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Barclays Interview Questions
These are real technical questions asked in recent Barclays interviews, sourced directly from candidates who went through the process — not a generic guide. Below: what to expect, worked answers to the most representative questions, and common mistakes that trip candidates up.
What Barclays's interview process actually looks like
Barclays' technical rounds are generalist bulge-bracket fare, but with a notable lean toward testing whether candidates understand why standard valuation frameworks (EV bridges, EBITDA multiples) break down for financial institutions — a distinction a lot of candidates have never actually been asked to articulate.
Real questions asked in recent Barclays interviews
Question: Why can't you value a bank the same way you'd value a normal operating company?
How to answer it: A normal company's Enterprise Value to Equity Value bridge doesn't really work for a bank, because a bank's debt, customer deposits and interbank borrowings, isn't a discretionary financing choice sitting on top of the business, it is the raw material of the business itself, so subtracting it out to get to an operating enterprise value doesn't make economic sense the way it does for an industrial company. Because of this, banks are valued primarily on equity value multiples like Price to Tangible Book Value and Price to Earnings, rather than EV/EBITDA or EV/Revenue, since EBITDA also isn't a meaningful metric for a bank given that interest income and expense are its core operating activity, not a financing cost sitting below an operating line. A DCF for a bank typically becomes a dividend discount model or an excess return model built off regulatory capital requirements, rather than an unlevered free cash flow build, because capital a bank is required to hold can't be freely distributed as cash flow to equity the way it can for a typical operating company.
Common mistake: Attempting to build a standard EV to Equity Value bridge for a bank by subtracting deposits as if they were discretionary debt
Question: Walk through accretion/dilution for the same acquisition under two scenarios: fully funded with acquirer stock, versus fully funded with cash from the balance sheet, no new debt. Which scenario is more likely to be accretive, all else equal?
How to answer it: In the all-stock scenario, whether the deal is accretive depends purely on comparing the acquirer's P/E multiple to the effective purchase multiple paid for the target, since new shares are being issued and diluting existing earnings across a larger share base. In the all-cash, balance-sheet-funded scenario, there's no new share issuance and no new interest expense, so pro forma EPS simply reflects the combined net income of both companies over the acquirer's unchanged share count, which in almost every realistic case is more accretive than the stock-funded version, since you're adding 100% of the target's earnings without diluting the share count at all. The only offsetting cost in the cash scenario is the acquirer giving up whatever return it was earning on that cash, an opportunity cost, sometimes modeled as forgone interest income, but that's typically a much smaller drag than the dilution from issuing new stock, which is why all-cash, balance-sheet-funded deals are almost always the most accretive financing option when a company has the cash available.
Common mistake: Not accounting for the forgone interest income, an opportunity cost, on cash used to fund the deal, treating cash as if it were free
Also reported from recent interviews at this firm:
- Why is Enterprise Value considered capital-structure-neutral, and why does that matter when comparing two companies with different amounts of debt?
- Walk through how goodwill gets created in an acquisition and what it represents on the pro forma balance sheet.
Full explanations and common mistakes for these — plus the rest of our Firm Specific bank — are in the app.
How to prepare specifically for Barclays
Generic IB prep guides cover the fundamentals every bank tests, but firm-specific patterns like the ones above only show up when you're practicing against real, recently-reported questions rather than a static 400-question PDF everyone else is also using. ApexIB's Firm Specific question bank is built directly from questions candidates report after their actual interviews — including Barclays — with AI grading and full explanations, not just a list.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Barclays ask about valuing banks differently from normal companies?
It's a common theme in their technical rounds — testing whether you understand that a bank's debt is its raw material, not discretionary financing, which breaks the standard EV-to-equity-value bridge.
Where do these questions come from?
Directly from candidates who interviewed at Barclays and reported their questions afterward, not from a generic template applied to every firm.
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