioritised on. A usable rule sounds like this: what has a hard external deadline against what only feels urgent, what blocks somebody else if it slips, what is good enough at eighty per cent against what has to be right, and what can be moved simply by asking. Walk your actual commitments through that rule out loud so they can hear the reasoning rather than the conclusion. Then the move that separates a strong answer, and the one almost nobody makes: say what you dropped, renegotiated or handed to somebody else, and say that you told the affected person before the deadline rather than after it. Everybody claims they delivered all of it. The candidate who says they went to the society treasurer a week out, said they could not do a thing, and brought the person who could, sounds like somebody who has actually worked, because that is what managing competing priorities looks like when it is real. Close on the outcome with something checkable attached, a grade, a result, an event that ran. And plan this one against question five before you begin, because that one also wants a story and the two land back to back. Use your busiest-period example here and keep your best team example for there.

Three words in this question carry the marks, team, delivered and under pressure, and weak answers hit one of the three. Check your story against all three before you use it. Pressure has to be named and real, which means a fixed deadline that could not move, somebody dropping out late, a thing breaking at the worst moment, or scope arriving after the work started. If you cannot point at the pressure, you do not have an answer to this question, you have an answer to a different one. Delivered means something existed at the end, so say what it was and whether it landed on time. Team is where most of the marks are lost, and it is lost in two opposite directions. The first is the answer where you quietly did everything and the rest of the team are scenery, which answers a question about individual effort rather than this one. The second is the answer so thoroughly collective that nobody can tell what you personally contributed. Do both halves on purpose: say what the others were responsible for, by role, and say what was yours, in a sentence each. Then the detail that lifts this above the pile. Give one decision the group made under pressure that could reasonably have gone the other way, cutting scope to protect the deadline, reordering the work, choosing which part to sacrifice, deciding to tell somebody early that you would be late. That is judgment, and judgment under pressure is what the question is really about, whereas effort under pressure is what everyone else will describe. Say how the decision was reached, since a group making a call quickly without falling out is itself the thing they want to see. Finish on the outcome, and if you have time left, one honest sentence on what you would do differently, which should be about the process rather than a disguised boast. Keep this example firmly separate from question four. Reusing the same term, the same society or the same project across both is the most common way candidates lose marks on this set, and the recording gives you no chance to go back and change it.