Banker
A banker helps individuals or businesses raise funds to purchase things (such as new machinery or homes), assist in the movement of money via payment mechanisms, and to provide ways to invest excess funds, such as savings accounts and bonds.
Retail bankers serve individuals, often from high street branches, but increasingly via telephone and online services. This also includes building society staff. Private banking is a subset of retail banking: these bankers serve high net worth individuals, often defined as those with more than £1million to invest.
Commercial bankers serve small and medium-sized businesses, often working closely with them to understand their options and develop their business plans, in order to start or grow their operations.
Retail and commercial bank branch management is similar to other management opportunities, in that the managers are responsible for:
Responsibilities for more junior bankers may include:
Bank graduate management programmes are open to all graduates, and banks seek applicants from a wide variety of degree subjects. A good honours degree, usually a 2:1 or above, is required to secure a place on a management or graduate training scheme and it is likely that graduate entrants are expected to have attained a minimum number of UCAS points.
Some banks offer other fast-track entry programmes which are open to people with good A-levels results, and this route may be applicable to graduates with less than a 2:1 or with an HND.
It is also possible to join a bank as an entry level customer adviser and build a career towards management.
Increasingly banks are looking to recruit people from their competitors, or even retailers from other industries.
A pre-entry postgraduate qualification is not usually required but Masters-level students may apply for graduate-entry training programmes. Pre-entry work experience is desirable. This may include vacation work, sandwich placements (paid or unpaid), internships and temporary or permanent work experience in a financial, customer-led environment, such as sales.
Candidates at every level will need to show evidence of:
Those moving into management will also need to demonstrate:
For more information, see work experience and internships and search courses and research.
All employees will be trained on the systems and products that the banks offer, and how to interact with the customer. As these change regularly, all employees will undergo training at least yearly. Sponsorship towards professional qualifications is often offered to those identified with the potential to progress.
Employees on a graduate development programme will undergo a structured set of training courses and coaching sessions to develop the knowledge, skills and experience to become a manager. These will often include relevant professional qualifications.
Professional qualifications are offered by the ifs School of Finance and the Chartered Banker Institute . It is worth noting that despite their name CIOBS operate throughout the UK and indeed globally. These organisations offer a wide range of qualifications, from City and Guild level 1, through to Chartered status. Often bankers will need to study for the next level of qualification, or for a specialst area, as their career progresses.
Retail and commercial banking careers can progress in linear terms, taking on responsibility for more sales, on to team leadership, assistant manager of a branch or department, a branch/department manager role, manger of a group of branches or departments, and on to regional or head office management.
Progression is determined by results and drive, not time, experience and qualifications, so movement up the ranks can be swift, or can take a lifetime. With each step up there will be more competition for the role, and the expectations that the banker needs to meet will also increase too.
It is also possible to move off the management career ladder into one of a number of areas; these may be banking specific such as credit control, risk management or product development; or more generic, such as marketing, procurement or training.
It is possible to move between banks as well as within banks; while this was once very unusual, it is now common practice, as is moving into other financial roles, such as insurance, other retail roles, such as supermarket management, or general management, e.g. of a call centre.
There are number of banks and building societies with branches on the high street, such as the Nationwide, HSBC and Santander, although continual consolidation since the 1980s has decreased the number of companies operating. This consolidation has seen large numbers of redundancies over the years, a situation that repeated in the months after the financial crisis started in 2008.
The upside of the financial crisis is that atypical sources, such as supermarkets, have announced plans to broaden their financial services to those that match high street banks, so a new set of opportunities may be opening up.
The other area of expansion, which started in the mid-1990s, has been the growth of banks that were set up to operate without branch networks, usually offering a combination of phone and internet services.
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