East West Bancorp Credit Analyst Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – Initially, I sent my resume to a VP that I was referred to through a friend. The VP passed my resume on to the CFO who then initiated the interview process. The HR representative assigned to me was very friendly and professional, although he/she would often forget to follow-up with me for scheduling purposes. I got the impression that HR was swamped with work.

On the day of the interviews, I fist met with the CFO. She/he was very impressive. She/he was young, sharp, and intuitive. We had a pleasant discussion about my background the why I was desiring to enter a financial career. However, I was surprised to learn that she/he does not speak any Chinese.

On my second interview, I met with another very impressive middle level manger. He/she and I had terrific rapport and he/she said that he/she would be happy to hire me, although he/she thought I might be a little bored in the position the he/she had to offer. Again, I was surprised to find out that he/she was not a fluent or literate Chinese-speaker. Also, another surprising finding: the company does not even have a corporate license for basic statistical analysis software like SAS.

On my third and final interview for the day, I met with the CFO's assistant. This person was saddled with an unlikely and inefficient trio of responsibilities: investment relations, risk management, and corporate financial statement preparation. And, she/he appeared to be making most of the risk management decisions without any strong quantitative statistical treatment. Of course, since the company had no corporate licenses for SAS, this made sense to them--I suppose. Again, she/he was a non-Chinese speaker.

For an institution that books itself with the strategic goal of being a financial "bridge from the east to the west", it was downright unbelievable to see that many of the top management were not even conversationally fluent in Chinese. This finding led me to question the firm's ability to realize it's above-mentioned headline strategic goal. Moreover, it appeared from my interviews that the current financial health of the institution had more to do with conservative business practices (and luck) than with informed quantitative data-driven investment decisions.