How Bankers Think

You walked into the interview prepared. You knew the ratios. You had read the guides. And somewhere in the first ten minutes, you realised the senior banker across the table was not testing what you knew - she was testing how you thought. There is a curriculum the standard guides never cover. It is the layer beneath the technical content: the frameworks practising bankers actually use, the dispositions they listen for in the room, and the disciplines that produce careers of durable judgement across cycles. No one writes it down, because the people who know it have spent fifteen or twenty years learning it the slow way. How Bankers Think names it. Drawing on sixteen years inside commercial banking, Michael Shang lays out the hidden curriculum as eight connected chapters - each built around a single question every senior banker carries into every file: How do I get my money back, with interest, across cycles? You will learn to read real demand from cash-flow window-dressing, to see the numbers behind the reported numbers, to judge an industry rather than just a borrower, to spot trouble before it spots you, and to recognise the deals worth walking away from. The final chapter turns the lens inward - onto the work of translation between a business as it actually exists and the institutional process that has to read it. This is not a glossary of terms or a recruiting cheat-sheet. It is a structured way of beginning to think like a banker - written for the finance student preparing for interviews, the early-career banker building judgement, and the finance professional or business owner who wants to understand how credit decisions are really made. "Michael Shang puts words around instincts that senior bankers carry but rarely articulate clearly." - Bill Luo, Head of Finance, Fonterra Co-operative Group "A thoughtful and well-judged perspective on how bankers evaluate risk and opportunity. Michael Shang provides a clear and practical framework for understanding the considerations that sit behind formal credit processes and commercial lending decisions." - Jesse Fairley, Partner, Russell McVeagh "Most borrowers only understand how their banker thinks once a facility is under stress. Michael Shang explains that thinking before things go wrong." - Carlo Wan, Partner, Lane Neave "Michael Shang bridges accounting analysis and credit judgment with rare clarity... essential reading for finance professionals." - Wayne Lee, Partner, BDO New Zealand