Business Analyst (Summer) Review

Interning at HSBC was great, they invest a lot in your personal and professional development. We started the internship with a lot of online training which was followed by a 1 week on-site training and more technical training at our desks. Everyone was really friendly at the bank, whenever I had any questions people were always kind to help out. HR organised a whole lot of events for us that helped to build a network of professionals from various groups within the Investment Banking Division (IBD) and get to know other interns as well. The reason why I am giving 8 stars is because I think the workflow could have been more balanced. In my team we had 14 interns and sometimes couple of them ended up having very little to do while others were overloaded with tasks. (This was a team specific 'issue' as other teams had 2-4 interns which seemed to be a more manageable)

People at HSBC value and respect each other and each other's opinion. Even at intern level all analysts, associates and directors I worked with took my inputs seriously and trusted me with work that was highly important for key projects. I give 7 stars because as a consequence of the professional environment most people are reserved and you get to know more your direct neighbours. However, as everyone is really open it is just up to you how far you take any of your relationships.

We had multiple feedback sessions (4 times scheduled in 10 weeks with the option to arrange more if an intern considered it necessary) with HR and line managers to evaluate my performance and set direction for development. We had a list of deliverable objectives given to us at the start of the internship and we received tasks which ensured that we work towards achieving these. This could only be done better if we received more support to develop some specific skills that we are interested in (eg. modelling) by getting more related work from supervisors.

On average we were quite busy. We had a long-term project to work on from week 3 and multiple deals to help out with throughout the internship. When we had less work to do we could spend time reading internal case studies of past deals and watch in-house training videos to learn more. My work was a bit more balanced than for interns in other teams as we had a larger pool of candidates to split the work amongst.

We worked on live deals from the very beginning. This gave us a great opportunity to learn a lot from day 1 by just completing some simple tasks initially. As we spent more time at the desk we could feel that our colleagues trust us with more work that also requires more responsibility, because of increased complexity and strict deadlines.

This was one of the best learning experiences I have ever had. I learnt an incredible amount about finance, various companies and also about how business is done in real life. It will be an incredibly valuable experience to build on later in my career as well as back in academia.

HR did a very good job by organising events for the intern group. We had weekly lunch & learn sessions where we learnt from Directors and Managing Directors about their careers as well as about their respective teams within IBD. We even had the co-heads of Global Banking come down to give a presentation on their career, past experiences and the directions of the bank. We also had plenty of activities outside the office too, networking drinks, treasure hunt in the city and volunteering.

I felt that HSBC invests a lot in its employees and their professional development. We had a lot of training at the beginning which prepared us for the work. The lunch & learns and other networking events gave us further opportunities to keep learning more. We also had some online internal training to complete which further developed our skills in finance. So we did not only learn from our work at the desk but also from the above source on a daily / weekly basis.

HSBC is known to take most of its interns onto its graduate scheme. HR emphasised it a lot that if we do well we have high chances to get onto HSBC's graduate scheme. Throughout the internship we could feel that the bank gave us full support to ensure that we all receive an offer in the end which was great to have. They will let us know about their hiring decision later this week (2 weeks after the end of internship).

The cost of living was not different from other parts in London. The bank subsidises your dinners if you work late which is always enough to get you food from most restaurants. The bank is right in front of Canada Square park which is the social hub of the area. We watched Wimbledon there and spent a lot of time socialising with other interns.

There were some internal events that the bank organised during our stay. For example, we had a traditional dragon boat racing event (in a sailing centre in Canary Wharf) where more than 80 people attended from global banking and thus we had the chance to expand our network and get to know more people from different divisions. The event was a great way to relax and get to know new people outside of work.