Back to Finance & Investment Banking
About this interview
A technical interview on Corporate Finance, pitched at the medium level. A voice AI interviewer leads the conversation, adapts its questions to your answers, keeps you on topic, and afterward gives you honest, specific feedback on where you were strong and where to improve. Expect roughly 30 minutes.
What you'll be assessed on
Explain the capital structure trade-off between debt and equity, including the tax shield and financial distress cost, and reason about debt capacity given cash-flow predictability
Compute and interpret WACC, including correct tax-adjustment of the cost of debt and how WACC responds to changes in the debt/equity mix and financing costs
Apply NPV, IRR, and payback period to capital-budgeting decisions with verified arithmetic, and correctly resolve conflicts between these methods for mutually exclusive projects
Compute and interpret the cash conversion cycle, and propose concrete, risk-aware levers to shorten it
Reason about treasury operations (cash pooling, liquidity buffers) and evaluate FX/interest-rate hedging decisions, including partial-hedge trade-offs
Evaluate dividend, buyback, and debt-paydown options for excess cash, and identify the added financial risk of a debt-funded buyback versus a cash-funded one
Topics covered
Capital Structure FundamentalsCost of Capital / WACCCapital BudgetingWorking Capital & Cash Conversion CycleTreasury OperationsFX & Interest-Rate HedgingDividend Policy & Buybacks
A few sample questions
Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.
“What's the basic trade-off a company weighs when choosing between debt and equity financing?
“In plain terms, what does NPV tell you about a potential investment?
“A retailer is rapidly growing revenue but its cash from operations keeps shrinking even as sales rise, and its cash conversion cycle has been lengthening each quarter. What's the mechanical link between those two facts?